doubly
revered and most sacred, because it was the WORD of GOD, and sacred too
from the recollections connected with it! Grandparents, parents, and
children, all, from their earliest infancy, had daily seen, read and
touched it. Like the household deities of the ancients, it had been
always present at all the joys and sorrows of the family. A touching
custom inscribed on the first or last pages, and at times even upon its
margins, the principal events in all those beloved lives. Here were the
Births, Baptisms, Marriages, and the Deaths. Now all these tender, pious
records must perish at once in the flames.

But mind, immortal mind, could not be destroyed; for free thought, and
truth, and instruction, among the people, were companions of the
Reformation, and books would circulate among all ranks throughout
Protestant France. The works generally came from Holland through Paris,
and from Geneva, by Lyons or Grenoble. Inside of baled goods, and in
cases and barrels of provisions, secretly, thousands of volumes were
sent from north to south, from east to west, to the oppressed Huguenots.
The great work which Louis XIV. believed buried beneath the ruins of his
bloody edicts still went on silently. At Lausanne was established a
seminary, about the year 1725, where works for the French Protestant
people were printed and circulated. The Bishop of Canterbury, with Lord
Warke, and a few foreign sovereigns, actively assisted in the founding
of this institution. Thus did that beautiful town become the source of
useful and religious knowledge to thousands, although it was conveyed
far and wide in a very quiet and secret way. One man was condemned to
the galleys for having received barrels, marked '_Black and White
Peas_,' which were found full of 'Ostervald's Catechisms.'

How strange it seems to us, writing in our own Protestant land, that
cruel authority should ever have intervened with matters of faith! What
can be more plain or truthful than that there should be liberty of
conscience; and that God alone has the power and the right to direct it,
and that it is an abuse and a sacrilege to come between God and
conscience? After the revocation of the edict of Nantes and the death of
Louis XIV., his royal successor sometimes vaguely asked himself why he
persecuted his Protestant subjects? when his marshal replied, that his
majesty was only the executor of former edicts. He seemed to have
consoled himself that he had found the system