ation, its disciples had been put to death with
horrible tortures. King and nobles, high-born women and delicate maidens,
the pride and chivalry of the nation, had feasted their eyes upon the
agonies of the martyrs of Jesus. The brave Huguenots, battling for those
rights which the human heart holds most sacred, had poured out their blood
on many a hard-fought field. The Protestants were counted as outlaws, a
price was set upon their heads, and they were hunted down like wild
beasts.

The "Church in the Desert," the few descendants of the ancient Christians
that still lingered in France in the eighteenth century, hiding away in
the mountains of the south, still cherished the faith of their fathers. As
they ventured to meet by night on mountainside or lonely moor, they were
chased by dragoons, and dragged away to life-long slavery in the galleys.
The purest, the most refined, and the most intelligent of the French, were
chained, in horrible torture, amidst robbers and assassins.(396) Others,
more mercifully dealt with, were shot down in cold blood, as, unarmed and
helpless, they fell upon their knees in prayer. Hundreds of aged men,
defenseless women, and innocent children were left dead upon the earth at
their place of meeting. In traversing the mountainside or the forest,
where they had been accustomed to assemble, it was not unusual to find "at
every four paces, dead bodies dotting the sward, and corpses hanging
suspended from the trees." Their country, laid waste with the sword, the
axe, the fagot, "was converted into one vast, gloomy wilderness." "These
atrocities were enacted ... in no dark age, but in the brilliant era of
Louis XIV. Science was then cultivated, letters flourished, the divines of
the court and of the capital were learned and eloquent men, and greatly
affected the graces of meekness and charity."(397)

But blackest in the black catalogue of crime, most horrible among the
fiendish deeds of all the dreadful centuries, was the St. Bartholomew
Massacre. The world still recalls with shuddering horror the scenes of
that most cowardly and cruel onslaught. The king of France, urged on by
Romish priests and prelates, lent his sanction to the dreadful work. A
bell, tolling at dead of night, was a signal for the slaughter.
Protestants by thousands, sleeping quietly in their homes, trusting to the
plighted honor of their king, were dragged forth without a warning, and
murdered in cold blood.

As Christ was the