XIII.
The abjuration of Turenne renewed the projects of reunion, which had never been entirely abandoned since the attempt of Cardinal de Richelieu. The Prince de Conti, governor of Bas-Languedoc, desirous of making himself agreeable to Louis XIV., had already renewed the endeavour in 1661. The provincial synod of Nismes answered him, in the rude language of the period, by the mouth of their moderator Claude, that the Reformed would be guilty of unpardonable cowardice if they consented to “unite light with darkness, Christ with Belial.”
The project assumed a more serious turn from 1670 to 1673. The Marshal de Turenne took it up with the approbation of the king, and tried to obtain the adhesion of the pastors. An agent of the court visited one after another those who were dependent upon the national synod of Charenton; and partly by threats of the king’s displeasure, and partly by the promise of accomplishing the reunion upon an equitable basis, this emissary succeeded in extorting from several ministers the verbal or written promise of supporting the plan in the next synodal assembly.
It was stated that the king was disposed to extirpate the abuses in the Romish church, which most shocked the Reformed; that the worship of images, purgatory, prayers for the dead, the invocation of saints, would be either suppressed or at least sensibly corrected; that theologians freely chosen from both sides, would have the mission of contriving a mutual understanding upon the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper; that the use of the cup would be restored to the laity, and the religious service would be celebrated in the vernacular; finally, that if the pope sought to oppose these changes, the king would go further, having the word of forty-two bishops upon these articles, and knowing the means of bringing the others to the same opinion.
This was evidently a falsehood. Louis XIV. could not execute what the subaltern agents promised in his name; and if the bishops had refused to make this concession at the colloquy of Poissy, when the Reformation was widely extended throughout the whole kingdom, how could one among them have made such concessions to a small minority, shut up in its places of worship, without political authority, shorn of all power of religious expansion, and well-nigh extirpated?
Nor did the wisest of the Reformed fall into the snare; for they knew that Rome uses two very different languages: the first, when she wishes to gain over heretics; the second, when she has them under her hoof. They knew, moreover, that the accord would, in the end, be limited to an entire submission on their part, followed by a merciful pardon on the other. For this reason, the provincial synod convoked at Charenton, in the month of May, 1673, opposed the new project of reunion with an energetic refusal, and the five pastors, who had promised to support it, solemnly declared their determination against it.
The same attempts produced the like results in Saintonge, Languedoc, and the Vivarais. The court and the clergy at length recognised that there was no rational hope of reducing the Reformed in this direction, and were driven to seek other means for the extermination of heresy.
Two methods, very different in their principle and line of action, were indicated by the adversaries of the Huguenots. The Jansenists, and the most enlightened and most pious of the (Roman) Catholics generally, proposed to convert them by persuasion, fair treatment, and good examples, thinking that it was better to leave the erring without the pale of the Church than to force hypocrites to enter it. The Jesuits and their friends said, on the contrary, that it was incumbent to use both the authority of the king and the Parliaments without reserve, to exact acts of Catholicity at any price, and then to retain folks by the fear of executions, upon the fundamental maxim, that if the new (Roman) Catholics had little faith, their children would have more, and their grandchildren still more. The court balanced a long time between these two systems, which serves to explain its alternatives of mildness and rigour. But in the end, the advice of the Jesuits prevailed.
Ordinances, declarations, decrees, and other acts of the council followed, striking the heretics blow upon blow. Their number was so great that it is impossible to indicate even the substance of them. The Reformed were successively forbidden to raise supplies for the maintenance of their ministers, and the expense of sending them to the synods; to except against suspected judges, although this right was preserved to other Frenchmen; to print religious books without the authorization of the magistrates of the Romish communion; to suborn and corrupt, that is to say, to seek to convert (Roman) Catholics, under pain of a fine of a thousand livres; to celebrate their worship in the places and on the days when the bishops made their tours; to have more than one school and one master in each of the districts where they exercised their religion; to teach by this master anything else than writing, reading, and the elements of arithmetic; and so on. The Reformed were oppressed in their religious faith, their civil person, their political rights, their domestic condition, the education of their children, and each iniquity necessarily produced others. Thus evil ever begets evil.
Some pastors, having held unlawful meetings upon the ruins of their places of worship, which had been unjustly pulled down, were condemned to do penance with a rope round their neck, and were then banished the kingdom. The demolitions spread, and were multiplied for the most trivial motives, upon the denunciations of a bishop, or of some other member of the clergy, upon the quibbles of a (Roman) Catholic commissioner, or simply, as the faithful of Saint Hippolyte experienced, upon the accusation of having manifested disrespect for a curate bearing the holy sacrament along the street.
There were in Béarn ninety-six places of worship, and forty-six churches of residence. A lawsuit, which lasted seven years, reduced the number of places of worship to twenty, and fettered these in every possible way. It was nearly the same in all the provinces of the kingdom. If the council sometimes used precaution, and imposed upon the intendants some reserve, the pastor Claude presumes, in his Plaintes des Protestants de France, that it was to induce the belief that justice was regarded, and that the condemned churches had not good titles.
The mind feels some relief, amidst these persecutions, in dwelling upon the paper wars which were fought at the same epoch between the most eminent pastors of the two religions. Here at least material violence did not intervene; here the contest was equal; and when men of great powers attacked the Reformation, it did not want solid and skilful champions for its defence.
The Jansenists were so accustomed to the strife, that they could not desist from it; and peace having been concluded between them and the Jesuits, through the intermission of Clement IX., they turned their arms against the Huguenots. They imported into the conflict all the greater zeal, that they were themselves taxed with being no more than disguised Calvinists.
Arnault and Nicole therefore published their famous Perpétuité de la Foi sur l’Eucharistie (1664-1676), in which they endeavoured to establish, from the text of the Fathers of the Church, and by certificates brought from the East, that the dogma of the real presence has been at all times admitted in Christianity. Claude replied that they had wrongly interpreted the sense of the Fathers, and certificates procured from poor Greek popes by the ambassador of France, who was their protector against the Turks, were but of little value. His answer had extraordinary success; and the Jesuits themselves did their best to disseminate it, as Arnault complains in one of his letters, because they were quite as much interested in humiliating the Jansenists as in destroying the Reformed.
Nicole re-entered the lists with his Préjugés légitimes contre les Calvinistes. His argumentation was sadly wanting in caution. He maintained that before quitting the Church of Rome, the meanest artisan is bound to assure himself of the authenticity of the holy writings, to compare the translations with the original, to examine all the various readings, to weigh all the interpretations of the texts, to compare them with the decisions of the councils, to perform in a word an immense labour that the most erudite dare hardly undertake. These arguments, every one knows, have been turned by Rousseau against (Roman) Catholicism and even against the Gospel. Claude, Jurieu, and Pajon answered Nicole.
Arnault came to the succour of his friend in a book upon the Renversement de la Morale de Jesus Christ par les Erreurs des Calvinistes. It astonished every one that a doctor who agreed with Calvin upon the dogma of predestination, had constructed all the scaffolding of his polemics upon this consequence, that grace cannot be lost; and this was judiciously objected to him, not only by Bruguier, pastor of Nismes, but by theologians of his own communion.
Bossuet’s Exposition also provoked numerous replies. La Bastide, a member of the consistory of Charenton, and David Noguier, a pastor of Languedoc, proved that this work was wanting in truth, and that the author has constructed an ideal Catholicism totally unlike the real. Pierre Jurieu proved it better than any one in his Preservatif contre le Changement de Religion, and resumed the same question in his Politique du Clergé de France. “Here is a man,” he says, “who transports us into another country. There is no worship of images, no invocation of saints in this new religion; they are only implored just as we beg the faithful on earth to pray to God for us. Until now, I had thought that the devotions to the Virgin and to the other saints was an important thing; I see that the majority of devotees think them of great consequence; and these people say they are nothing, they may be dispensed with, and that it is sufficient to invoke God and Jesus Christ!”
Claude had a celebrated conference with Bossuet in 1678, upon the invitation of Mademoiselle de Duras. The two adversaries have published the report of their debate. Bossuet had pledged himself to make Claude avow that it may happen that a simple individual, however ignorant he may be, understands the Scriptures better than all the councils and all the rest of the Church together—a proposition which he styled as absurd. Claude answered that the question was not so simple, and that before asking if an artisan may be right in spite of all the councils and the Church, it should be shown that there is a single article, upon which the Church and all the councils have constantly agreed.
Ten years afterwards, the bishop of Meaux (Bossuet) re-entered the arena with his Histoire des Variations des Eglises Protestantes. His attacks were made upon the absentees and the proscribed, whose books of refutation were not permitted to pass from Holland into France.
To speak alone was a privilege a man like Bossuet ought to have repudiated.