A LITTLE more than one hundred and twenty years ago, a French woman sat bending over a letter she was writing, as best she could, in a dark, strange-looking room.
This room was round, with stone walls, and with neither windows nor fireplace. A fire burned there sometimes in the cold weather but it was lighted in the middle of the stone floor, and the smoke, if it found its way on at all, had to ascend through a hole in the roof into an upper chamber, exactly like the lower one, except that the hole in the floor occupied the place of the fire in the room below. The upper room had a hole in the roof open to the sky, through which the smoke sometimes escaped, and through which till rain and wind poured in at all seasons.
Round these rooms, beds were placed for the fourteen inhabitants―all old women, or women who looked old from suffering and sorrow.
Marie Durand, who was endeavoring to write a letter, was at this time about fifty-three years old. She had spent thirty-eight years of her life in this dark dungeon. Some of her companions had been there longer. One of them had never seen the outside world since she was eight years old.
What had the child done that she should be condemned to spend her life in prison, with no hope of ever again looking upon the sunny hills and the blue sea outside? She had gone with her mother to hear the forbidden preaching, the preaching of the Gospel of Christ in the mountains of the Desert.
“The Desert:” so were the mountains of the Cevennes called by the witnesses for Christ, who, during the last century, lived literally in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth; hunted, tortured, massacred, imprisoned whenever the Jesuit agents could find them. Pierre Durand Marie’s brother, had been caught on his way to baptize a child, and hanged forthwith. Marie had been seized at the age of fifteen and never again had she breathed the fresh air or seen one of the old faces of her childhood.
At any moment she might have gone forth free―so might any of these prisoners. They had but to say they abjured the faith of their Huguenot fathers―that was all―they had but to do what thousands of our English women are doing today, to kneel down and worship the consecrated host, then the prison doors would be opened to them, and they might go where they would. But year after year passed by; some of them left their dungeon, but it was to go to Christ in Paradise; the rest remained, and prayed together, and praised the Lord that they were counted worthy to suffer for His sake.
Marie, and the rest of them, had been often ill, ―no wonder. Marie had gone without a dress, or apron, or shoes, that her fellow-prisoners might have some little extra comforts, and she was writing to her old pastor, Paul Rabaut, whose life had been spent in preaching in the mountain fastnesses, and who was always in danger of his life, and always a helper of his suffering brothers and sisters in the faith. But long, long years had passed before Paul Rabaut could do more than pray for the imprisoned women of the Tour de Constance.
When Paul Rabaut received this letter, which Marie wrote in the dim light of her dungeon, he resolved to leave no stone unturned, if by the help of God, he could gain freedom for these saints of His. The time had come when his prayers were to be answered.
The Irish Governor of Languedoc, Lord Thomond, one of the followers of the exiled Stuart princes, had been a bitter and tyrannical persecutor of the Protestants. In the year 1763, he was succeeded in his government by the Prince de Beauvan. The prince was nominally a Catholic, but he was not only an enlightened man of noble character, but a man who had the fear of God before his eyes.
“These Protestants,” he said, “are good and loyal Frenchmen, whose only crime is that they desire to serve God according to their conscience”; and he forthwith gave orders that they should hold their meetings for worship without molestation. The Protestants met in multitudes in the mountain glen, the voice of their singing resounded far and wide, and with tears of joy and thankfulness they listened to the gospel preaching which, but for their faith and faithfulness would have been silenced in France long ago.
Paul Rabaut betook himself to the prince, and after many entreaties persuaded him to go in person to visit the Tour de Constance. His nephew, the Chevalier De Boufflers, who went with him, describes the scene. “Fourteen women,” he wrote, “were pining in this tower deprived of light and air. The governor whose noble countenance was but the expression of the beauty of the great soul within could scarcely refrain from weeping, and for the first time, doubtless, these poor women saw the marks of compassion in a human face. I can see them now, when he suddenly appeared amongst them, falling at his feet which they watered with their tears, endeavoring to speak, but only able to weep and sob. There taking courage by the kind words they heard at last they related the sufferings of the long years of their captivity. The youngest of these martyrs was more than fifty years old...she was eight when she had entered the gates of this gloomy tower. The prince hesitated not a moment, he ordered the chains of the captives to be loosed, and told them all to go forth free.”
He was threatened with the anger of the king, on account of this act, which went beyond the range of the authority granted to him, and was told that he would now probably be deposed from his post.
“The king has the power to remove me from my post,” he replied, “but he has no the power to prevent me from performing my duties according to my conscience and my honor.”
It was a joyful yet a sad sight to see this band of prisoners go forth. For nearly all of them there was no home, no family to welcome them. Marie Durand dragged herself feebly to the old house of her childhood. There stood the chestnut trees―she knew them each one in the old familiar place―but the home? It was a solitary ruin, enough remaining to shelter her from the weather, that was all! There she spent the rest of her days, provided for by a small pension, sent to her from Holland, which she shared with an old Protestant, just released from the galleys, and died thanking and praising God.
A hundred years passed away. They had been years of liberty from the dungeons and the gallows, and the bayonets of the century before. But a tyrant more cruel than Louis XIV. or Louis XV, had not forgotten the Protestants of the Cevennes. The “prince of this world,” who had failed to stifle the blessed gospel by persecution and torture, and death, had other ways and means more dangerous, because less visible and less terrible to flesh and blood. And this time it seemed as if he had triumphed marvelously, for the grandchildren of the martyrs, still called Protestants, had become those who had a name to live and were dead, their valleys were as the valley of Ezekiel―the valley of dry bones―they were imprisoned in strong dungeons, darker than the Tour de Constance, the dungeons of infidelity and rationalism.
“I go from village to village on my donkey,” an evangelist said to me eight years since, “in each there is a rationalist pastor, and a dead, unbelieving flock, and except when an evangelist comes amongst them, the gospel for which their fathers died is a sound which never reaches their ears.”
But there were some even in Sardis who had not defiled their garments, and in one of these little towns of the Cevennes there were a few who met to pray to the Lord that He would breathe the breath of life into these lost, dead souls around them.
One Sunday, six years ago, one of these praying believers, the pastor of the town, was preaching to the lifeless congregation who lay so heavily on his heart. As he preached, a man stood up and said: “Pray for me—pray for me, I am a lost sinner.” And another and another followed, till the church resounded with the agonizing prayers of awakened souls. Thirteen that day found peace in believing in Jesus.
And from that little town the tide of living water has flowed across the whole breadth of Southern France, and beyond the borders into the Swiss valleys, and thousands have passed forth, free men and women, from the dark dungeons in which Satan held them captive—from the dungeons of unbelief, and death, and condemnation, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.
Only two days since, I read a letter from some of these delivered captives, who had gone to preach the blessed gospel in the dark villages of Algeria, and who can now tell of the mighty works of God, the signs which have followed them that believe.
And in the villages of the Cevennes the great work is carried on by the power of the Spirit, the wind of God that bloweth where it listeth, breathing into the slain that they may live. Only a week or two since one of the pastors stood at the foot of the pulpit stairs in his large church, and said, “I am not going up into this pulpit, I wish to kneel down amongst you all, and pray that the Lord may save you. It is salvation that is needed. Let any here who are already saved cry to the Lord for the salvation of the rest.”
Then the voice of the pastor, and of the believing amongst his people, arose in fervent prayer to God, and there arose also the sound of the bitter weeping of those who longed for the conversion of their brethren, and of those who now, for the first time, knew themselves to be lost sinners.
In the town where this awakening began six years ago, one woman looked on with scorn and bitterness. She was a washerwoman, who was persuaded to go to the gospel meetings, but who only listened to mock and scoff. One lady in particular spoke often to this woman, but her heart seemed to be as hard as a millstone, and as one and another around her were turned to the Lord, she called them fools and hypocrites. Last April the lady who cared for her soul, received the following letter from this prisoner of Satan: ―
“Madame, ―I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart that you have led me to Jesus. You have been His angel, sent to break the chains with which I was bound.
I had gone to church for many years, and I was always in the habit of reading the Bible with pleasure, and the sermons of the pastor used sometimes to make me feel serious. But the chains were always there, holding me fast. I had not Jesus in my heart. I was not saved, as you said to us when we were coming home from one of those blessed meetings. I was always hearing after that, the words sounding in my ears, Have you Jesus for your own? “Are you saved?”
“I went to bed that night, but I had to get up again very quickly. I knelt down there and then, and I said, ‘O my God, O Lord, I will stay here on my knees till Thou sayest to me as Thou saidst to the paralytic man, “Rise up!’”
“But Satan was there busy with all his wiles, and he said to me, ‘Go to bed! tomorrow you can read your Bible, and He will come to you.’
“ ‘But it is now,’ I said, ‘before the day dawns, that I want Jesus.’
“And so I remained kneeling there till two o’clock in the morning; then Satan came back and said to me, ‘You see how late it is. He will not come. Go to bed.’
“But I remained there nailed to the ground on my knees, and I answered, ‘It is now that I want Jesus, not tomorrow.’ And then I said to Him, ‘Lord Jesus, come quickly!’
“And behold, all in a moment I was filled with joy-transported with a joy I cannot describe. Something mysterious had happened to me, which words cannot tell. My heavy burden was gone.
“Then Jesus Himself said to me, ‘Go and rest.’
“Lord, I thank Thee that Thou didst send Thine angel to lead me to Thee! Guide me now in my house and family by Thy wise counsels in all my dealings with my husband and children. Do this for me in the name of Jesus.
“Madame, receive the loving affection of your humble and devoted servant.
MARIE L—.”
Will those who read this true story, and who are themselves saved, pray that this glorious work of the Spirit of God may deepen and widen, and that the towns and villages of France still lying in darkness and in the shadow of death, may hear the voice of the Son of God, for those who hear shall live? F. B.