Editorial by William A. Spicer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 26, 1914

Editorial

By William A. Spicer

Deliverance of a Protestant Witness in France

PAUL RABOUT was a Protestant minister of Nimes, and a member of the French Assembly in the days of 1789. Those were days when men were struggling to break the bonds that centuries of papal rule had fastened upon mankind. Rabout had joined the assembly in the declaration that "all citizens are equal in the eyes of the law;" and in a speech for liberty of conscience he declared, "I demand for all non-Catholics what you demand for yourselves — equality of rights — liberty, the liberty of their religion, the liberty of their worship."

His faithful championship of true religion and liberty of worship had made him the mark of the Romanist oppressors, who were seeking to stifle the protest against spiritual and social tyranny. Dr. Less, a personal friend of Rabout's, says:—

For many years he was nowhere safe, not even in his own house. Soldiers came suddenly both by day and night, surrounding his house and searching for him. Every trick was used for seizing and getting rid of one justly viewed as the chief support of Protestantism. Everywhere surrounded by spies, and every moment in danger, he usually performed his ministerial duties only in the night; or if it was needful in the day, he disguised himself as a bricklayer or a stocking weaver. Often he was obliged to leave his house, and to lie whole days and nights in the open fields, or in some remote, pitiful hut, certain that if seized, he must instantly suffer an ignominious death.

In these dangers his only human security was the fidelity of his flock. They constantly watched over him, and at the first approach of hazard gave him warning. He assured me that he often escaped by secret forebodings of the designs of his enemies. One night at supper he felt a sudden and almost irresistible impulse to leave his own house, and to sleep somewhere else. Accordingly he left it, though his wife entreated him to stay, as there was not the least appearance of danger. Next morning he was informed that about three o'clock in the morning a detachment of soldiers had surrounded his house and searched for him. I the rather regard these accounts, as I never knew a man farther from enthusiasm. — Lorimer's "Protestant Church of France," page 500.

"To him," as the human agent, it was said by Dr. Less, "the preservation of Protestants in France has been chiefly owing. His whole life has been a constant sacrifice to the interests of religion."

And as he was a true witness amidst papal oppression, so also he stood true in those days of the terror, when revolutionary France, in revolt against papal tyranny, turned against all religion, as predicted' in the prophecy of Revelation II. Refusing to go with the multitude in the denial of his Lord, Rabout was arrested by order of the Convention, and sent to prison riding upon an ass, being too infirm with age to walk. "It was only the fall of Robespierre," says Lorimer, "which saved him from the guillotine at nearly eighty years of age."

We have but the most meager records of the Protestant story in those revolutionary and prerevolutionary times in France, when prophecy was fulfilling and the period of papal supremacy was drawing to its close. But the glimpses of delivering providences of God in Rabout's active life show us the living God all the time watching over his own and intervening in times of peril with special deliverances. W. A. S.