Protestantism in France From Death of Francis I to Edict of Nantes - James Aitken Wylie

and not counted. Protestantism in France was not
merely on the road to victory, morally it had
already achieved it.
And further, to form a true estimate of the
strength of the position which Protestantism had
now won, we must take account of the situation of
the country, and the endowments of the people in
which it had so deeply rooted itself. Placed in the
center of Christendom, France acted powerfully on
all the nations around it. It was, or till a few years
ago had been, the first of the European kingdoms
in letters, in arts, in arms. Its people possessed a
beautiful genius. Since the intellect of classic days
there had appeared, perhaps, no finer mental
development than the French mind; none that came
so near the old Roman type. Without apparent
labor the French genius could lay open with a
touch the depths of an abstruse question, or soar to
the heights of a sublime one. Protestantism had
begun to quicken the French intellect into a
marvellous development of strength and beauty,
and but for the sudden and unexpected blight that
overtook it, its efflorescence would have rivaled, it
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