praying, watching, and fighting for their faith, they stood, still in arms, amid the ruins of their homes and their churches, and laid down their weapons only when a solemn pledge from the enemy conceded their rights; that this pledge was immediately violated, nearly all their heroic men imprisoned in thirteen Piedmontese dungeons, their children put in Catholic schools, their women in nunneries; that the Vaudois were at last considered extinguished, their own historians, who had fled to other countries, declaring "the ancient Church of the mountains," the "Israel of the Alps," "obliterated," "irrecoverably lost," as one of them said; that of the fourteen thousand heroic prisoners of Piedmont all died of starvation or disease save three thousand, who, liberated at last, but forbidden ever to re-enter their valleys, made their way to Protestant Switzerland and Germany; that seven or eight hundred of them afterward combined under a vow to redeem their lost cause and. country, armed themselves clandestinely, marched, under the command of their pastor, Arnaud, through the most intricate ravines of Switzerland and Savoy, under the shadow of Mont Blanc, along the cliffs of Mont Cenis, through passages in which only mountaineers could make their way, with no commissariat, each man carrying his own ammunition and food, the Catholic towns and villages rising against them, but quailing before them, as if a terror from God had fallen upon the land; that France on the one hand, Italy on the other, sent armies to arrest their triumphant march, twenty-two thousand men in all; that they rolled back the enemy in victorious fights, entered their ancient valleys "with singing and shouting," fought the Catholic foe from rock to rock through months, supplying themselves with ammunition only by their victories, destroying ten thousand of the enemy in eighteen victorious attacks, winning peace at last, restoring their old homes, schools, and churches, receiving their expatriated wives and children, sheltering even their persecuting sovereign, who had to flee from his enemies below to seek their protection; and that, re-established in their mountains and enfranchised by their government, they are now bearing the Gospel over Italy, and are thus displaying before the eyes of this skeptical age the providential meaning of their history.

Such are a few mere allusions to this remarkable history

the most remarkable, we are inclined to think, on record. We delay not to discuss the questions which have excited so much inquiry among European scholars respecting the date of the origin of the Vaudois, a date lost in the obscurity of remote time. We have mentioned their own traditions on the subject, as attested by Arnaud, in his history of the Glorieuse Rentrée. We know that centuries before the Reformation they were a pure Church; that their doctrines, forms of worship, Church government, show no traces of ever having been reformed, as they show none of ever having needed reform. We know, also, that as early as the fourth century St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, testifies that the Church corruptions of Italy had not penetrated these mountains, and that about one thousand one hundred and twenty-five Catholic writers allude to them as soiled by inveterate heresy. These evidences are sufficient for our present purpose, and we can now approach our main subject.

The Glorieuse Rentrée originated in the persecutions which attended the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Vaudois on the French side of the Cottian Alps were, of course, included in that most impolitic and disastrous measure of Louis XIV. The king was determined to extinguish Protestantism in France. According to the historian Capefigue, (himself no friend to Protestantism,) no less than two hundred and thirty thousand Protestants fled from their country to escape the persecution; nearly one thousand six hundred of these were preachers, two thousand three hundred were elders of the Churches, fifteen thousand were "gentlemen," the others mostly merchants and artisans-the best in the kingdom. Capefigue's figures were taken from official statistical returns made at the period; the emigration continued years later. Charles Coquerel says that the Revocation "kept France under a perpetual St. Bartholomew's for about sixty years," and that more than a million of the best citizens were either driven abroad, or put to death, or sent to the galleys or to dungeons. A single province (that of Languedoc) was officially reported to have sacrificed a hundred thousand by the wheel, the gibbet, or the sword. Three years before the Revocation the Protestant pastors reported to the Government one million eight hundred Protestant households in the kingdom; in about twenty-five years after the Revocation the king declared that,

Protestantism was exterminated in France. His bigoted and ferocious policy had struck disastrously the best interests of his country, but it had laid the foundations of the manufacturing and commercial prosperity of the Low Countries, of England, and of much of Germany, and had given to the American colonies some of their best families, from New Rochelle to Savannah. The emigration comprised some twenty-one thousand Protestant soldiers and sailors, and six hundred military officers. Most of these entered foreign service, and avenged on France in many a battle the wrongs of their brethren. Thousands helped to save the Protestant throne of England by fighting in Ireland against the attempt of Louis XIV. to restore the apostate Stuarts. They conquered their old persecutors at the battle of the Boyne, and on other Irish fields. Marshal Schomberg was one of them. Their descendants in Germany, still bearing their ancestral names, were among the best heroes of the last war with France; and Jules Simon, the French statesman, had occasion to show his country that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had given at least eighty eminent officers of the German staff of the terrible invasion of 1870, by which France was trodden in the dust.

The king's assertion, that there were no more Protestants in his realm, was apparently, though not really, correct. The Protestant temples were all either demolished or given to the Catholics. Protestant pastors were hanged or broken on the wheel all over the south. None remained except in concealment, and with the certainty of death if they were discovered. Their people could worship only in caves, or in recesses of forests. Never was there a more studiedly minute or more diabolical edict issued by a government than the Act of Revocation, and its accompanying acts. They reached all classes and all interests of the Protestant population. It was death if they were found worshiping in public; it was the galleys for life if they were heard singing their hymns in their own houses. It was five hundred livres fine if they did not send their children to the Catholic priest for baptism. Protestant marriages were illegal, and their children illegitimate. All children more than five years old were to be taken by the magistrate from Protestant homes. Protestant midwives were forbidden to assist their Christian sisters in childbirth. Protestant physicians,

surgeons,. druggists, lawyers, notaries, school-teachers, librarians, booksellers, printers, grocers, were all suppressed-and there were hundreds of thousands of them. All Protestant schools, charitable, public, or private, were closed. Protestants could no longer be in any government employment, even as workingmen on the highways. All Bibles and Protestant books were to be publicly burned. "There were bonfires of them," says a good authority, "in every town.". Protestants were not allowed to seek employment as servants, nor Protestant families to hire them, the penalty being the galley's for life. Protestant mechanics were not allowed to work without certificates that they had become Catholics. Even Protestant washerwomen were interdicted the common washing-places on the rivers. "In fact," says Samuel Smiles, our best popular authority on French Protestantism, "there was scarcely a degradation that could be invented, or an insult that could be perpetrated, that was not practiced upon these poor Huguenots who refused to be of the king's religion." Such was the persecution of the infamous Revocation. According to Coquerel's figures, it drove a million of the French out of their country, and surpressed a thousand pastors, one tenth of whom were either put to death or, worse, consigned to the horrors of the galleys.

When the king supposed his work of extermination done, he was reminded of the humble Vaudois, hid away in the ravines of the French sides of the Cottian Alps. The atrocious work could not be pronounced complete while these remained. The light might again stream down from these heretic heights upon the plains and towns of southern France. They were one in faith, and in every other respect, except political allegiance, with the Italian Vaudois of the other side of the mountains. The king, therefore, demanded the co-operation of the Duke of Savoy in the extermination of both. The duke hesitated; blood enough had flowed in these mountains, and but thirty years before, fourteen thousand of their devoted population had been massacred in vain; they appeared invincible; but he had to yield to the superior sovereign, who threatened to do the bloody work himself and to appropriate the territory as his own. Thus began the thirty-third war against these unconquerable mountaineers. The armies of both nations made si

multaneous invasions; terrible struggles ensued at three or four different points, but we cannot here detail them. On Easter Monday, 1686, a general attack was made. The pastor, Arnaud, became on this day first known as a hero-the hope of the persecuted people for the future, if not for the present. The Duke of Savoy led one attack; Catinat, with his French, another. Both were hurled back the first day; on the next, Catinat destroyed the little force opposed to him, and massacred men, women, and children. The commanders of the Italian troops sent messengers to the Vaudois at other points, assuring them that their brethren in the Valley of St. Martin had surrendered and received pardon; the positive promise of the duke, assuring them of their pardon, their lives, and liberties, was declared to them, and on this pledge they all laid down their arms, surrendering impregnable positions. Immediately the pledge was violated; they were loaded with irons, and fourteen thousand of them, according to Arnaud, were incarcerated in the prisons of Piedmont. "Their children," says the historian Mustan, "were carried off and dispersed through Roman Catholic districts; their wives and daughters were violated, massacred, or made captives. As for those who still remained, all whom the enemy could seize became a prey devoted to carnage, spoliation, fire, excesses which cannot be told, and outrages which it would not be possible to describe."

The great aim of the Revocation was now supposed to be accomplished. Louis XIV. declared, as we have seen, that there were no more Protestants in his realm. One of his officers in these mountains wrote that "all the valleys are now exterminated; the people all killed, hanged, or massacred." "Rome," says Smiles, "rang with Te Deums in praise of the final dispersion of the Vaudois." The Pope congratulated the Duke of Savoy in a special brief. Roman Catholics were settled in the valleys on the lands of the dispersed Protestants. It was now that one of their historians, a refugee in London, wrote, "The world looks upon them no otherwise than as irrecoverably lost and finally destroyed." But the Vaudois Church was inextinguishable; it was still alive in the thirteen dungeons of Piedmont. Of the fourteen thousand prisoners there, many were daily perishing by hunger, thirst, or disease, mar