LITERATURE: LATER CHURCH HISTORY OF FRANCE. 1. Guizot, F. P. Le reveil Chrétien en France au 19 Siècle. Paris, 1866. 2. Bonar, Horatius. The White Fields of France. 2d ed., Lond., 1880. 3. Castelnare, Westphal. Yesterday and To-day; or, The Activities of French Protestants since the Commencement of this Century. Paris, 1885. 4. Smith, R. T. The Church in France. Lond., 1894. See also Pére Dom Vincent Maumus, L'Eglise et la France Moderne. Paris, 1897. Abbé G. Bazin, Le Grand Schisme en France aux XIX Siècle. Paris, 1892. Bold and eloquent plea for revival of Catholicism in union with liberalism and republicanism. Important articles in Amer. Journal of Theol., i, 538, and New World, ii, 256; iv, 516; and vii, 113. I. BOSSUET. 1. Tabaraud.—Supplement aux Histoires de Bossuet et Fénelon. Paris, 1822. 2. Lear, H. L. Sidney. Bossuet and his Contemporaries. Lond., 1874. 3. Reaume (Life). 3 vols. Paris, 1870. See arts. on Bossuet as a Preacher in Amer. Theol. Rev., 1868, 91 ff.; as a Persecutor in Meth. Quar. Rev., 1866, 22 ff.; Life and Writings in Lond. Quar. Rev., vi, 400 ff. and The Quar. Rev., Apr., 1884; on Inedited Works in Church Quar. Rev., xvi, 246; on the discovery of a new work, The Nation, N. Y., Sept. See C. Griselle, Mss. de Bossuet. Lille, 1898. 17, 1896, p. 214. II. FENELON. 1. Ramsay, M. Vie de Fénelon. Paris, 1725. 2. Bausset. Hist. de Fénelon. 4 vols. Paris, 1808. Transl. by Mudford. Lond., 1810. 3. Follen, Mrs. Selections from the writings of Fénelon with a memoir. New ed. Boston, 1859. 4. De Broglie, E. 5. Ramsay, A. M. 1897. Fénelon à Cambrai. Paris, 1884. Hist. of Life of, with notes by Cuthbertson. Transl. Lond., 6. Mahrenholtz, R. Fénelon: ein Lebensbild. Leipz., 1896. 7. Bontie, P. L. Fénelon d'apres quelques critiques contemporaires, in Delmont, Etudes Relig., Dec., 1895. See also Crousle, L., Fénelon et Bossuet. Paris, 1896. The Quar. Rev., July, 1885. III. MASSILLON. 1. Theremin, C. Demosthenes und Massillon. Berl., 1845. 2. Campignon, B. Massillon d'apres des documents inedites. Paris, 1879. See Sainte Beuve's Causeries du Lundi, vol. ix; Van Oosterzee, in Amer. Theol. Rev., 1868, 295 ff.; The Quar. Rev., Oct., 1884. 2 CHAPTER X. LATER CHURCH HISTORY OF FRANCE. DEGENERACY ABOUT 1700 the Catholic Church of France, says Dr. Döllinger,' possessed more learned theologians than all the rest of Christendom together. At the head of these stood the great Jacques Benigne Bossuet, "The Eagle of Meaux," famous alike as preacher, bishop, theologian, historian, controversalist, and a marvel of perfection in the French tongue. Above him in religious genius, though inferior in style and learning, stood the younger bishop, Fénelon. But by 1715 the triumph of the Jesuits was complete, and they thrust their wretchedly inferior partisans into all the high places of the Church, which by the middle of the century had become the center of intellectual feebleness and ignorance. JESUITIZED CHURCH. The immeasurable detriment sustained by France in the loss of half a million of her Protestant subjects, including the whole body of their clergy, needs no comment. That larger fraction of the Huguenots, about two thirds, that had been unable or unwilling to flee, remained behind in an apathy of dull despair. Most of them, in view of certain ruin, offered for a while a hollow abjuration, and were enrolled by the priests as "the new converts," but continued to hate Catholicism, and clung to their ancestral religion as stubbornly as ever. Protestantism, open or slightly concealed, was not only maintaining itself, but was actu- oF PROTESally extending. There were not infrequent instances of original Catholics who had become Protestants, moved by compassion and edified by the Christian demeanor of the persecuted Huguenots. Even some priests became Protestants after attending Protestants at their execution or in the galleys. PERSISTENCE TANTISM. The attempt to compel the Huguenots not only to attend the mass, but to take the communion from the priests, was denounced by Madame de Maintenon, as well as by Cardinal de Mailles and Cardinal Le Cannes, and various other bishops, as a sacrilege, and was finally given up. Yet in the very year of his death Louis XIV issued a savage edict, providing that, if anyone refused the sacraments at death, his goods should be forfeited and his body cast 1 Akademische Vorträge, vol. i, p. 414. Nördlingen, 1888. into the common sewer. The hideous scenes often involved are portrayed by Baird.' After a few years these loathsome exposures CRUEL were given up for very shame. Yet death remained the penalty for any minister venturing to exercise his office. From 1685 to 1762, when the executions ceased, eighty-seven Protestant ministers perished on the gallows or were broken on the wheel. As to the laity, scores, perhaps in all hundreds, remained dead on the ground in the wilderness where the soldiery had detected them worshiping God. The French Protestants, bereft of all their accredited teachers, and of a great part of their educated laity, were wrought up into a state of enthusiastic, and even of fanatical exaltation. Many thousands, all over France, declared that for many days together they heard angelic voices in the air singing the familiar Huguenot psalms. In their stolen assemblies men, women, and even children would fall on the ground in half-conscious ecstasies, during which all their ejaculatory commands were received with implicit obedience as of the Holy Ghost. THE PROPH- In 1702, under the pressure of the persecution and under the incitement of these imagined prophesyings, there broke out, in the mountain region of the South known as the Cevennes, the war of the Camisards,' which for two years exercised all the skill of the marshals of France, and of many thousand soldiers, before it could be quelled. Languedoc, especially this mountain district, was the chief seat of French Protestantism. Whole parishes had scarcely any other than Huguenot inhabitants. These brave peasants, acquainted with all the intricacies of the wilderness in which they dwelt, were a cause of infinite perplexity and dismay to the royal troops, and to all the Catholics of the South. Abhorring plunder, and almost wholly guiltless of offenses against female honor, they soon, under the provocation of suffering and the fury of strife, became more murderously cruel than even their antagonists. Their main leader was the young peasant, Jean Cavalier, a mere boy of the age of twenty, but full of military vigor and resource, and, though of no real greatness or tenacity of character, having a great power of influencing those about him. After two years of brilliant exploits, the king himself made flattering offers, which Cavalier accepted with a somewhat selfish eagerness. He did, how 1 The Huguenots and the Revocation, ii, 425 ff. 2 So called probably from the white camise (chemise) which they were said to wear at night over their other clothes, for mutual recognition. JEAN ever, secure the release of the Protestants who had been sent to the galleys. Well-warranted misgivings soon led him to escape from France. His more devoted companions held out a little longer, but surrendered at last, the leaders being allowed to withdraw from the kingdom. Thus ended the brief Camisard War, which at least showed all the world how ridiculous a fiction it was to say that Protestantism had been extinguished in France. ANTOINE COURT. After the Camisards came the long era of "The Church of the Desert." Antoine Court became, from 1713 onward, the restorer of French Protestantism. He was but seventeen years of age when he began among the Huguenots of the Desert-the one comprehensive name given to all the secluded retreats of their worshipto preach sermons of his own composition. Boy as he was, his judgment was ripened into soundness and strength. He soon became persuaded that two things were indispensable if French Protestantism was not to perish. One was that the prophesyings should cease. By steady calmness of appeal to the Bible as the one authority for Christians and for Protestants in place of all imagined private revelations, he at last succeeded completely. The other pillar of continuance for the reviving Church was to be found in a thorough organization. The wise and stable youth of nineteen, on August 21, 1715, held, in a deserted quarry near Monoblet in Lower Languedoc, the first Synod of the Desert, composed of nine persons. Court presented a number of searching and far-reaching principles of action, all of which were accepted, thus banishing anarchy, unseemliness, and fanaticism from the reconstituted Church, which now reentered upon the possession of its local consistories, rising grades of presbyteries,' and local and general synods. These meetings were always conducted with the utmost precision of ecclesiastical regularity. Corteiz, an older preacher, was sent to Switzerland to obtain ordination. On his return he ordained Court, and thus the succession of Reformed pastors in France was reestablished. RESTORED TANTISM. PROTESTANT After the Revocation the law refused any longer to accept as evidence of baptism or marriage the certificate of a Huguenot minister. All who were not married before a priest were legally esteemed concubinaires, and their children illegitimate. Yet as the churches of the Desert multiplied, the Protestants again flocked to the ministers for the baptism of their children and the benediction of their nuptials. They ultimately com 1 Called in France, colloquies. pelled the State to give its tardy sanction to the moral validity of their marriages as well as once more to accept their baptismal registrations. Progress was steady. Court says: "What a comfort it was for me to be present, in 1744, at meetings of ten thou sand souls, on the identical spots where, in the first years of my ministry, scarcely had I been able to bring together fifteen, thirty, sixty, one hundred persons." In 1729 Antoine Court, having provided a sufficiency of ordained pastors and finding the pursuit after him so hot as to make it hardly prudent to remain, withdrew into Switzerland, where, at Lausanne, he founded a divinity school, which long continued to supply the French churches with preachers. Court lived until 1760, but occasionally revisiting France. His son, Court de Gébelin, was a marvel of erudition and talent, and was universally esteemed one of the ornaments of France. When he published Le Monde Primitif, the king and the archbishop of Paris, on two occasions, voted him one of the highest honors, in the most flattering terms. Yet he was as much devoted to the Church of the Desert as his father. Wretchedly provided for, and in constant dangers, he yet never withdrew from his ministry. His GEBELIN. high standing in the learned world enabled him to work with great influence for the mitigation of the persecutions, and it was only three years after his death, in 1784, that the long-desired Edict of Toleration appeared. COURT DE "The relentless pursuit of the ministers of the Reformed Church," says Baird, "did not come to an end until 1762, with the execution at Toulouse, on February 19, of François Rochette, the last of the martyred pastors. The long list of noble confessors of the faith could not have closed with a worthier name than this." Before the great Church of Saint Stephen, as if the judges were swayed unconsciously by the will of God to make a parallel between EXECUTION the elder and the later martyr, Rochette, attired in a OF ROCHETTE. Simple shirt, bareheaded and barefooted, holding in his hand a great yellow taper, with the label on his back, "Minister of the Pretended Reformed Church," was condemned, before mounting the ladder, to ask pardon of God, the king, and justice. "Of God," said he, "I do ask forgiveness. Of the king I have none to ask, for I have ever obeyed him, save when to obey him was to disobey God. I have done no wrong to my judges, but may God forgive them." 'The Huguenots and the Revocation, ii, 431. |