We are now witnessing a third revolt against her authority; and it remains to be seen how the Church of Rome will deal with it. Will she now adopt half measures? Will she now falter and draw back,--she that never before feared enemy or spared foe? Will that Church that quenched in blood the Protestantism of the Waldenses,--that put down the Reformation in France by one terrible blow,--that by the help of dungeons and racks banished the light from Italy and Spain,--will that Church, we ask, spare the Protestantism of Britain? What folly and infatuation to think that she will! What matters it that, in rooting out British Protestantism, she should shed oceans of blood, and sound the death-knell of a whole nation? These are but dust in the balance to her: her dominion must be maintained at all costs. Her motto still is,--let Rome triumph though the heavens should fall. But she tells us that she repents. Repents, does she? She has grown pitiful, and tender hearted, has she? She fears blood now, and starts at the cry of murdered nations! Ah! she repents; but it is her clemency, not her crimes, of which she repents. She repents that she did not make one wide St Bartholomew of Europe; that when she planted the stake for Huss, and Cranmer, and Wishart, she did not plant a million of stakes. Then the Reformation would not have been. Yes, she repents, deeply, bitterly repents, her fatal blunder. But it will not be her fault, the _Univers_ assures us, if she have to repent such a blunder a second time. Let us hear the priests speaking through one of the country papers in France:--"The wars of religion were not deplorable catastrophes; these great butcheries renewed the life of France. The incense cast away the smell of the corpses, and psalms covered the noise of angry shouts. Holy water washed away all the bloody stains. With the Inquisition, the most beautiful weather succeeded to storms, and the fires that burned the heretics shone like supernatural torches." The hand that wrote these lines would more gladly light the faggot. Let only the present regime in France last a few years, and the priests will again rejoice in seeing the colour of heretic blood. There cannot and will not be peace in the world, they say, till for every Protestant a gibbet or stake has been erected, and not one man left to carry tidings to posterity that ever there was such a thing as Protestantism on the earth.