Section V.
CHURCH GOVERNMENT AND WORSHIP.
(Supplementary to a similar Section in Volume I.)
The Huguenots rejected Saints’ days, though they retained the observance of the festivals dedicated to the Divine Persons of the Godhead. Their baptismal ritual was simple. They, however, allowed, though they did not compel, the appointment of sponsors, but without such designations as god-fathers and god-mothers. A child might have a male sponsor called the parrain, and a female, the marraine; sometimes there were two of each sex. In the city of London, Canterbury, and Southampton, there were no sponsors, but only témoins, witnesses. The witnesses, however, were expected to have an eye upon the child during his or her years of pupilage.
What the Huguenots most delighted in was Clement Marot’s metrical version of the Psalms. These they sang in their churches without instrumental accompaniments. They sang them as they walked in the streets or roads, and in their boats on the rivers, until the irate and jealous Romanists procured a law to silence them. Mary Queen of Scots’ French education brought into Scotland her loathing abhorrence of this joyous and heretical psalm-singing, and she seems to have infected Darnley with the same feverish irritation. John Knox publicly from the pulpit accused him of “haveing caste the Psalme-booke in the fire.” In 1751 appeared a splendid edition of the “Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg,” in which Frederic wrote about the refugees to this effect:— “An entire people departed from the kingdom out of party spirit, having the Pope as its object of hatred, and to receive under another sky the communion in both kinds. Four hundred thousand souls expatriated themselves and forsook all their possessions, that they might roar within other temples Clement Marot’s old Psalms.” The poet Akenside rebuked the Royal Author:—
Whence then at things divine those darts of scorn?
Why are the woes, which virtuous men have borne
For sacred truth, a prey to laughter given?
What fiend — what foe of nature — urged thy arm
Th’ Almighty of His sceptre to disarm —
To push this earth adrift, and leave it loose from Heaven?
Many of the nobles, bishops, and gentry of England laid the refugees under great obligations to them by many acts of kindness, so that the refugees in private life were more associated with them than with the middle class to which the dissenters belonged. The English upper classes also made it a matter of personal longing that their friends in the French churches should adopt the same prayer-book as their own; so that gradually the majority of the French churches adopted Durel’s Prayer Book.[1] But this did not alienate the dissenters from them. Their leader, Dr. Edmund Calamy, when the Schism Bill was to come before the House of Lords, sat up a whole night, drawing up queries which were addressed to my Lords the Bishops, and in which he pled equally for English Dissenters and French Protestants.
On the other hand, when the High Anglican Church party had the upper hand, it repudiated any alliance with the Huguenots. In 1712 both Houses of Convocation in Ireland addressed the Queen on the state of religion, which they represented as being unwholesome and dangerous, and among other alleged proofs they particularized the following:—
- ↑ Misson records as to the French Refugees’ churches:— “Some have stuck to their old service according to the institution of Calvin, others have conlornicd to the Church of England, and part have grown amphibious.”
