PROTESTANTISM IN FRANCE.
By L. A. P.
WHILE Protestantism is growing in France, there is said to be a steadily increasing hostility to it among the masses of the people. The greater share of this opposition is of course from Roman Catholics, who constitute the majority of the masses. There is a ready and constant demand for anti-Protestant literature, in which extravagant language is used, sounding, says the New York Observer, wonderfully like the writings of some of the Catholic theologians on the eve of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. It is asserted that there can be no just cause for this opposition, inasmuch as the Protestants are law-abiding and peaceable citizens. The Observer attempts to give an answer to the question why they incite such increasing hostility. It says:— “The question is a difficult one to answer, tho the fact that Protestants are prosperous and hold many official posts does, as indicating the possession of qualities not shared by Catholics, afford a partial explanation. It is only partial, however, because, singularly enough, the French agnostics are quite as hostile to the Protestants as are French Catholics. The very men who profess contempt for Catholicism, unite with the Catholics in condemning the Protestant, and, apparently, because he is not a Catholic. This would indicate that the antipathy is caused not by difference of religious belief, but by different habits of thought. And the theory is borne out by the fact that neither the spread of the doctrine of Voltaire, nor the Revolution, nor the process of secularization which followed the Franco-Prussian war, ever greatly modified the hatred of Protestantism. The Protestant has never been allowed a place in popular esteem alongside the agnostic. Catholicism is so much a habit of life with the mass of the French people, so much a point of view, that it looks at everything through Catholic spectacles, failing even to discover anything disgraceful in St. Bartholomew. It may ignore the church and ridicule its rites, but it retains the inherited prejudices of that faith. This is the chief cause of the hostility to Protestantism, the fact that the latter looks out upon the world from a different view point from that of Catholicism. The Protestant judges men and things on their merits, the Catholic accepts the judgment of his church, and the independence of the former naturally offends him. Aside from this hatred of Catholicism, there are, of course, other reasons for the French hatred of Protestantism, the chief perhaps being that Protestants are so often of foreign blood, and bear foreign names, and that in scholarship they hold the supremacy. But the chief cause is differing habit of mind. Nevertheless, Protestantism is growing in France, having now regained the strength it had when the Huguenot persecution began.” Yet Protestants, like Préssense, tell us that French Protestants have lost their power. It should be emphasized, tho, that what the Observer calls a differing habit of mind accounting for this hostility, is a habit of mind almost wholly, if not entirely, the result, through ages, of Catholic teaching. Even the French agnostics, if they are not backsliders from the Catholic faith, have been trained through generations of this influence. In the end, the matter of religion will be found to be wholly responsible for the attitude, except as there may be inconsistent Protestants whose individual lives give the lie to their profession. In this sense it is a habit of mind, and a habit which affects the French Protestant—the Huguenot—just as it affects the English, or American, or German, or true Protestant of any other nationality,—it changes him from bondage to liberty, the glorious freedom of the sons of God.