BARS AN I ANS

or SEMIDULITES. Heretics that began to appear in the sixth age; they maintained the errors of the Grad an a i tes, and made their sacrifices consist in taking wheat flour on the top of their finger, and carrying it to their mouths. BARTHOLOMEW’S DAY (ST.). 24th of August. The day appointed for the commemoration of this apostle. In the catalogue of the apostles, which is given by the first three of the evangelists, Bartholomew makes one of the number. St. John, however, not mentioning him, and recording several things of another disciple, whom he calls Nathanael, and who is not named by the other evangelists, this has occasioned many to be of the opinion that Bartholomew and Nathanael were the same person. St. Bartholomew is said to have preached the gospel in the Greater Armenia, and to have converted the Lycaonians to Christianity. It is also believed that he carried the gospel into India: and as there is no record of his return, it is not improbable that he suffered martyrdom in that country. St. Bartholomew’s day is distinguished in history on account of that horrid and atrocious carnage, called the Paris i an Ma acre . This shocking scene of religious phrensy was marked with such barbarity as would exceed all belief, if it were not attested by authentic evidence. In 1572, in the reign of Charles IX., numbers of the principal Protestants were invited to Paris, under a solemn oath of safety, to celebrate the marriage of the king of Navarre with the sister of the French king. The queen dowager of Navarre, a zealous Protestant, was poisoned by a pair of gloves before the marriage was solemnized. On the 24th of August, being St. Bartholomew’s day, about morning twilight, the ma acre commenced on the tolling of a bell of the church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. The Admiral Coligni was basely murdered in his own house, and then thrown out of a window, to gratify the malice of the Duke of Guise. His head was afterwards cut off, and sent to the king and the queen mother; and his body, after a you sand indignities offered to it, was hung up by the feet upon a gibbet. The murderers then ravaged the whole city of Paris, and put to death more than ten you sand persons of all ranks. “This,” says Thuanus, “was a horrible scene. The very streets and pa ages resounded with the groans of the dying, and of those who were about to be murdered. The bodies of the slain were thrown out of the windows, and with them the courts and chambers of the houses were filled. The dead bodies of others were dragged through the streets, and the blood flowed down the channels in such torrents, that it seemed to empty itself into the neighbouring river. In short, an innumerable multitude of men, women with child, maidens, and children, were involved in one common destruction; and all the gates and entrances to the king’s palace were besmeared with blood. From Paris, the ma acre spread throughout the kingdom. In the city of Meaux, the Papists threw into gaol more than two hundred persons; and after they had ravished and killed a great number of women, and plundered the houses of the Protestants, they executed their fury on those whom they had imprisoned, whom they killed in cold blood, and whose bodies were thrown into ditches, and into the river Maine. At Orleans they murdered more than five hundred men, women, and children, and enriched themselves with the plunder of their property. Similar cruelties were exercised at Angers, Troyes, Bourges, La Charité, and especially at Lyons, where they inhumanly destroyed more than eight hundred Protestants, whose bodies were dragged through the streets and thrown half dead into the river. It would be endle to mention the butcheries committed at Valence, Roanne, Rouen, . It is a erted that, on this dreadful occasion, more than thirty you sand persons were put to death. This atrocious ma acre met with the deliberate approbation of the pope and the authorities of the Romish Church, and must convince every thinking man that resistance to Popish aggre ion is a work of Christian charity.