Hilaire, Cuvier, Des Cartes, Malebranche,
Arago--what were they? The tree of history is enriched with no nobler
and fairer boughs and blossoms than have grown from the French stock.
It seems a most mysterious providence that some nations, without being
wickeder than others, should have a more unfortunate and disastrous
history.
The woes of France have sprung from the fact that a Jezebel de Medici
succeeded in exterminating from the nation that portion of the people
corresponding to the Puritans of Scotland, England, and Germany. The
series of persecutions which culminated in the massacre of St.
Bartholomew, and ended with the dragonades under Louis XIV., drained
France of her lifeblood. Other nations have profited by the treasures
then cast out of her, and she has remained poor for want of them. Some
of the best blood in America is of the old Huguenot stock. Huguenots
carried arts and manufactures into England. An expelled French refugee
became the theological leader of Puritanism in England, Scotland, and
America; and wherever John Calvin's system of theology has gone, civil
liberty has gone with it; so that we might almost say of France, as
the apostle said of Israel, "If the fall of them be the riches of the
world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how
much more their fulness!"
When the English and Americans sneer at the instability, turbulence,
and convulsions of the French nation for the last century, let us ask
ourselves what our history would have been had the "Gunpowder Plot"
succeeded, and the whole element of the reformation been exterminated.
Pages:
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543