PERIOD PREVIOUS TO LOUIS XII. A.D. 1497.
PERHAPS there is no country in the world, when we except the Holy Land, where the entire history of religion, taken in connexion with the circumstances which have surrounded it, has been at once more interesting and more painful, than in France.
In France, the Christian religion has uniformly been placed between two enemies ;-on one side, superstition; on the other, infidelity. An escape from the former has too often caused a fall into the latter.
In no country has the history of persecution and martyrdom been more striking than in France, whether the persecutors were the furious worshippers of the gods of ancient Rome and Gaul, or the unhappily blinded and bigoted disciples of the church which succeeded them. In the first ages of Christianity, the martyrs