offer a stone when bread is required of you, unless it be done with love in your heart – personal, human, and therefore Divine love. "If ye have not been faithful in that which is another man's, who shall give you that which is your own?" Use the benefits of institutions – even though you use them only for others – as you would use your own property. Recommend only cases that are known to you to be worthy and necessitous, and, should the institution depend on voluntary support, let a contribution accompany your "case," if you can any way afford it, as an act of justice as well as of mercy.
Don't join in the traffic in votes, and never go begging for "proxies," in order to have an exchangeable stock on hand, that you may secure a candidate for any particular institution. This kind of gambling is a cancer that is eating the heart out of genuine, pure, charitable effort, and is making way for the cold impersonal system of distribution, which is now being advocated by those who would make the relief of human wretchedness and distress a mechanical organisation without the soul of love. At the same time, let us not forget that no charitable effort which would be efficacious in affording relief to the widely-spread distress by which we are surrounded, could be even so much as attempted without associations established for the express purpose of relieving particular forms of suffering. This, indeed, is the glory of our country, that humanity is so strong among us as to lead us not only to combine, but to emulate. The absolute concentration and centralization of charitable effort would be a calamity. The breaking up of the best of our institutions, which have grown from small beginnings in almsgiving into wide and influential centres of benevolent effort, would be destruction.
If anything that may be written hereafter concerning some representative (large and small, but still truly representative) efforts to do the work that Christianity demands as its first evidence of reality, should lead to a deeper and wider personal interest in their behalf, it will be matter for rejoicing. The larger the number of people who ask what is being done, the greater will be the desire to continue the good work, or to declare it. The attention that might in this way be directed to the mode of affording relief would exercise so keen an influence in the reformation of abuses, and the adoption of improvements, that all our charities would soon become truly "public." With the more earnest conviction of the duty of personal inquiry, and real sympathetic interest in the individual well-being of our poorer brother or sister, would come the satisfaction that we belonged to an association, or to a chain of associations, which will afford to him or to her the very relief which otherwise we should despair of securing.
I purpose in another chapter to ask you to read the story of an institution that was in its day wonderfully illustrative, and even now serves to take us back for two centuries of history. Only yesterday I was speaking to some of its inmates. One of them had nearly completed her own century of life, most of them had seen far more than the threescore years and ten which we call old age; but they come of a wonderful race, the men of fire and steel; the women of silent suffering – the old Huguenots of France.
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE STRANGER
A hundred and eighty-seven years ago a French army invaded England and effected a landing at various places on the coast. Smaller divisions of that army had previously obtained a footing in some of the chief towns of Great Britain; and for about fifty years afterwards other contingents arrived at intervals to find the compatriots settled among the people, who had easily yielded to their address and courage, and by that time were apparently contented to regard them as being permanently established in the districts of which they had taken possession. The strange part of the story is, that for a large part of this time England was successfully engaged in war with the country of the invaders, and not only with that country, but with a discarded prince of its own, who, having received assistance from France, strove to regain the throne which he had abdicated by raising civil war in Ireland. Then was to be seen a marvellous thing. A detachment of the French army of occupation in England went with King William to the Boyne, and when the mercenaries who were at the back of James in his miserable enterprise came forth to fight, they beheld the swords of their countrymen flash in their faces, and heard a well-known terrible cry, as a band of veteran warriors cut through their ranks, fighting as they had been taught to fight in the Cevennes and amidst the valleys and passes of Languedoc. For the army that invaded England in 1686, and for four or five years afterwards, was the army of the French Huguenots, against whom the dragoons of Louis XIV. and the emissaries of Pope and priests had been let loose after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Four hundred thousand French Protestants had left their country during the twenty years previous to the revocation of that pact, which had been renewed after the siege of Rochelle, and though the attempt to escape from the country was made punishable by the confiscation of property and perpetual imprisonment in the galleys, six hundred thousand persons contrived to get out of France, and found asylums in Flanders, Switzerland, Holland, Germany, and England, after the persecutions were resumed.
Comparatively few of the men who came in the second emigration had fought for the religion that they professed. They had learned to endure all things, and with undaunted courage many of them had suffered the loss of their worldly goods, the burning of their houses, hunger, poverty, and the imprisonment of their wives and daughters in distant fortresses, because they would not forswear their faith. Hundreds of their companions were at the galleys, hundreds more had been tortured, mutilated, burned, broken on the wheel. Women as well as men endured almost in silence the fierce brutalities of a debased soldiery, directed by priests and fanatics, who had, as it were, made themselves drunk with blood, and seemed to revel in cruelty. With a resolution that nothing seemed able to abate, pastors like Claude Brousson went from district to district, living they knew not how, half famished, in perpetual danger, and with little expectation of ultimately escaping the stake or the rack. Nay, they refused to leave the country, while in the woods and wildernesses of the Gard great congregations of their brethren awaited their coming, that they might hold services in caves and "in the desert," as they called that wild country of the Cevennes and of Lozére. These men were non-resistants. They met with unflinching courage, but without arms. Those of them who remained in France stayed to see the persecutions redoubled in the attempt to exterminate the reformed faith. They were the truest vindicators of the religion that they professed. Up to the time of the siege of Rochelle, and afterwards, Protestantism was represented by a defensive sword, but these men discarded the weapons of carnal warfare. Only some years later, when the persecutors (rioting in the very insanity of wrath because their declaration that Protestantism was abolished was falsified by constant revivals of the old Huguenot worship) directed utter extermination of the Vaudois, did the grandeur of the non-resisting principle give way before the desperation of men who came to the conclusion that, if they were to die, they might as well die fighting.
It must be remembered that some of them knew well how to fight. Some of their leaders – men of peace as they were, and men of an iron determination, which was shown in the obstinacy with which they refused to take up the sword – had come of stern warriors and were Frenchmen– Norman Frenchmen – Protestant Norman Frenchmen. A rare combination that; – cold hard steel and fire.
But it was not till some time afterwards that these men became the leaders of the peasantry, the chestnut-fed mountaineers who came down from their miserable huts and joined what had then become an organised army of insurrection. Before this time arrived a strange aberration seemed to move the people. The old simple non-resisting pastors had been done to death by torture and execution, and the people met, it is true, but often met amid the ruin of their homes, or in desert places, and as sheep having no shepherd. Then a wild hysterical frenzy appeared among them. Men, women, and even children claimed to be inspired, and at length fanaticism leaped into retaliation. On a Sunday in July, 1702, a wild mystic preacher, named Séguier went down with a band of about fifty armed men to release the prisoners. They were confined in dungeons beneath the house of one Chayla, a priest, who directed the prosecutions, and invented the tortures which he caused to be inflicted for the conversion of heretics. The Protestants broke open his door, forced the prison, and ultimately set fire to the house, in attempting to escape from which Chayla was recognised and killed. This was the beginning of a series of retaliations by the tormented people, the success of which changed
