PITAUX'S FRENCH REFORMATION (LAST VOLUME).* THE seventh and concluding volume
of M. Puaux's History of the French Reformation surpasses in novelty and interest all its predecessors. It has for its subject what may be called the underground life of French Protestantism during the eighteenth century ; and reading it one can well understand the tenacious attachment of a large body of the French Protestants to the traditions of their Church, and what a reality must have for them the tenets of "the faith once delivered to the saints" of the French wilderness. For by a touching and at the same time accurate image, the Protestant Church of France during this period styled itself the " Church of the Wilderness,"—rEgiise du Desert. During about a century—from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 to the edict of toleration in 1787—a million of Frenchmen, whose worship was absolutely proscribed under penalties, of which those of our own laws against Romanism are but faint copies, and who were at the same time forbidden by similar penalties from leaving the country, had, winter and summer, from
• Histoire Sc I. Nformalion Francaise. Par F. PaanC. Michel LS y Fares. 1564.
Tome Septieme. Paris :
year's end to year's end, from generation to generation, to seek out lonely wastes in which they might serve their God, t ankfnl even when they could do so by the light of day. Eves records of their frequent martyrdoms at the stake or on Me scaffold are scarcely more touching than are a few pages out of the daily life of Court, one of the "pastors of the wilderness," which have come down to us. It is the spring and summer of 1728. We see the minister calling together, night by night oftener than day by day, assemblies of the various churches, generally two or three at a time. After some days the rain seems to accompany him everywhere. " My God I " he exclaims in one place, " how much rain fell during the preaching and the celebration of the Eucharist- Yet it did not disturb devotion." By July, on the other hand, the heat of a midday sun compels an unusually speedy administra- tion of the Holy Communion. Meanwhile marriages, forbidden by law, are solemnized, children are baptized, still in the teeth of the law. And all this is done amidst continual alarms ; here the Ro:nanists are on the watch, but fortunately the rain, which does not prevent the Protestants from meeting, hinders the soldiers from going abroad ; elsewhere a priest at the heal of a detachment starts to break up an assembly, but stops half way. Nor is this all. A harder task remains. In the very midst of outward oppression and persecution the " Church of the Wilderness " has to reform itself, to restore its discipline, to vindicate itself against the calumnies of its own co-religionists abroad. The war of the Camisards had left the French Protestant population a prey to fanaticism. Ministers had almost disappeared ; nothing remained but prophets and prophet- esses. Women and sometimes men fell into ecstatic transports in_ the midst of divine service, and would be speaking all at once. There were sects of "Multipliers," of " Swellers," these denying all spiritual authority, recognizing no guidance but that of the direct illu- mination of the Holy Ghost, with women prophets, and boy high priests, and strange, fantastic rites ; those holding one Maroger for God the Father, and a Widow Chassefiere for Queen, and all ministers as well as Romish priests foredoomed to eternal fire. " Whenever I think," wrote Court, " that these people attribute their mad imaginations and the extravagancies they have committed, and of many of which I have been witness, to the Spirit of the Lord, a shudder runs all through me, my flesh creeps, my hair stands on end, my heart trembles, and makes me fear lest a thunderbolt fall from heaven and crash these wretches, who dare make the Holy Ghost the author of all these things." So at eighteen, being at Nimes, he resolved to devote his life to the restoration of the Church, by four principal means, first, by calling the people together and instructing_ them ; secondly, by combating fanaticism ; thirdly, by reviving Church-discipline, synods included ; fourthly, by training men for the ministry. He lived to see all four purposes fulfilled ; to found and direct a theological seminary for training Protestant ministers at Lau- sanne ; to be present at provincial synods, at a national synod in 1744 ; and died at Lausanne, after forty years of ministry, in 1760. Yet, strange to say, this great work .of internal re- formation was not appreciated abroad. The " Churches of the Refuge," as were termed those of the French Protestant emigrants to foreign countries, were at issue with the " Church of the Wilderness." Amidst all his indefatigable labours, Court was accused in England of wasting his time in sporting, and by the side of his " dear Rachel " (his wife). gamin, the great preacher of the " Refuge," took no interest in the slow and obscure martyr- dom of those of his co-religionists who had remained in their native land. France was for him a Babylon, out of which God's people were to come forth, and whilst Court was endeavouring to form ministers to keep up the preaching of the Gospel, so to speak, under the very gibbet, Saurin only sought to withhold his brethren from re-entering what he deemed a land of perdition.
A second great name is that of Paul Rabaut. Twenty-two years younger than Court (born 1718), Rabaut was spiritually a child of the wilderness, and was wont as a boy to serve as guide to the ministers, and sometimes to act as "reader" in their assemblies of the cavern or the wild wood. At sixteen he resolved to devote his life to the ministry, was admitted to preach at twenty, and soon afterwards married, but finding himself insufficiently in- structed for his task, left his wife for three years to go and study at Lausanne under Court, who soon recognized in the weakly- looking youth of four feet ten inches (French) in height the man who was to complete his work. One of the most striking passages of his life is that in -which, on the strength of some respite to persecution in the South, through the arrival of the Minister of War, Paulmy d'Argenson, Rabaut—whose life as a minister was ipso facto forfeited, and whose person was perfectly well known,—waited for the Minister on the high-
very high price for a picture, the real evil being one which grew up so that on one occasion be was not even able to take off his gown tinder the oppressive usury laws, the underhand manner in which the in escaping from the pulpit. Still thepersistence of Protestantism profit is made. Suppose a man knows he is dealing with a doubtful in spite of persecutions was now beginning to be remarked. A Prince customer and charges 100 per cent., he is still only asking his own of the blood royal, the Prince of Conti, coquetted with it ; Rippert price and his mode of doing it namely, taking a receipt for 100/. at de Montelar, Procureur-Gindral of the Parliament of Aix, claimed 5 per cent. ; but paying only 791. for a bill due in three months is merely for it civil toleration ; Rabaut and another minister were urged an absurdity produced by the still greater one of fixing a maximum to leave the country, instead of being blindly hounded down. rental for money. The newest chapter in the book is one on the Andthelast martyrdoms were at hand,—those, namely, of the minis- Levant Trade, which the writer declares to be hampered by an organized . ter Rochette, and of the three brothers Grenier, who had sought to system for drawing bills in the way called in the City "Pig upon bacon," rescue him when arrested, "gentlemen glassmakers," of a family drawer and drawee being really the same persons. in Foix ennobled for improvements in the manufacture of glass, Astra Casing. By Mr. Hatton Turner. (Chapman and llall.)—Mr. of which three members had already been sent to the galleys by Hatton Turnoris evidently an enthusiast, for only an enthusiast, and one, reason of their faith. At Toulouse the four were executed, February too, the balance of whose mind had been a little overset, just a trifle 18, 1762, the gentlemen by the axe, the minister by the halter. tilted as it were, would have gone to the expense of publishing this Yet it was not these martyrdoms that stopped persecution, but magnificent volume. Mr. Tumor believes that the atmosphere is the the death of a much less worthy Protestant victim, executed true highway of nations, and in a mighty quarto, heavy as one of our
eighteen days later at Toulouse, the famous Calas. grandfathers Bibles, bound in purple and gold, rich with wide margins,
The story of Calas has been told in full and clear detail, by M. endeavoured to collect against the day of final triumph the literature of Athanase Coquerel junior, in a separate volume published some aerostation. Scientific disquisitions and newspaper articles, letters years back, and need not here be dwelt upon. Calas, it should from Mr. Coxwell and American squibs, ancient narratives and pro- be borne in mind, though his name has been made illustrious by phetic poems by Victor Hugo, Mr. Monck Mason's spirited accounts of Voltaire, though a real sacrifice to Romishlanaticism, was not a aerial prospects and Edgar Poe's wild dreams, the last American ex- martyr, and would perhaps never have been condemned, but for periment, and the latest squib from the New York Herald, are all the false pride which made him and his lie and perjure themselves jumbled together, without judgment, or drift, or connecting link other in the first instance as to the circumstances of the suicide of his than the air, into a volume which collectors will one day purchase as a eon Marc Antoine, in order to avoid the cruel indignities inflicted curious and rare illustration of quasi.scientific folly. Mr. Turner has in such cases on the body of the deceased. But such derogations little of his own to offer except a preconceived conclusion, that as from truth would perhaps even commend their cause to Voltaire, every other science advances aerostation must advance also, and he whose life is full of mendacity, and who cannot even abstain from collects without much judgment; but still the book, in its an.4,-,11 -laud it in the course of the Calas affair, itself the best passage in his its gorgeousness, its mass of material and its absence of coiLimil career. Anyhow, the posthumous reparation given to the Toulouse thought, is worth the attention of those who care te....,udy the effect of a great idea on a mind scarcely wide enough to contain it. They may cloth-merchant, through the quashing of his death-sentence by gather up, too, amidst the astounding medley some information which, if the Council of State (7th May, 1763), was the commencement they know nothing whatever of aerostation, its history, its occasional of a new era for French Protestantism. For the first time since successes, and its ever recurring failures, will interest them enough to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes a national synod (seventh make them wonder why a man sn industrious and so enthusiastic as and last) was held without fear of disturbance (1st June, 1763). Mr. Tumor should. not have condensed his materials into some useful More wondrous still, the Church of Nimes was allowed to choose a and inexpensive form. The chapter on the guidance of balloons, for spot for public worship, on condition that its meetings should take example, seems to contain a record of most of the experiments yet tried, place by day-light (though still only in the open air). Then came the experiments most of them indicating disordered judgment as well as release of the Protestant women, prisoners of the faith, at Aigues fanatic faith in those who pursued them. Mortes, one of whom had spent thirty-eight years in the prison ; Frost and Fire. 2 vols. (Edmonston and Douglas.)—The author, then a judgment giving damages to a Protestant wife, deserted by for reasons which it is not easy to understand, refrains from putting his her husband on the ground that they had only been married "in the name on the title-page, but signs nevertheless the preface with the wilderness ;" then the quashing, againthrough Voltaire's assistance, name of J. F. Campbell. If the only reason for this was modesty, of an iniquitous judgment against Sirven, accused, like Calas, of never was modesty more misplaced, for without pretending to estimate having killed his child ; then, lastly, the edict of 1787, which re- the value of the author's scientific theories, it is easy to see that even stored to the Protestants their civil rights and legalized their on these points he deserves a hearing, and certainly in a literary point marriages. of view he has produced a most entertaining and original book. The The main interest of the story is over by this time, though third chapter, where he defines it as treating of igneous and sedimen- another great Protestant name remains, that of Rabaut St. Etienne, tarp rocks; "it recognizes the activity of two mechanical forces, which son of Paul Rabaut, who figures prominently in the early days of act in opposite directions, upward and downward, from and towards a the Revolution, and who presided for a time over the Constituent centre, in radiating and converging lines." These forces are of course Assembly. But those halcyon days of French liberty soon passed gravitation and heat, to which he considers all the phenomena of the by, and Protestantism, like Romanism, had to bear the yoke of the earth's crust to be due. The first of these acts chiefly by means of ice, Convention. Rabaut St. Etienne, after sitting in it, was proscribed which is obviously Mr. Campbell's favourite subject of study, for he allots and executed, 5th December, 1792. His wife went mad on hear- quite three-fourths of these portly octavos to frost, and only the remain- ing from a public crier her husband's name among those of the der of his space to fire. But he is less devoted to the glacier theory than recently executed ; and his old father, Paul Rabaut, was arrested most of the later geologists, attributing a larger share of the action of and carried to prison on ass-back, amidst the hooting of the popu- frost on the earth's surface to floating icebergs. All this, however, might lace, but was released by the fall of Robespierre, and died shortly seem dull to the general reader, but it is not, for two reasons. First, that after, 25th September, 1794. With him French Protestantism the author has a singular love of comparing great things with small, itself seemed morally dead for many years, and has only revived and illustrating with remarkable ingenuity the largest operations of within our own times. nature by means of experiments on the smallest scale. He is never more M. Puaux's views as to the relations of State and Church need happy than in insisting on the uniformity of the operations of nature, who forms the delta of the Nile and of a gutter on the same principles. not here be discussed. He has written a valuable work, often of Secondly, his book is amusing because he has been so groat a traveller, absorbing interest, and his narrative should commend itself to and has been quite above the pedantry of writing a treatise to suit the many who may be far from sharing his opinions. dignity of science. He speaks with equal familiarity of Greece and Ice-
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