Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 2.djvu/53

 their relief recommended to all good Christians, especially to those of the Reformed Religion, in a sermon preached at St. James, Westminster, April 5, 1699. By William Wake, D.D., Rector, &c.” At page 28, the preacher said,—

“It is but a little time since we were called upon to receive those of the Reformed Church of France into our bosoms. By doing this we have preserved so much of the Protestant Interest from sinking. And all that their persecutors have gained by their cruelties against them is but this, that they have forced them to change their country, but have not at all lessened either their zeal for religion or their ability to defend it. We are now invited to preserve the remains of the same church and of some of those of the vallies of Piemont with them.” To the same collection the diarist, Ralph Thoresby of Leeds, alludes:— “1699. The learned Mr. Boyse, being come from Dublin to this his native place, lodged at my house till his marriage with Mrs. Rachel Ibbetson. The sermon he preached relating to the sufferings of the French Protestants was very moving. . . . 1500 pasteurs were banished, their flocks scattered, and many thousand families forced into exile, for whose relief public collections are being made.”

The distribution of the Royal Bounty was assigned to two committees, one ecclesiastical (for the needy pasteurs) and the other lay (for the poor laity). The usual test for a French refugee’s admission, either as a casual recipient or as a regular pensioner, was simple membership in a French Protestant congregation. Occasionally despotic politicians and Laudean prelatists endeavoured to introduce the taking of the Sacrament in the Anglican mode as the “key” or “pick-lock” of the sacred money-chest.

In the folio volume on his Life and Times, entitled “Reliquiae Baxterianae,” Rev. Richard Baxter writes, under the date December 1684, “Many French ministers, sentenced to death and banishment, fly hither for refuge. And the church men relieve them not, because they are not for English diocesans and conformity. And others have many of their own distressed ministers and acquaintance to relieve, [so] that few are able. But the chief that now I can do is, to help such, and the silenced ministers here, and the poor, as the almoner of a few liberal friends who trust me with their charity.” And in the beginning of the reign of William and Mary, one or two quondam Huguenot pastors, who had become Anglican conformists, thought to please their new associates by re-producing this intolerant proposal. But they were silenced by the great theologian Howe’s appeal to one of the Commissioners (name not known):—

“Sir, — But that I am learning as much as I can to count nothing strange among the occurrences of the present time, I should be greatly surprised to find that divers French Protestant Ministers, fled hither for their consciences and religion, who have latitude enough to conform to the rites of the Church of England, do accuse others of their brethren (who are fled hither on the same account, but have not that latitude) as schismatics, only for practising according to the principles and usages of their own church which at home were common to them both, and as schismatics judge them unworthy of any relief here. Their common enemy never yet passed so severe a judgment on any of them that they should be famished. This is put into the hands of the appellants from this sentence unto your more equal judgment And it needs do no more than thus briefly to represent their case and me, Most Honoured Sir, your most obliged and most humble servant,

, April 5th 1689.

.”

The funds were faithfully administered. To this one of the refugees, Maximilien Misson, bears witness in 1697. He writes:— “Of this multitude of poor exiles there are not at most above three thousand that receive alms, or (as we call it) are au Comité.” The sums of money that have been collected have always been deposited in the hands of four or five noblemen, who have referred the division and administration thereof to a chosen set of men picked out from among the refugees 