tors walk in and out before their united flocks! Families scattered are united, competence rewards honest and persevering toil, and peace and prosperity cheer the hearts of all. Great thoughts fill the mind of the kingthoughts of Christian union with other nations; but while he meditates the plan, he falls beneath the knife of Ravaillac.

Henry IV. was the most popular king that ever sat on the throne of France-a proof that toleration was not unacceptable to the great body of his subjects. His son, a little boy in his ninth year, succeeded him. Louis, when he became of age, confirmed the edict of Nantes, but his prime minister, Richelieu, was the moving spirit of his reign, and he was determined upon humiliating the Huguenots. Perceiving the direction of affairs, an im mense multitude of Protestants assembled in a kind of general council, and resolved to die rather than have their liberties taken from them. Daily infractions upon their rights continued. They resorted to arms. Rochelle was their strong hold. Richelieu attacked it by land and sea. They made a gallant defence for a whole year. At last they were fairly overcome by famine; but not until they had lived upon bread and water for thirteen weeks. Of the eighteen thousand citizens who were within the city when its gates were closed, not above five thousand were alive to see them re-opened for the entrance of the besieging host.

What followed these oppressive measures of the prime minister may be easily conjectured. A seven-years' war had deprived the Protestants of all their troops; they were without places of refuge, defenceless, and almost homeless. And yet, making due allowance for emigra. tion, it is computed that the number of Protestants in France, at this critical period, exceeded two millions. Wonderful people! Where in history do we find so illustrious an example of persistent devotion to the principles of religious liberty?

We approach a brilliant, but sad epoch in our history. Louis XIV. is upon the throne of France. At his majority, in 1652, he confirmed the edict of Nantes; but he had scarcely confirmed it, before he began to violate it. Papists and Jesuits were in his councils, and he resolved

upon the extirpation of the Protestants. On the 8th of November, 1685, the dreadful deed was done. The edict of Nantes was revoked, and Protestants were legally banished from the kingdom. This was followed by a measure even more tyrannical and shocking,-an express order addressed to all the reformed churches, to embrace the Catholic faith. To carry these wicked purposes into effect, every motive of pride, ambition, fear, was appealed to. Some yielded; but the great body of them stood firm to the cause they had espoused. When the count and clergy, with the eloquent but heathen Boussuet at their head, had exhausted their stock of artifice and cruelty to establish the ecclesiastical unity of France, then came the work of direct extermination. Churches were pulled down, schools closed, preachers banished or murdered, and the worldly substance of the industrious Huguenots consumed, or otherwise destroyed. The active agents in this nefarious work were the king's dragoons, who were quartered in the houses of the Protestants. A distinguished French minister, author of a Defence of the Reformation, an English edition of which appeared in 1683, in referring to these dragoons and the cruelties which they employed to oblige the Huguenots to abjure their faith, says: "They cast some into large fires, and took them out when they were half roasted. They hanged others with large ropes under the armpits, and plunged them several times into wells, till they promised to renounce their religion. They tied them, like criminals, on the rack, and poured wine with a funnel into their mouths, till, being intoxicated, they declared that they consented to turn Catholics. Some they slashed and cut with penknives; others they took by the nose with red-hot tongs, and led them up and down the rooms till they promised to turn Catholics."

The record of such a deed as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, would make a dark page in the history of any nation. But when we reflect that the rights secured to the Huguenots by Henry IV., in an edict which he declared "fixed and irrevocable," were denied them by so distinguished a personage as Louis XIV., in the very zenith of the glory of France, when her schools and pulpits were occupied by such men as Massillon, VOL. XV. 6

Boussuet, Bourdaloe, Bridaine, Fenelon, Arnaud, and Pascal; when we reflect that Louis was the favorite son of France, and that papacy and monarchy had almost uncontrolled sway throughout the vast empire, what language shall we employ to express the enormity of a deed, by which, in such a presence, these conscientious and harmless men and women were deprived of their most sacred rights, and subjected to such inhuman and disgraceful treatment?

Nothing remained to the faithful Huguenots but to leave the country or suffer death by persecution. Life is sweet. They would live if it were God's will, and they might do so without renouncing or denying their faith. In great numbers they left the country-left their native land, severed those endearing relations that attach us to the place of our birth, and went forth to new scenes, and the lands of strangers.

"One look, one last look,

To the cots and the towers,
To the rows of our vines,
And the beds of our flowers;
To the church where the bones
Of our fathers decayed,
Where we fondly had deemed
Our own should be laid.

"Farewell, and forever!

The priest and the slave
May rule in the halls

Of the free and the brave.
Our homes we abandon,

Our lands we resign,
But, Father, we kneel
To no altar but thine."

But emigration was also prohibited. One of the articles of the edict of revocation, was: "And we do most stoutly again repeat our prohibitions unto all our subjects of the pretended reformed religion, that neither they nor their wives nor children do depart our kingdom, countries, or lands of our dominion, nor transport their goods and effects, on pain, for men so offending, of their being sent to the gallies, and of confiscation of bodies and goods for the women." "" No fact in the entire history of the Huguenots more forcibly shows their integrity, their noble devo

tion to the truth, than that, in the face of all these dangers, more than five hundred thousand fled from France, and sought refuge in foreign lands. "Some, after leaving the shores of France, were made prisoners by the Corsairs, and endured years of slavery in Africa; some were thrown upon the coast of Spain, and were handed over to the Spanish inquisition; " but most, it is gratifying to know, were welcomed to the countries they sought, and found the protection they desired. Louis had thought to rid the country of heresy; but, in the high-handed measures which he employed for this purpose, he did great, and almost irremediable injury to the prosperity of his kingdom. He banished not only heresy, but heretics, who in leaving France took with them their skill and industry, as well as their faith. But their skill and industry France could not spare. The commercial prosperity of the country depended much upon the manufactures of the Huguenots, who were very generally connected with the useful arts. No country ever lost by one fatal act so valuable a portion of its population as fled from France in consequence of the revocation of the edict of Nantes. For a time, the manufacture of silks and the weaving of stockings was nearly broken up; whilst other countries, profiting by the handicraft of the fleeing Huguenots, entered into a troublesome competition with the French. Louis XIV. was a spendthrift; but he gave a greater blow to the industry and wealth of his kingdom by driving out of it half a million of his most skilful and orderly subjects, than by the unlimited expenses of his pride and ambition. In 1774, the Protestants who still remained in France assembled to regulate meetings for worship. They had been denied baptism, the rites of burial, and marriage. They were without churches and schools. As all suitable buildings were refused them, they decided to hold their meetings in the open air. These meetings were called "assemblies of the desert." Under the broad canopy of heaven, the marriage ceremony was performed, the newborn babe baptized, and the rites of burial performed. The law pronounced all children born of Protestant parents illegitimate, and they were often deprived of their inheritance by a meddlesome informer; but the smiles of God's approving love mantled the cheeks of innocent

childhood, and his favor held in charge that other inheritance, "incorruptible and undefiled."

From this time on to 1753 there were many barbarous transactions in France. Children were in many cases torn from their parents, and placed under the care of monks, while the parents were "obliged to defray the expense of educating them in a religion which they detested." In case the child escaped, the father was held answerable. There were lulls in this long-contined storm; but through all, the Huguenots were proscribed, outlawed. Their treatment was not regulated by considerations of justice and mercy, but depended upon the fortunes of the hour, the caprice of bishops, and the humor of intendants. A noble form rises into view at this period. In 1787 the assembly of the notables was opened. In that assembly there was a man who had, three years before, returned to France, laden with the gratitude of the American nation for his services in our revolutionary war. We refer to La Fayette the friend of Washington. It was he who proposed to the assembly the enfranchisement of the Protestants. He was the friend of rational liberty in both hemispheres. A Catholic bishop declared La Fayette anti-Christ for maintaining that Protestants ought to be permitted to marry and die according to their own faith; but posterity has pronounced the bishop a bigot, and La Fayette the protector of religious liberty at home, and the defender of civil liberty abroad. A few years more, and the sunny plains of France are again moistened with blood. This time the Catholics are the persecuted. Infidelity is waging a war of extermination against all religion, especially the organized and ruling religion. Old names are forgotten, the Huguenots pass from our view in the complete disorganization, and we gladly turn away from that dreadful "reign of terror," with pity for those who are learning a useful lesson from a cruel master.

The massacre of the Protestants on St. Bartholomew's day, in the sixteenth century, and the massacre of the Catholics in the revolution of the eighteenth century, are events over which religion weeps, and humanity must shudder.

We have now presented an outline of the history of the Huguenots in France. It remains for us to give some account of their fortunes in other countries.