Protestantism in France From Death of Henry IV to the Revolution - James Aitken Wylie

seminary he had there founded, and which
continued for eighty years to send forth pastors and
martyrs to France.[7] Paul Rabaut took his place as
nourisher of that Protestantism which Antoine
Court had restored. The life of Rabaut was full of
labors and perils; but he had the satisfaction of
seeing the Protestant Church growing from day to
day in spite of bloody arrets, and in defiance of the
continued operation, sometimes in greater and
sometimes in less intensity, of the dragonnade, the
galleys, and the scaffold. As the result of continual
journeyings, during which he seldom slept more
than two nights in the same hiding-place, he kept
flowing the fountains that his great predecessor had
opened, and streams went forth to water the weary
land. But neither then nor since has the Protestant
Church of France attained the glory of her former
days, when sovereigns and princes sat in her
Synods, when great generals led her armies, and
learned theologians and eloquent preachers filled
her pulpits. She continued still to wear her chains.
At length in 1787 came the Edict of Malesherbes,
which merely permitted the Protestants to register
their births, marriages, and deaths; in other words,
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