• By the late-16th century, Europe had shaken off much of its medieval character. Still, the collapse of the old and the onset of the new created a volatile mixture. Between 1618 and 1648, for example, most European nations took part in the Thirty Years' War, a bloody affair that began as a dispute between Catholics and Protestants and ended as a thoroughly modern conflict over raw power.

• Sir Issac Newton, widely considered to be the greatest scientist of his or any other time, designed and constructed the first reflecting telescope. In 1687, Newton compiled his theories on gravity, motion and other subjects in Principia, which underscored the fundamental contributions he made to the development of science.

• The French explorer La Salle was the first European to sail the lower Mississippi River in 1682. Like other explorers of his time, La Salle made the discovery while seeking a route to Asia through the North American continent. He also engaged in the fur trade while in North America.

• Peter I, known as Peter the Great, was the tsar of Russia between 1682 and 1725 and the first Russian emperor, named in 1721. He built a vast military apparatus and sought to turn Russia into a westernized society. As a result, he constructed the foundation of the modern Russian state.

• Even as their empire began to decline, the Ottoman Turks continued to seek new lands. In 1669, they seized the Mediterranean island of Crete and held onto it until the Cretans launched a successful revolt in 1898. The Ottoman Empire reached its peak in the 16th century and slowly collapsed.

• In 1692 the famous witchcraft trials were held in Salem, Massachusetts. The episode began when a group of young girls accused others, generally older women, of consorting with the devil. Before the trials were over, 300 men and women had been accused. Twenty people were executed, including a minister who intoned the Lord's Prayer before his death. Soon after the trials, the weight of opinion in Massachusetts turned against the superstition of witchcraft, and no other trials of this sort were held in New England.

• The War of the Spanish Succession, the longest and bloodiest war of French King Louis XIV, was contested throughout the Spanish Empire from 1701 to 1714 and ended with Britain atop a vast colonial and naval empire. The war erupted after the last Spanish Hapsburg king, Charles II, died childless. European powers then launched the struggle to fill the power vacuum.

• A dramatic increase in the flow of Protestant German immigrants to the United States began in 1709 and within a short time swelled the population of the Middle Colonies and the back-country south by 250,000. The immigrants were primarily members of the Lutheran and German Reformed (Calvinist) churches.

• The slave trade enveloped western Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries. In the 18th century alone, an estimated 6 million Africans were placed on ships and taken to the North American colonies. Thousands died during the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean.

PARIS, Aug 24 (Reuter) - On a balmy summer night, 425 years ago, Roman Catholic militia wielding knives and swords fanned out through Paris, dragging Protestants from their homes and slitting their throats in an orgy of terror. When dawn broke on August 24, 1572, thousands of bodies lay in streams of blood on the streets of the French capital. The St Bartholomew's Day massacre, carried out in a struggle for control of the French court, remains one of the darkest episodes in the country's history. Pope John Paul sought to heal the painful memories after French Protestants, incensed that his four-day visit to Paris coincided with the anniversary of the massacre, demanded a gesture of remembrance. "On the eve of August 24, we cannot forget the sad massacre of St Bartholomew's Day, an event of very obscure causes in the political and religious history of France,'' he told crowds of young pilgrims from 160 countries at a Saturday night vigil. "Christians did things which the Gospel condemns,'' he said in a plea for forgiveness, dialogue and reconciliation. He made no further reference to the massacre during an outdoor mass coinciding with the anniversary on Sunday.

Jean Tartier, head of the French Protestant Federation, said the Pope had made "a very important statement that goes towards asking for forgiveness and looking back at history.'' Testimony that the massacre still haunts mainly Catholic France came in a recent film, "La Reine Margot'' (Queen Margot), starring Isabelle Adjani, which graphically described the killings and the obscure civil war plots that led to it. Most French people nowadays, in a country which has had two Protestant prime ministers in less than a decade, are at a loss to understand the complex causes of the massacre. Even the death toll is controversial. It has been variously put at between 1,000 and 10,000 in Paris, and 2,000 up to 100,000 for the whole country.

The massacre occurred against a background of rivalry between France and Spain for the control of Flanders, and a 10-year-old noblemen's war between Catholics and persecuted Huguenots, as French Protestants were called. On August 20, 1572, Catherine de Medicis, the pro-Spanish mother of France's Catholic King Charles IX, engineered an attempt on the life of his powerful Protestant aide, admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who was advocating war on Spain. A badly wounded Coligny warned the king about his mother. King Henry of Navarre, a Protestant who had just married Charles' sister Margot and came in line for succession to the French throne, demanded that Coligny's attackers be punished. Catherine de Medicis then ordered a massacre of Protestants during which Coligny would be finished off. Her powerful allies, including the duke of Guise, stormed Coligny's home, slit his throat and dumped his body in the house's yard. Church bells pealed, calling Catholic militia to arms. The killings went out of control.

The "wars of religion'' flared again. Twenty-two years later Henry of Navarre, after besieging the French capital, declared in a famous quip: "Paris is well worth a mass.'' He converted to Catholicism and was crowned king of France. His Edict of Nantes in 1598 granted the Huguenots toleration and civil rights. He was assassinated 12 years later in an anti-Protestant plot. King Louis XIV, attempting to forcibly convert Protestants, revoked the Edict of Nantes almost a century later.

Many Huguenots went to hide in remote mountain villages of southern France. An estimated 400,000 went into exile, taking their industrial skills mainly to Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. Persecution of Protestants ended in 1764, and the 1789 French Revolution made them fully-fledged citizens, granting citizenship to the descendants of exiled Huguenots who returned. About 100 protestants lay a wreath at the statue of Coligny on Sunday to mark the massacre. There are now one million Protestants in France, a country of 58 million. They gave the country its current Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and his fellow-Socialist former premier Michel Rocard, Nobel Prize winning writers Andre Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre, an atheist who was born to a Protestant family.

WE by the grace of God, of these United States, the land of a free people, are living in a truly golden age. We can put our trust in Pope, priest or atheist without fear of the galleys, dungeon, or the stake. Religious intolerance is at a discount; burning witches and hanging Quakers have gone out of fashion in these latter days. We are beginning to make a record for the Twentieth Century that is a credit to advanced civilization.

The name of Huguenot, as applied to the dissenters from the Church of Rome, is supposed to have been derived from Hugeon, a word used in Touraine to signify persons who walk at night. Their only safe place of worship for one hundred years had been dark caves and the blue vault of the heavens. The matter of religion with Louis, XIV was merely a pretext. He used the Church as a club for wholesale confiscation. It was a rich field to work in, and the proceeds lined the pockets of the dissolute nobles of his court.

The Huguenots, as a class, were the bone and sinew of France. The nobility were wealthy, the merchants and manufacturers prosperous, and the poorer classes sober and industrious. It is estimated that the loss to France by the Huguenot persecutions, first and last, was about 400,000. Manufactures and the arts were paralyzed, and the whole country suffered from its effects for one hundred years. Louis and his predecessors sowed the vipers' eggs that a century later brought Louis XVI and his court to the guillotine. Thus, in a measure, did time avenge the martyred Huguenots. This name was applied indiscriminately to those who adopted the creeds of Luther or Calvin. It seems they got an idea that the Bible would be a pretty good book for the people, and this did not suit the priests and monks of those days. They made a general job of burning both books and readers. Mankind is a contrary quantity, and, as is generally the case, their ideas grew and prospered under opposition and persecution. In the course of time, the Huguenots became a prominent factor among all classes, from noble to peasant. The followers of Luther and Calvin were the bone and sinew of the states, and in a general way, represented the best class of inhabitants.

This struggle between advancement and ignorance was at its height about 1450. To quote a French monk of that period: "They have now found out a new language called Greek. We must carefully guard ourselves against it. That language will be the mother of all heresies. I see in the hands of a great number of persons a book written in this language, called the New Testament. It is a book full of brambles with vipers in them. As to the Hebrew, whoever learns that becomes a Jew at once."

One hundred years passed and found the new faith growing, and persecution increasing. Phillip II of Spain devastated Flanders, and changed that rich country to a desert. The massacre of St. Bartholomew followed shortly after. In 1581, the exodus from France and Flanders began in earnest, but was stayed, in a measure, by Henry of Navarre, who was proclaimed king in 1584, with the title of Henry IV. As a Protestant himself, he promulgated the celebrated Edict of Nantes, but the people were soon deprived of its benefits when the king became a nominal Catholic for