Renewal of Persecution.

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ticipation in the attempts at assassination. He said he knew that the priests would willingly see a revolt among the Protestants so that they might have a good pretext for crushing them; but his friends were resolved to remain quiet, they lived only for the King.

The clergy now tried a new kind of tactics. The Bishop of Agen wrote a very violent letter to prove that Protestants had always been revolutionaries and republicans, enemies of the State. They had shewed themselves such in Flanders, in Scotland, in England; and in France they had stirred up factions till their expulsion. The conclusion was: exterminate the Protestants who remain and we shall have peace. Antoine Court could not allow these calumnies to pass unnoticed. He took his pen once more and completely turned the tables upon the prelate. He proved that all the disturbances in the kingdom from 1562, when a royal edict had granted liberty of worship to the Huguenots, had been stirred up and fomented by the Roman Catholic party, while the Protestants had invariably been loyal to their sovereign. He showed that the results of the Revocation had been the decay of commerce and manufactures, a decrease in the population, and a scarcity of hands to till the land. His conclusion was, that it would be for the interests of the State to call back the emigrants and grant liberty of conscience. Persecution had now been tried for seventy-five years, and with what success? The Protestants. were as numerous as before the Revocation. This paper was drawn up in the form of a memorial, couched in language of studied calmness, and signed, " An impartial Frenchman and Patriot." Whether it reached those for whom it was intended we have no means of knowing. At all events a lull in the persecution soon after followed. It was also about this time that the Marquis de Paulmy, making a military tour through the southern provinces, was stopped one night by some men on horseback, one of whom came forward and respectfully approaching the carriage, said, "I am Paul Rabaut," and presented a long memorial over which he entreated the Marquis to cast his eyes. The sub-delegate of Languedoc hearing of this, could not refrain from exclaiming, "This is a very bold step on the part of a man on whose head there is a price, and it shews that he fears nothing."

VOL. XXII.-NO. LXXXIV.

K

By and bye a new champion stepped forward in favour of the proscribed ones. The clergy had overshot their mark when they called public attention to the civil status of the Protestants. They had themselves introduced the wedge which was to split up their well-combined plans. In 1755 appeared a memorial which excited a good deal of sensation. It was for a time supposed to emanate from a Protestant's pen, and bore by way of title, "Theological and Political Memorial on the subject of the Clandestine Marriages of the Protestants in France." But the author was a Roman Catholic, a member of the Parliament of Aix, the Marquis de Rippert Monclar.

"According to the jurisprudence of this kingdom," says this paper, "there are no Protestants in France, and still, according to the truth of things, there are three millions. These imaginary beings fill the towns, the provinces, the country; the capital of the kingdom itself contains sixty thousand."

After shewing the injustice of depriving a whole population of its civil rights, the document goes on to urge, as the only way to get over the difficulty, that leave should be granted to contract marriage before the civil magistrate. The argument is based principally on the inhumanity of this state of things.

"How long shall we continue to molest a great people whose numbers are so necessary to us, their labour so useful, their industry so precious, their fidelity so tried, and their attachment so extraordinary? Is it not time that this long captivity should cease, under which they have groaned for seventy years in the midst of their native land?"

The impression produced by this memorial told upon the public mind. The clergy attempted a reply to it, but a change of opinion on the subject of toleration was coming over the country; and though thirty-two more years were to elapse before a civil status was granted to the Protestants, yet it may be said, that from this time the power of the clergy was on the wane.

Antoine Court did not live to see the last bloody act of the long tragedy, the act which, through its exposure by Voltaire, roused the indignation of Europe. He died about a year and a half before Toulouse signalised itself by the infamous trial of Calai and the execution of Rochette and the three brothers Grenier. His wife had died in 1755, and though he lingered till 1760, he never recovered from the effects of his bereavement. He could not remain in the country-house where she

His death.

347 died, but returned to Lausanne, ill and suffering, and tried to console himself in the society of his gifted son, who had just been appointed professor of logic and moral philosophy at the seminary. His death was painfully felt by the Protestants of France, for whom he had lived so constantly and so devotedly.

The pastors who had passed through the seminary, and the preachers and students, especially felt his loss. Each student who had passed from the seminary to the battle-field, had felt that he left behind him one whose fatherly solicitude would follow him in all his wanderings.

"I hide with you," writes he, "in the darkest retreats, with you I suffer from the rain and the cold. But with you I remember that the trials of time have an end, and that our momentary sufferings are not to be compared with the glory that is waiting us at the end of them."

We have preferred not to mar the beautiful simplicity of this narrative by any suggestions of our own, and have felt only one regret, that our limits have hardly allowed us to do justice to "men of whom the world was not worthy." But one thing strikes us painfully as we conclude. Do our Saviour's words, "There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for My sake and the gospel's, but he shall receive an hundred-fold now in this time, house, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions," imply that His church can flourish only when "under the cross"? We have seen that, during these long years of hard bondage, like the children of Israel in Egypt, the more the Protestants were afflicted "the more they multiplied and grew." They have not multiplied in the same proportion during the seventy years which have elapsed since the modern Constantine took. them under his protection. Where is now the ancient discipline? Where the pure doctrine taught during the times of persecution? The pastors have become state functionaries under the orders of a Minister of Public Worship. Rationalism is preached in many churches and listened to by the descendants of those men who died to maintain a pure gospel. Would Antoine Court recognise his desert church in the official establishment now existing in France? or would he not rather look to the few struggling Free Churches as the future hope of Protestantism?

But we must not close with so sombre a picture. We must

not forget such hopeful signs of revival as the Inner Mission, constituted since the war, principally by members of the Established Church, but open to Protestants of all denominations, or as the increasing desire manifested on all sides (even of late by some of the rationalists) to get free from the trammels of the State. Would not our desert pastors marvel, too, could they see seventy Protestant deputies deliberating in the Assemblée Nationale, and hear Dr de Pressensé pleading the cause of freedom of education against the Bishop of Orleans; or the former orator of Notre Dame, the Pere Hyacinthe, uttering in the evangelical chapel of Taitbout, such words as these?

"Jesus Christ, addressing Himself in the person of Peter to every Christian conscience, declares, Thou art Peter, and every conscience which affirms what thou affirmest, this day shall be Peter. Thy faith is a rock like thy name, and on this immoveable rock I shall build My church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. If the church rests upon the person of Peter, it is because it rests upon the faith of Peter; we may in the same way say that it rests upon our person, in so far that it rests upon our faith."

C. DE FAYE.

REPRINTED ARTICLE.

The Labour Question in its Economic and Christian

THA

Aspects.

BY LYMAN H. ATWATER, D.D.

HAT the conflict between capital and labour is growing to a magnitude and universality, in itself and its threatened consequences, which make it one of the portents of the time, is only too evident. It is quite time that it receive the serious attention of all earnest and thinking men, especially such as reach the public mind, and have any vocation to enlighten it on questions of duty. We therefore make no apology for asking the attention of our readers to some thoughts on this great subject.

What, then, is labour, and what is capital? Labour is not every form of human activity or exertion. But it is human

Definition of Labour.

349

effort intentionally applied to natural objects so as to produce utilities not otherwise existing, i.e., to supply some want or gratify some desire of man. There are several elements in this definition. It must not only be human effort, but intentional, that is with an intelligent design to produce some result beyond itself. It must not terminate merely in itself or its own pleasurable sensations, like games, dances, or mere sport. It must produce some result beyond itself, either transient or enduring, coveted by man. This may be the sensations which immediately follow it and then vanish, as the exhilaration consequent on friction of the body, or enduring as the granite monument. And this result is still further some desired, and, in this sense, useful modification of natural objects of more or less duration. There is no form of labour without these marks; and whatever activity possesses them is labour. The only seeming exception is intellectual effort, in some form of acquiring or imparting knowledge or mental discipline. But practically this is no exception. For it enters not into the labour involved in the great contest between labour and capital now under consideration. Withal, this sort of effort contributes immensely to the efficiency of that labour on material objects. with which we are immediately concerned. Besides, considering the mind or spirit as a natural object, which it surely is, effort for the purpose of increasing the knowledge, or vigour, or purity, of one's own or other's minds, surely comes within our definition of labour.

Now of the results or utilities so produced by labour, as already intimated, there are two kinds, the one evanescent or transient, the other more or less enduring, because embodied in natural objects more or less enduring. These latter are products or commodities, which, with respect to their form as thus modified, are the creations of labour. All food, raiment, fuel, buildings, tools, farm improvements, are of this description. It is these products more or less, that survive the effort of making, which constitute the property, wealth, and capital of society. Nothing else is wealth or capital but natural objects so modified by human labour as to have a new utility not otherwise inhering in them, whereby they will exchange for other equivalent labour or product of labour, be this product money, gold, silver, iron, or whatever else. Paradoxical as this may seem to those who have not