Or, the Power of Prayer.
IN a small town in Normandy, named. Jouarre, there once stood a famous nunnery, long since in ruins, but still remembered as the home of Charlotte de Bourbon. Charlotte was born in the middle of the sixteenth century, and her father was the Duke of Montpensier, of the royal house of Bourbon. His property had became reduced, and being unable to give his daughter a dowry equal to her rank, he — a stern, proud. Romanist — resolved that she should enter a nunnery.
This resolution was very distressing to the child’s mother on many accounts, but especially because she had her eyes opened to the errors of Romanism, and, by the grace of God, had been brought to know the truth as it is in Jesus. As she was unable to change her husband’s mind, she made the best use of the time during which her dear child was yet to be left in her charge, by instructing her in the blessed truths of the Gospel, spending many hours with her over the word in her private chamber, where mother and daughter often wept and prayed together. Although Charlotte does not seem to have been brought to know the Lord at this time, the teaching, prayers, and tears of her affectionate Christian mother were not to remain unfruitful. God never forgets the prayer of faith. Christ, his own dear Son, has pledged himself that the request made in his name shall be granted. This the Father never can forget. Oh that this simple, yet all-important, truth were ever present to the minds of those who love his name! At the early age of thirteen, Charlotte was torn from her dear mother’s arms, and taken by her father to the nunnery of Jouarre. There, in accordance with the gloomy system of Romanism, her hair was cut away, her dress was changed to coarse linen and haircloth, a cord was tied around her waist, and with downcast looks and heavy heart she trod the stone-bound cloisters by day, and rested at night on the floor of her tomb-like cell. A few years passed away; her loving mother had fallen asleep in Jesus; and, beset on every side by false teaching and example, Charlotte began to be not only in some measure reconciled to her condition, but partly to believe that her self-denial and sufferings were well-pleasing to God, and that the reward of a life of such useless seclusion would be certain glory in heaven. But her mother’s prayers, though almost obliterated from her memory, were not forgotten before God. The time was at hand for the long-looked-for answer to be given, and that, too, appearance, the nun of Jouarre was quite established in self-righteousness; for she had obtained so high a character for piety and self-denial, that, ‘although still very young, she had been raised to the lofty position of Lady Abbess, and head of the whole convent.
Suddenly, light entered the nunnery of Jouarre in the form of Protestant tracts. The Lady Abbess read them, and their teachings revived in her memory the loving words which her departed mother had spoken long years before in her private chamber at home. The large Bible, and the truths read from it by a voice now silent in the grave, the prayers, the tears, the exhortations, the happiness of her childhood, all came back again as fresh as if but of yesterday. The Spirit aroused conviction in her heart, and she fled as a lost sinner to the cross of Christ. Counting her own righteousness but as filthy rags, she looked to the blood of Christ as alone able to put away her sins; and as the blind man rejoices when his eyes behold the sun, so did the Abbess of Jouarre when the light of the Gospel beamed brightly on her soul. Charlotte de Bourbon was saved! But now how was she to escape her gilded chains as Lady Abbess of the Romish convent? For a nun to leave a convent in those days, and “return to the world,” as it was called, was certain death, and that, too, by one of the most cruel methods that religiousness could devise. When recaptured, the unhappy prisoner was first subjected to a mock trial before a secret tribunal of monks, and then carried to a dungeon where a niche in the wall had been previously prepared, in which she was placed with a loaf of bread and jug of water, and a wall being built up in front, she was literally entombed alive, and left to perish miserably! Skeletons have been found from time to time thus entombed in the crumbling walls of ruined. monasteries. How, then, should Charlotte de Bourbon escape? In this, too, her mother’s prayers were to prove effectual. It was in the year 1572 That the noise of battle was heard around Jouarre. It came nearer―nearer — to the very doors of the convent. In vain did the nuns supplicate their images; the gates were assailed by an infuriated soldiery; they yielded; and the nuns, driven in terror from their cloistered home, sought a temporary shelter in the neighboring woods. Charlotte de Bourbon was free! The proud self-will of her ducal father had imprisoned her there, but her gentle mother’s prayers had “burst the gates of brass, and smitten the bars of iron in sunder.” Not all the power of Romish superstition, with a Bourbon to back it, could hinder the accomplishment of a lonely Christian mother’s prayer for her helpless child. Vain had been all the efforts of the adversary to destroy the seed sown in secret by a mother’s voice, and watered by her tearful supplications; vain the enticements of a gaudy religious ness; vain the stone walls and iron gratings of the gloomy convent: “the snare was broken, and the prisoner escaped!”
Adopting various disguises, she fled through France. Her peril was great: detection was death, or lifelong imprisonment; and often was she on the eve of being discovered, but her mother’s prayers were her protection still. After many narrow escapes, she at last reached Heidelberg, where there were Christians glad to receive and able to protect her from the baffled rage of the Romish priesthood, and the vengeance of an angry and bigoted parent. Here she made a public renunciation of the Romish religion. It grieved her to the heart to disappoint her father’s wishes and purposes thus, but she was supported by that word, “Whoso loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me.” That a lady abbess, the daughter of a duke, and of the royal house of France, should thus sacrifice everything for the truth’s sake, and contentedly enter into obscurity, was a cause of joy to those who loved the Lord, while it was a source of bitter disappointment to the pride of the Bourbons. But she was not long allowed to remain in the obscurity she had willingly sought. William, Prince of Orange, had heard of her piety, and the sacrifices she had made; and being himself a Protestant, he sought and obtained her hand in marriage. Thus raised to a position higher than that she had resigned for the Lord’s sake, she became an example alike to the noble ladies of her court and the lowly mothers in their families; and if the meekness, charity, and devotion, which characterized the whole after-life of Charlotte de Bourbon were blessed to any, it too was traceable to the teaching and prayers of that mother who, in her childhood, had sought to lead her to him who said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.”
As Princess of Orange, and the highest lady of rank in the Netherlands, she had a wide sphere of opportunity for adorning her Christian profession, and thus giving glory to him who had loved her, and bought her with his precious blood. And when at last the time of her departure arrived, she resigned her spirit into his hands with a confidence and an assured hope which nothing but faith in that blood could give. Surely a Christian mother’s prayers proved an unspeakable blessing to the Abbess of Jouarre!
It will interest the reader to know that she was an ancestress of our present Queen. Her daughter, Louisa, was the wife of Frederick the Fourth, the Elector Palatine of the Rhine, and grandmother to Sophia, Duchess of Brunswick, who was the mother of George the First of England, whose great-grandson, the Duke of Kent, was the father of Queen Victoria. Thus the sovereign of Great Britain derives her descent from one who, but for a mother’s prayers, might have lived and died the Abbess of Jouarre!