Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/48

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sentiments, the Catholics more winningly vivacious. You esteem the Protestants, you like the Catholics; and your sympathy for each will be prompted by temperament, intellect, and instinct. Catholics will always regard Du Chayla, the Christian persecutor of the Cévennes, as a martyr; Protestants, more justly, will pronounce him a hateful persecutor. Religious persecutors, the world over, find their fervent apologists, and it may be said that a large proportion of the French race approve to-day of their St. Bartholomew, and yearn for a repetition of it; just as the good Catholics of the Spanish race find little to condemn in the horrors of the Inquisition. If there should break out a second Revolution in France (we have been living so long on the brink of it that I am constantly reminded of the story of the boy and the wolf, and ask myself in dismay, How long have we to run before meeting with the famous moral of the story?), be sure this time that religion will prove the provocation. I cannot predict on which side it will burst, but assuredly the red flag will be "anti-Semitism." In the provinces this sentiment runs in a feebler, less aggressive channel, and the rural atmosphere seems to cleanse the air of it entirely. Here religious feeling is either stagnant because of the absence of religious rivalry, or it is a dull assertion of hostility in abeyance, only waiting for the occasion to break out in a tor-