ensured by laying it on a scriptural basis. If this were done, it would be of little consequence whether the work proceeded fast or slow: however slow it would be sure, and the work done would abide; while at present all is left to the mere ingenuity of men, and almost every year we are amused or shocked with some new hypothesis, varying only according to the good or bad taste, the caution or the recklessness, of the propounders.

ART. V.-Histoire des Eglises du Désert chez les Protestants de France, Depuis la fin du Régne de Louis XIV., jusqu'à la Revolution Française. Par CHARLES COQUEREL. TWO vols. 8vo. Paris: Ab. Cherbuliez et Co. Geneva: Même Maison. Londres: Jeffs, Burlington-arcade.

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WHEN the various and widely separated districts of France, which renounced Popery, first openly espoused the cause of the Reformation, the professors of the purified faith were distinguished, if we may so call it, by the appellation of Lutherans. It is a well-known fact, however, that they were moved more by an united feeling against Rome than by an unanimous approval of all that Luther taught. Indeed, no class of Reformers so little deserved the appellation of Lutherans as the French; for whatever opinions they may have adopted in their first burst of eagerness to escape from the intolerable thraldom of Popery, they soon acknowledged no other earthly leader than Calvin. From the very first, their attempt to secure religious freedom was met by the most cruel tyranny. To dare to think was, in itself, to merit death; to dare to speak was to ensure it. The aristocracy of France upheld their cause only to be slain in its defence. The ever-infamous day of St. Bartholomew will serve to illustrate the depth of their own wrongs, and the blood-thirstiness of the men who first worked the evil, and then massacred alike those who complained and those who were passive. To grant them a little breathing time of peace was to endanger the throne from which the message of brief grace was enunciated. When Henry III. sheathed his own sword, and bid his Protestant subjects bind up their wounds, a yell of execration arose from the universal Popedom. The smell of the hot blood that had been shed was provocation to the spilling of more, and the fiat issued from Rome that stirred up those bloody Guises, not only to attempt the overthrow of a king, who was willing to see his Protestant people sit undisturbed at the foot of his throne, but the extirpation of that very people,

and the utter and complete annihilation of the religion they professed. The complete horrors of that long period, in which slaughter stalked abroad and became familiar in the sight of men-in which bloody aggression never ceased, and bloody resistance never slackened-those horrors have never been adequately told, as indeed they are beyond all adequate conception. With the accession of Henry IV., a bright but deceitful dawn broke over the new prospects of the Protestant cause. effectually check the commission of further atrocities, Henry IV. flung the shield of the law over the hard-pressed Reformers. He gave them legal toleration-he presented to their grati tude the great edict of Nantes-the edict was, in fact, a decree against the commission of religious assassination. The Jesuits obeyed it by burying a knife in the bosom of the decreer!

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From that period, Popery and the Reformed doctrine have stood with threatening aspect in presence of each other. The toleration promised by the edict of Nantes was a mere delusion: the exceptions made to its clauses annulled all that was worth the acceptance of those for whom the clauses were expressly made to remonstrate was to rebel; and rebellion was the forerunner of death. This doom was ever before the eyes of every individual in France who objected to the supremacy of Rome. Neither age nor sex were permitted to escape. Toleration was only allowed to those who dared not accept it; if they sought to reap its advantages, the end was destruction. They were hurried on to an assertion of their rights, and a resolution to maintain them, only to be swept down by cannon shot, or cut off by the speedy system of the dragonades. Popery never allowed royalty to slumber-the monarch who dared to rest for a moment from the slaughter, which he was persuaded or compelled to authorise, was excited, by priestly threats and crafty menaces, to let slip the bloodhounds of persecution, with renewed appetites, against a terror-stricken, but not a faithdenying people. The revocation of the edict of Nantes was the great crime and the great foolishness of Louis the XIV. His troops had slaughtered all who came within reach of their shot or their arms, as professors of the reformed religion. Death was denounced against the few yet left who had courage to keep their faith and to practice its rites by night in the desert places of a land, to stand on which, with a profession of protestantism avowed, was to forfeit property, to yield to the gallows, and to be denied a grave.

It is the object of the reverend author of this interesting work to give a narrative of those Protestant communities of France which, without defying the revocation of the edict of Nantes,

yet resolved upon not going into exile, and resigned themselves to endure the horrible barbarities of the laws, when detected in the innocent, nay praiseworthy, worship which was denounced as an infringement of them, worthy of death. Long and fierce was the persecution which the Church formed by those communities had to submit to, with the cheerful humility of martyrs. The persecution, in its shape of deadly enmity, did not cease till the period of Louis XVI., when the government and the parliaments became deaf to the urgent persuasions of the Romish clergy, displayed a reluctance to enforce the edicts of the "great monarch," and, at length, finally abrogated them altogether.

It is hardly possible to conceive the position of a large body. of men thus existing in face of a law which pronounced them legally dead, and which rendered them physically so, when they were caught in the criminal fact of asserting their religious liberty. Their first, aud most implacable foe, Louis XIV., stood in connection with them, exactly as we see the "archiarchi-archi"-despot of Russia stand in connection with his Roman Catholic subjects. The Muscovite whip, torture, and oven, wherein to bake poor Romanist women who decline conscientiously to enter the Greek Church, are all plagiarisms from the policy of Louis XIV., whose sole and selfish object it was to create an apparent religious unity within his kingdom, and to compel every French Protestant subject to embrace the Romish religion of the prince. He who was not of the monarch's religion was accursed, and pronounced worthy of dying the death; just as, at this day, he who, in Russia, is not of the czar's religion is anathematised by the military synod, which arranges the ecclesiastical department of Russia, and handed over to imprisonment, laceration, and the grave.

When the peace of Utrecht became an established fact, the scattered, fragmentary, priestless congregations of French Protestantism began to take heart. They were not sensible of the actual arrival of better times; but they saw an age of promise in the distance, and they commenced due preparation for it accordingly. They began by assembling by night in caves, forests, on wide plains, or under the shelter of craigs and cliffs. Peril attended the path of those who attended these meetings--peril hung over them while they tarried, nor left them as they returned. But the danger of death could not deter men from the solemn congregations of the wilderness; and weary miles were trodden by worshippers to hold community with their fellow-proscribed, to bid them be of good cheer, to "bide their time," and to wait patiently for the salvation of the Lord. Immense difficulties, nevertheless, obstructed the efforts of the

good men who, with the youthful Antoine Court at their head, had to hold their way between the most atrocious persecution on the one hand, and ignorance, partaking largely of fanaticism,' on the other. Low, indeed, was the condition of the Protestants in France when the great restorer of Protestantism, whom we have just named, put his hand to the plough, hever to look back from his task till death relieved him. Oppression had so entirely crushed the hearts of many of the French Protestants, that their inward burning affection for the Reformed faith was dishonoured by their outward, yet compelled, behaviour. To use Court's own expressive words "In one hand they held the Gospel, and in the other the idol." B night they offered a secret worship to God, and by day they publicly attended mass. He assumed a perilous but a glorious mission who undertook to restore freedom and purity, where slavery, cruelty, and hypocrisy, born of terror, had so long reigned paramount. It was by the latter instruments that Louis XIV. deemed that he had effectually annihilated the Reformation. He was already on his deathbed when he had struck the commemorative medals bearing the legend of "heresy extinct ;" and yet, ere the bronzed lie had been consigned to the cabinets of the curious, and the oratories of the priests, that so-called heresy was springing into new life, and receiving daily vigour in the hands of a youth who held a sling, and a stone, and a mission from God. We refer our readers to the details given by M. Coquerel of the method taken by Court, and his co-adjutors, to organize the scattered" remnants of the widely spread congregations. They are full of interest, but they are too long for us. One significative fact will prove the delicate and dangerous nature of their undertaking. They had drawn up a paper for the guidance of their followers on matters of faith, discipline, religious worship, morality, and loyalty six ministers subscribed this document, and of these four fell into the hands of the authorities, and were immediately hanged.

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That our readers may have some idea of what the professors of Protestantism had to contend with, from the period of the revocation of the edict of Nantes, to that very shortly anterior to the French Revolution, we will, as briefly as possible, detail only a few of the inflictions and penalties which impeded or punished the profession of the reformed religion in France. The edict of revocation decreed the utter annihilation of that! religion, and little short of the same extremity to its followers. We may premise that, only a few years previous to the publication of the avenging edict, a famous decree, touching emigration and emigrants, forbade any Protestants from either

emigrating to Protestant countries or marrying with Protestant foreigners: confiscation of goods and dreary imprisonment were the penalties incurred; and it was expressly declared that all parents, relations, and guardians consenting to such marriages should be condemned to the gallies for life. Death on the scaffold inevitably fell on all detected in facilitating the evasion of Protestants from the kingdom; and this cruelty was excused on the plea of the necessity that existed to prevent the beloved but erring subjects of a Popish monarch from enjoying, in other dominions, the destructive liberty of indulgence in errors which could not be thought of, but at peril of the gibbet or the galleys, in his own. Again: before the edict of revocation halfruined France, and gave a yet enduring and consequent prosperity to England and Holland-the two nations at whose hands France has received the most numerous humiliations—and a host of other legal restrictions affecting the Protestants, we find a singular decree (tempting to apostacy), by which the king "grants to all his subjects of the pretended reformed religion, and who shall make abjuration of the same, the term and delay of three years for the payment of the capital of their debts; his majesty expressly forbidding "their creditors to take any steps for the recovery of money so owing to them during the aforesaid time." This was, as we have said, a temptation to apostatize. That it was not decreed out of affection for the Protestants themselves is sufficiently proved by another order in council, which declared that no person who had professed the "pretended reformed religion" should dispose of either his real or personal property, to the amount of 3,000 livres and upwards, without express authorization from the king. This famous declaration was repeated triennially until towards the end of the reign of Louis XVI., and by its means the government had the property of the Protestants completely locked up under their hands.

Among the more singular laws of the period, one forbids a Protestant practising the calling of an "accoucheuse" to Catholic ladies, on the pretext that, should the latter be in peril of their lives, their heretical midwives, "having no faith in the sacraments," might leave them to perish without informing them of their condition. In most cases, where the infringers of these royal decrees are females, the penalty announced, if not death, as is too often the case, is, that they shall have their heads shaved, be sent for a time to the gallies, and finally kept in perpetual seclusion. As for the learned, brave, or enterprising male "heretics," they were not only shut out from promotion in any profession they might adopt, but they were forbidden to