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a legal existence. A decree of the Constituent Assembly declared "all citizens equal in the eye of the law," and removed the last badges of degradation. When the patrimony of the Church was confiscated, the Protestants were accused by the Roman Catholic party of being the cause of its misfortune, and in the south of France they were pillaged and killed; but the revolution advanced, both parties fell in equal proportions beneath the knife of the guillotine, and these quarrels disappeared. During the reign of Napoleon the Protestants were protected. “The empire of the law," said he, "ends, where that of conscience begins." If we may believe O'Meara, he once seriously contemplated the establishment of Protestantism as the religion of France. During the empire persecution ceased, and yet religion seemed to derive no advantage. Properly speaking, says M. De Felice, a Protestant minister, "French Protestantism has no history during the consulate and the empire. Weak in numbers, scattered, without bond or union, without discipline, constrained to be humble and silent, and to avoid all occasion of disturbing the official classification of religions, it dragged on a uniform and obscure existence. The ministers preached, and the people listened, the consistories met, and worship preserved its forms. Beyond this no one troubled himself, no one thought, and religion was a thing beyond the life of all." Upon the return of the Bourbons, in 1815, attempts were made on the part of the extreme Roman Catholics to induce the government to repeat the often-tried experiment of religious persecution. At Nismes, barbarities were practised, which would stand out in strong and frightful colours in any other history than that of the ever-suffering Huguenots. Several outrages and even murders were committed, and a general slaughter, "another Bartholomew" was planned, and on the eve of execution, when it was happily discovered and prevented by General Lagarde. The second revolution of 1830, placed all religions once more upon an equal footing, and the Protestants accepted the dynasty of Louis Philippe with hope and joy. But they were again doomed to disappointment. They soon found that they were safe so long only as they were apathetic. The national irreligion gave them occasion to display their zeal, and their old opponents, the Jesuit party, on whose support the king had unhappily thrown himself, demanded vigorous measures. The growth of a new developement of infidelity, St.

Simonianism, had created an Evangelical association, the aim of which was to promulgate Scriptural truth rather than to further the interests of any individual community. In several instances the Protestant ministers, and especially those in connection with this society, were punished by the inferior courts with fines, or the suppression of their places of worship; and the Court of Cassation, the supreme tribunal, though presided over by the virtuous Dupin, professed itself incompetent to redress the grievances the reality of which were admitted. Yet Protestantism increased, and the traces of its primitive zeal and piety reappeared. A number of Roman Catholics, and even some priests embraced it. New churches were formed. In 1838, the Calvinist or Reformed Church had eighty-nine consistories, and about four hundred ministers. The Lutheran Church in France had, in addition, thirty-seven consistories, and about two hundred and sixty ministers. The names of men of rank and talent, and of pastors renowned for eloquence or apostolic zeal, once more adorned the annals of a reviving cause. Amongst the former were the young Baron de Stael, the worthy descendant of great progenitors, and the admiral Ver-Huell, an ambassador, and a peer of France. Amongst the latter, Felix Neff, Alexander Vinet, Vincent, and Encontre, need only to be mentioned. The revolution of 1848 found the Protestants anxious, and probably not reluctant. Under Louis Philippe, their liberties had been abridged, and the growing power of the priesthood evidently threatened them with further discouragements. Once more there was a door of hope. The delegates of the reformed churches assembled spontaneously at Paris in the month of May 1848. They had been, in a manner, convoked by the common necessities and apprehensions. There was no regularity in the origin of their mandates; some had been appointed by universal suffrage, others by the consistories. Nor was a fair proportion observed in the members of the representatives: certain churches in the neighbourhood of Paris reckoned five or six delegates for a single consistorial circuit; while, on the other hand, some churches had only sent one deputy for thee or four consistories. There, lastly, was no uniformity in the powers of the delegates; some were authorized to enter fully into a discussion of ecclesiastical questions, and others were not. Such an assembly could only prepare the way for a body more regularly chosen by the members of legal Protestantism.

VOL. I.

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The meeting first debated the question of the relations between Church and State, and the great majority were in favour of preserving the alliance, reserving expressly the dignity and liberty of the Church. A resolution was framed for the formation of an assembly to consider the affairs of the Protestant communion. Its session opened on the 11th September 1848. Ninety-two consistories were invited to nominate an ecclesiastical or lay deputy, and eighty-nine complied. But the number of members actually present at the assembly did not exceed from seventy to eighty; it was, in fact, a voluntary meeting, and without authority in law; the churches represented were still free to accept or reject its resolutions. But the difficulties which seem inherent in all ecclesiastical convocations impeded the little good which might, perhaps not unreasonably, have been looked for. The assembly stumbled and broke down upon the question of a confession of faith. The majority decided not to meddle with dogmatic subjects. The minority protested and withdrew. The majority proceeded to revise the constitution of the French churches, and submitted a scheme to the Minister of Public Worship with a view to obtaining a legal establishment. They proposed to reconstruct the Church upon the presbyterian system. They retained general consistories as subordinate to particular synods, and these again to a general synod which should assemble at stated intervals. But the scheme has not yet been sanctioned by the government. The minority formed, together with the independent congregations already in being, a new religious society under the name of the Union of the Evangelical Churches of France. They opened a synod on the 20th of August 1849, and drew up a profession of faith and an ecclesiastical constitution for the churches represented. But other changes were at hand. In December 1851, Louis Napoleon became Emperor of France. In the proclamation in which the imperial constitution is promulged, he declares, "it is still the Concordat that regulates the relations in Church and State." This is, certainly, a great discouragement to Protestantism. By Napoleon's Concordat of 1801 the Roman Catholic faith is recognized "as that of the majority of the French nation," and although liberty of conscience was affirmed for all, still the priest-party had never ceased to urge, even under Napoleon I., that toleration was all to which Protestants were entitled-not

an endowment by the State. The National Assembly of 1849 bad declared all religions equal in the eye of the law; and the Protestants looked forward on the accession of Napoleon III. to a share in ecclesiastical revenues as well as civil rights. At present, the French Church exhibits on the one hand a revival of piety, learning, and active zeal worthy of its best ages; on the other its political horizon is gloomy: the State shows little sympathy; and the Jesuit party are bent on its destruction.

It is a long time since the literature of the French Church was known beyond its own borders. Poverty, and constant anxieties for its very existence, suggest at once a sufficient explanation without any reflection upon the capacity or diligence of the clergy. "We are not aware," says De Felice," of the publication of a single important book on doctrine, ecclesiastical history, or sacred eloquence, in the course of Napoleon's reign." A few occasional sermons, some courses of religious instruction, some abridgments of sacred history, three or four translations of English and German works, constitute the Protestant literature of this epoch. After the Restoration, though numerous works were published, they were mostly translations or reprints. Thus the writings of Paley, Chalmers, Thomas Scott, and Milner, have become familiar to the French reader. At present, the religious press upon the continent, where free, is in a state of great activity; and works of great research, or deep thought, such as Gaussen's Theopneustia, for example, enrich the language of France and exalt its piety. In history and biography, and, still more perhaps, in a species of writing which has hitherto been left too much, in England at least, to minds of an inferior order,-religious tracts, full of thought and point; solemn as the subject requires, yet picturesque and vivid, -the French Protestant divines are creating a new and important literature of their own.-Maimbourg, Hist. du Calvinisme; Anquetil, Esprit de la Ligue; Fleury, Hist. Ecclesias.; Thuani, Hist.; Vie de Coligny; Browning, Hist. Huguenots; De Felice, Hist. French Protestants; Weiss, Hist. des Réfugiés Protestants depuis la Révolution, &c.

FRIENDS, SOCIETY OF (OR QUAKERS). George Fox,

who was born at Drayton, in Leicestershire, in 1624, is the reputed founder of the Society of Friends; but they trace up their principles to the New Testament, and regard Fox in the light only of an eminent confessor, possessing more spiritual discernment than other teachers of his age. The Reformation, they maintain, was a gradual work, and Fox brought it to completion. The great leaders of the Reformation had no doubt protested faithfully against various errors. Wickliffe against the papal supremacy; Latimer against the mass; the Anabaptists against the error of infant baptism; and thus the great structure of human inventions was gradually broken down. It was reserved for Fox to teach the spirituality of pure religion, and the power with which the Holy Spirit works upon the soul of man. The doctrine, in his hands, was not new; it was held by all the Reformed Churches; and sentiments which have been supposed to be peculiar to Quakerism on the point of a Divine afflatus may be found in earlier records. Thus Peloquin, who was burnt in France in 1552, had said in his confession "that it was the Holy Ghost who gave him witness in his conscience that the books of the Old and New Testament were the Holy Scripture." Lewis de Marsac was burned about the same time at Lyons. When asked how he knew the Holy Scriptures to be the gospel, he made the same answer, "that God had taught him so by his Spirit." These men, however, lived only in the dawning of the Reformation, and to them a full and clear discernment of the truth had not been granted, for though, to use the language of a Quaker historian, the stem of human traditions and institutions had been sometimes strongly shaken, yet much of the root was left. There still stood a partition wall, whereby the soul was hindered from living in perfect peace with its Creator." It now pleased God to make a clearer discovery of his truth; and Fox was raised up to teach the doctrine of an inward light and the spirituality of true religion.

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The parents of George Fox were pious members of the Church of England in humble life. His father was a weaver; his mother was of the stock of the martyrs. Their son was apprenticed to a shoemaker, and from childhood his temper was grave and thoughtful. In his nineteenth year, under a conviction. which he believed to be from heaven, that he must forsake his

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