must be given up to that, and conscience to this. He suffered the edict to be infringed every day, and he was determined not to stop till he had established a uniformity in the church, without the obtaining of which, he thought, that something was wanting to his master's power. The Protestants did all that prudence could suggest. They sent the famous Amyraut to court to complain to the king of the infraction of their edicts. [1631.] Mr. Amyraut was a proper person to go on this business. He had an extreme attachment to the doctrine of passive obedience.

This rendered him agreeable to the court: and he had declared for no obedience in matters of conscience, and this made him dear to the Protestants. The synod ordered him not to make his speech to the king kneeling, as the deputies of the former synod had done: but to procure the restoring of the privilege, which they formerly enjoyed, of speaking to the king, standing as the other ecclesiastics of the kingdom were allowed to do. The cardinal strove, for a whole fortnight, to make Amyraut submit to this tacit acknowledgment of the clerical character in the Popish clergy, and of the want of it in the reformed ministers. But Amyraut persisted in his claim, and was introduced to the king as the synod had desired. The whole court was charmed with the deputy's talents and deportment. Richlieu had many conferences with him, and, if negotiation could have accommodated the dispute between arbitrary power and upright consciences, it would have been settled now. He was treated with the utmost politeness, and dismissed. If he had not the pleasure of reflecting that he had obtained the liberty of his party, he had, however, the peace that ariseth from the consciousness of having used a proper mean to obtain it. The same mean was tried, some time after, by the inimitable Du Bosc, whom his countrymen call a PERFECT ORATOR, but alas! he was eloquent in vain.

The affairs of the Protestants waxed every day worse and worse. They saw the clouds gathering, and they dreaded the weight of the storm: but they knew not whither to flee. Some fled to England, but no peace was there. Laud, the tyrant of the English church, had a Richlieu's heart without his head; he persecuted them, and, in conjunction with Wren, and other such churchmen, drove them back to the infinite damage of the manufactures of the kingdom. [1634.] It must affect every liberal eye to see such professors as Amyraut, Cappel, and De La Place, such ministers as Mestrezat and Blondel, who would have been an honour to any community, driven to the sad alternative of flying their country, or of violating their consciences. But their time was not yet fully come.

Cardinal Richlieu's hoary head went down to the grave, [1642.] without the tears of his master, and with the hatred of all France. The king soon followed him, [1643.] complaining, in the words of Job, my soul is weary of my life. The Protestants had increased greatly in numbers in this reign, though they had lost

their power: for they were now computed to exceed two millions. So true is it, that violent measures in religion weaken the church that employs them.

Lewis XIV. was only in the fifth year of his age at the demise of his father. The queenmother was appointed sole regent during his minority, and Cardinal Mazarine, a creature of Richlieu's, was her prime minister. [1643.} The edict of Nantz was confirmed by the regent, and again by the king at his majority. [1652.] But it was always the cool determination of the minister to follow the late Cardinal's plan, and to revoke it as soon as he could, and he strongly impressed the mind of the king with the expediency of it.

Lewis, who was a perfect tool to the Jesuits, followed the advice of Mazarine, of his confes sors, and of the clergy about him, and as soon as he took the management of affairs into his own hands, he made a firm resolution to destroy the Protestants. [1661.] He tried to weaken them by buying off their great men, and he had but too much success. Some, indeed, were superior to this state trick; and it was a noble answer which the Marquis de Bougy gave, when he was offered a marshal's staff, and any government that he might make choice of, provided he would turn Papist. "Could I be prevailed on, said he, to betray my God, for a marshal of France's staff, I might betray my king for a thing of much less consequence: but I will do neither of them, but rejoice to find that my services are acceptable, and that the religion which I profess, is the only obstacle to my reward." Was his majesty so little versed in the knowledge of mankind, as not to know that saleable virtue is seldom worth buying?

The king used another art as mean as the former. He exhorted the bishops to take care, that the points in controversy betwixt the Catholics and Calvinists should be much insisted on by the clergy, in their sermons, especially in those places that were mostly inhabited by the latter, and that a good number of missionaries should be sent among them, to convert them to the religion of their ancestors. It should seem, at first view, that the exercise of his majesty's power in this way would be formidable to the Protestants, for, as the king had the nomination of eighteen archbishops, a hundred and nine bishops, and seven hundred and fifty abbots, and as these dignitaries governed the inferior clergy, it is easy to see that all the Popish clergy of France were creatures of the court, and several of them were men of good learning. But the Protestants had no fears on this head. They were excellent scholars, masters of the controversy, hearty in the service, and the mortifications, to which they had been long accustomed, had taught them that temperate coolness, which is so essential in the investigating and supporting of truth. They published, therefore, unanswerable arguments for their non-conformity. The famous Mr. Claude, pastor of the church at Charenton, near Paris, wrote a defence of the reformation, which all the clergy in France could not answer. The bishops, however, an

XX

swered the Protestants all at onee, by procuring an edict which forbade them to print.

The king, in prosecution of his design, exluded the Calvinists from his household, and from all other employments of honour and profit; he ordered all the courts of justice, erected by virtue of the edict of Nantz, to be abolished, and, in lieu of them, made several laws in favour of the Catholic religion, which debarred from all liberty of abjuring the Catholic doctrine, and restrained those Protestants, who had embraced it, from returning to their former opinions, under severe punishments. He ordered soldiers to be quartered in their nouses till they changed their religion. He shut up their churches, and forbade the ministerial function to their clergy, and, where his commands were not readily obeyed, he levelled their churches with the ground. At last he revoked the edict of Nantz, and banished them from the kingdom. [Oct. 22, 1685.]

"A thousand dreadful blows," says Mr. Saurin, "were struck at our afflicted churches, before that which destroyed them: for our enemies, if I may use such an expression, not content with seeing our ruin, endeavoured to taste it. One while, edicts were published against those, who, foreseeing the calamities that threatened our churches, and not having power to prevent them, desired only the sad consolation of not being spectators of their ruin. [Aug. 1669.] Another while, against those, who, through their weakness, had denied their religion, and who not being able to bear the remorse of their consciences, desired to return to their first profession. [May, 1679.] One while, our pastors were forbidden to exercise their discipline on those of their flocks, who had abjured the truth. [June, 1680.] Another while, children of seven years of age were allowed to embrace doctrines, which, the church of Rome says, are not level to the capacities of adults. [June 1681.] Now a college was suppressed, and then a church shut up. [Jan. 1683.] Sometimes we were forbidden to convert infidels; and sometimes to confirm those in the truth, whom we had instructed from their infancy, and our pastors were forbidden to exercise their pastoral office any longer in one place than three years. [July 1685.] Sometimes the printing of our books was prohibited, and sometimes those which we had printed were taken away. [Sept. 1685.] One while, we were not suffered to preach in a church, and another while, we were punished for preaching on its ruins, and at length we were forbidden to worship God in public at all. [Oct. 1685.] Now we were banished, then we were forbid den to quit the kingdom on pain of death. [1689.] Here we saw the glorious rewards of those who betrayed their religion; and there we beheld those who had the courage to confess it, a haling to a dungeon, a scaffold, or a galley. Here, we saw our persecutors drawing on a sledge the dead bodies of those who had expired on the rack. There, we beheld a false friar tormenting a dying man, who was terrified, on the one hand, with the fear of hell if he should apostatize, and, on the other, with the fear of leaving his children without

bread if he should continue in the faith: yonder, they were tearing children from their pa rents, while the tender parents were shedding more tears for the loss of their souls, than for that of their bodies, or lives."

It is impossible to meet with parallel instances of cruelty among the heathens in their persecutions of the primitive christians. The bloody butchers, who were sent to them under the name of Dragoons, invented a thousand torments to tire their patience, and to force an abjuration from them. "They cast some," says Mr. Claude, "into large fires and took them out when they were half roasted. They hanged others with large ropes under their arm-pits, 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. These cruel proceedings made eight hundred thousand persons quit the kingdom.

If the same actions may proceed from different principles, it must always be a hazardous, and often an unjust, attempt, to assign the true motives of men's conduct. But public actions fall under public notice, and they deserve censure, or commendation, according to the obvious good or evil, which they produce in society. The art of governing requires a superior genius, and a superior genius hides, like a lofty mountain, its summit in the clouds. In some cases, a want of capacity, and, in others, a fund of selfishness, would prevent a subject's comprehension of his prince's projects, and, consequently, his approbation of the prince's measures; and, for these reasons, the cabinets of princes should be the least accessible, and their hearts the most impenetrable parts of their dominions but when the prince would reduce his projects to practice, and cause his imaginations to become rules of action to his subjects, he ought to give a reason for his conduct, and if his conduct be rational, he will do so, for as all law is founded in reason, so reason is its best support. In such a case, the nature of the thing, as well as the respect that is due to the rank of the prince, would require us to be either mute or modest, on the motive; and the same reasons would require us to consider the reasonableness, or unreasonableness, of the law, for if it be not reason, it ought not to be law; and nothing can prevent our feeling the good or ill effects of the whole action.

To disfranchise, and to banish, to imprison, and to execute, some members of society, are partial evils: but they are also sometimes general benefits, and the excision of a part may be essential to the preservation of the whole. The inflicting of these punishments on the French Protestants, might possibly be essential to the safety of the whole nation. Or, perhaps his majesty might think it essential to monarchy; perhaps the clergy might think it essential to orthodoxy perhaps the financiers, and the king's mistresses, might think it essential to the making of their fortunes; but we have nothing to do with these private views, the questions are, Was it essential to the general safety

It was an irrational act, for there was no fitness between the punishment and the supposed crime. The crime was a mental error: but penal laws have no internal operation on the mind. It was irreligious, for religion ends where persecution begins. An action may begin in religion: but when it proceeds to injure a person, it ceaseth to be religion, it is only a denomination, and a method of acting. It was inhuman, for it caused the most savage cruelties. It was as ungrateful in the house of Bourbon to murder their old supporters, as it was magnanimous in the Protestants, under their severest persecutions, to tell their murderer, that they thought that blood well employed, which had been spilt in supporting the just claim of the house of Bourbon to the throne. It was, to the last degree, perfidious, for the edict of Nantz had been given by Henry IV. for a perpetual, and irrevocable decree; it had been confirmed by the succeeding princes, and Lewis XIV. himself had assigned in the declaration the loyalty of the Protestants, as a reason of the confirmation. My subjects of the pretended reformed religion, says he, have given me unquestionable proofs of their affection and loyalty. It had been sworn to by the governors and lieutenants general of the provinces, by the courts of parliament, and by all the officers of the courts of justice. What national perjury! Is it enough to say, as this perjured monarch did, My grandfather Henry IV. loved you, and was obliged to you. My father, Lewis XIII. feared you, and wanted your assistance. But I neither love you, nor fear you, and do not want your services. The ill policy of it is confessed on all sides. Where is the policy of banishing eight hundred thousand people, who declare that a free exercise of religion ought not to injure any man's civil rights, and, on this principle, support the king's claim to the crown, as long as he executes the duty of the office? Where is the policy of doing this in order to secure a set of men, who openly avow these propositions, the Pope is superior to all law: It is right to kill that prince, whom the Pope excommunicates: If a prince become an Arian, the people ought to depose him? Where is the policy of banishing men, whose doctrines have kept in the kingdom, during the space of two hundred and fifty years, the sum of two hundred and fifty millions of livres, which, at a moderate calculation, would otherwise have gone to Rome for indulgences, and annates, and other such trash? Who was the politician, the Count d' Avaux, who, while he was ambassador in Hol

the refugees had carried out of France more than twenty millions of property, and advised the king to recall it, by recalling its owners? or the king, who refused to avail himself of this advice? Who was the politician, the intolerant Lewis, who drove his Protestant soldiers and sailors out of his service? or the benevolent prince of Orange, who in one year, raised three regiments of French refugee soldiers, commanded by their own officers, and manned three vessels, at the same time, with refugee sailors, to serve the Dutch, while France wanted men to equip her fleets? The Protestants, having been for some time, excluded from all offices, and not being suffered to enjoy any civil or military employments, had applied themselves either to the manufactures, or to the improving of their money in trade. Was it policy to banish a Mons. Vincent, who employed more than five hundred workmen ? Was it policy on the side of that prince, who demolished manufactories? or on the side of those who set them up, by receiving the refugee manufacturers into their kingdoms? Had England derived no more advantage from its hospitality to the refugees than the silk manufacture, it would have amply repaid the nation. The memorials of the intendants of the provinces were full of such complaints. [1698.] The intendant of Rouen said that the refugees had carried away the manufacture of hats. The intendant of Poitiers said that they had taken the manufacture of druggets. In some provinces the commerce was diminished several millions of livres in a year, and in some half the revenue was sunk. Was it policy in the king to provoke the Protestant states, and princes, who had always been his faithful allies against the house of Austria, and, at the same time, to supply them with eight hundred thousand new subjects? After all, it was a weak and foolish step, for the Protestants were not extirpated. There remained almost as many in the kingdom as were driven out of it, and, even at this day, though now and then a preacher hath been hanged, and now and then a family murdered, yet the opulent province of Languedoc is full of Protestants, the Lutherans have the university of Alsace, neither art nor cruelty can rid the kingdom of them; and some of the greatest ornaments of France, now plead for a FREE TOLERATION.

The refugees charge their banishment on the clergy of France, and they give very good proof of their assertion, nor do they mistake, when they affirm that their sufferings are a part of the religion of Rome; for Pope Innocent XI. highly approved of this persecution. He wrote a brief to the king, in which he assured him that what he had done against the heretics of his kingdom would be immortalized by the eulogies of the Catholic church. He delivered a discourse in the consistory, in which he said, the most Christian king's seal and PIETY, did wonderfully appear in extirpating heresy, and in clearing his whole kingdom of it in a very few months. [March 18, 1689.] He ordered Te Deum to be sung, to give thanks to God for this return of the he

retics into the pale of the church, which was accordingly done with great pomp. [Ap. 28.] If this persecution were clerical policy, it was bad, and, if it were the religion of the French clergy, it was worse. In either case the church procured great evil to the state. Lewis XIV. was on the pinnacle of glory at the conclusion of the peace of Nimeguen. [1679.] His dominion was, as it were, established over all Europe, and was become an inevitable prejudice to neighbouring nations; but, here he began to extirpate heresy, and here he began to fall, nor has the nation ever recovered its grandeur since.

Protestant powers opened their arms to these venerable exiles. Abbadie, Ancillon, and others fled to Berlin. Basnage, Claude, Du Bosc, and many more, found refuge in Holland, The famous Dr. Allix, with numbers of his brethren, came to England. A great many families went to Geneva, among which was that of Saurin.

Mr. Saurin, the father of our author, was an eminent Protestant lawyer at Nismes, who, after the repeal of the edict of Nantz, retired to Geneva. [1685.] He was considered at Geneva as the oracle of the French language, the nature and beauty of which he thoroughly understood. He had four sons, whom he trained up in learning, and who were all so remarkably eloquent, that eloquence was said to be hereditary in the family. The Reverend Lewis Saurin, one of the sons, was afterwards pastor of a French church in London. Saurin, the father, died at Geneva. James, the author of the following sermons, was born at Nismes, [1677.] and went with his father into exile, to Geneva, where he profited very much in learning.

In the seventeenth year of his age, [1694.] Saurin quitted his studies to go into the army, and made a campaign as cadet in lord Galloway's company. The next year, [1695.] his captain gave him a pair of colours in his regiment, which then served in Piedmont: but the year after, [1696.] the duke of Savoy, under whom Saurin served, having made his peace with France, Saurin quitted the profession of arms, for which he was never designed, and returned to Geneva to study.

Geneva was, at that time, the residence of some of the best scholars in Europe, who were in the highest estimation in the republic of letters. Pictet, Lewis Tronchin, and Philip Mestrezat, were professors of divinity there, Alphonso Turetin was professor of sacred history, and Chouet, who was afterward taken from his professorship, and admitted into the government of the republic, was professor of natural philosophy. The other departments were filled with men epually eminent in their several professions. Some of them were natives of Geneva, others were exiles from Italy and France, several of them were of noble families, and all of them were men of eminent piety. Under these great masters, Saurin became a student, and particularly applied himself to divinity, as he now began to think of devoting himself to the ministry. [1696.] To dedicate one's self to the ministry in a wealthy flourishing church,

where rich benefices are every day becoming vacant, requires very little virtue, and sometimes only a strong propensity to vice: but to choose to be a minister, in such a poor,banished, persecuted church, as that of the French Protestants, argues a noble contempt of the world, and a supreme love to God, and to the souls of These are the best testimonials, however, of a young minister, whose profession is not to enrich, but to save himself, and them who hear him.' 1. Tim. iv. 16.

men.

After Mr. Saurin had finished his studies, [1700.] he visited Holland, and England. In the first he made a very short stay: but in the last he staid almost five years, and preached with great acceptance among his fellow exiles in London. Of his person an idea may be for. med by the annexed copperplate,* which is said to be a great likeness, and for which I am indebted to my ingenious friend, Mr. Thomas Holloway, as I am to his amiable brother, Mr. John Holloway, for several anecdotes of Saurin. His dress was that of the French clergy, the gown and cassock. His address was perfectly genteel, a happy compound of the affable and the grave, at an equal distance from rusticity and foppery. His voice was strong, clear, and harmonious, and he never lost the management of it. His style was pure, unaffected, and eloquent, sometimes plain, and sometimes flowery: but never improper as it was always adapted to the audience for whose sake he spoke. An Italian acquaintance of mine, who often heard him at the Hague, tells me, that in the introductions of his sermons, he used to deliver himself in a tone, modest and low; in the body of the sermon, which was adapted to the understanding, he was plain, clear, and argumentative, pausing at the close of each period, that he might discover, by the countenances and motions of his hearers, whether they were convinced by his reasoning; in his addresses to the wicked, (and it is a folly to preach as if there were none in our assemblies, Mr. Saurin knew mankind too well) he was often sonorous, but oftener a weeping suppliant at their feet. In the one, he sustained the authoritative dignity of his office, in the other he expressed his master's, and his own benevolence to bad men, 'praying them in Christ's stead to be reconciled to God.' 2. Cor. v. 20. In general, adds my friend, his preaching resembled a plentiful shower of dew, softly and imperceptibly insinuating itself into the minds of his numerous hearers, as dew into the pores of plants, till the whole church was dissolved, and all in tears under his sermons. His doctrine was that of the French Protestants, which at that time was moderate Calvinism. He approved of the discipline of his own churches, which was Presbyterian. He was an admirable scholar, and which were his highest encomiums, he had an unconquerable aversion to sin, a supreme love to God, and to the souls of men, and a holy unblemished life. Certainly

* The engraving accompanying this volume is an exact fac-simile from the one in the London edition, alluded to in the text.