The Dragonnades.
And now these brutes [the "Dragonnades" or "military missionaries"] dwelt in the worst manner, which can scarcely be described, regarding and treating not only the goods, but also the women in the house, as their own property, and committing the most unspeakable outrages without any shyness. These were called, as I have said, the Dragonnades, or alleged conversions by dragoons. All worship by the Reformed was then forbidden, their schools closed, and their children handed over to Catholic parents for education; emigration was forbidden under penalty of the galley and confiscation of property. Reformed preachers who immediately converted to the Papacy received an annual allowance that exceeded their previous income by one-third; on the other hand, preachers who did not convert were partly executed, partly ordered to vacate the country within a fortnight. The prisons filled up with arrestees. Those who refused to take the Catholic so-called last rites on the sickbed, if they recovered, lost their goods and were sent to the galleys; if they died, their property was likewise confiscated and their bodies handed over to the executioner. Women who sang Protestant hymns and psalms had their hair cut off; old men were dragged to the altars by the soldiers, under curses and threats, to receive communion under one form; Such persons, however, who had first renounced their faith out of fear, and afterwards again took part in reformed worship, or were even caught making an un-Catholic remark, had to atone for their “blasphemy,” as it was called, partly in the hardest prisons, partly on the scaffold of blood. The seminaries of the Reformed received Jesuits, and their converts appointed Catholic priests as their preachers. Finally, all religious meetings, as well as the practice of Reformed worship in the castles of the nobility, were forbidden under penalty of confiscation of their goods and persons. All their children were henceforth baptized and educated in the Catholic religion. Every Reformed who emigrated, and every preacher who did not emigrate within 14 days, was condemned to the galleys. The Edict of Nantes, formerly granting them protection, issued by King Henry IV. in 1598, was now repealed on October 25, 1685. Sixteen hundred churches of the Reformed have been pulled down in this time, thousands of the same forged into the galleys, and innumerable tortured, yea, many hanged, wheeled, and burned. (See Wernicke's and Becker's Weltgeschichte [or World History].)
* [On Reformed persecutors] *
Unfortunately, however, the Reformed not only experienced such persecution from their papist opponents, but where they had gained the power to do so, they also exercised it to a certain degree against their Lutheran opponents. Thus even [August] Tholuck, a man who was always more inclined to the Reformed than to the Lutherans, writes: "In Cassel, the Lutherans could not practice public worship until 1724. The Lutheran nobility, who were scattered throughout the country, were only allowed to have home communion without the help of strangers. Only in 1782 did the Lutheran worship attain general religious freedom.… In 1678, Count Moritz (of Nassau-Siegen) renewed the ban on Lutherans settling in Siegen; in Wied, the children had to be educated by Lutherans in a Reformed manner; circumventing the ban by Lutheran education abroad was punishable by expulsion (still according to the church order of 1708). (See: Das kirchliche Leben des 17. Jahrhunderts. II, 228. 238.) Indeed, the Reformed Max Goebel himself writes: “The relationship of the Reformed religion to the Lutheran was on the whole just as hostile and abrupt as to the Catholic. Obviously, however, the Reformed were here far more the persecutors than the persecuted, not in doctrine and in controversial sermons, but in preventing the worship and the formation of congregations of the Lutherans, and, as they often suffered injustice from the Catholic sovereign and his councillors and theologians, so they also often did injustice with the help of their Reformed state government, and by such violent measures embittered the Lutherans, who were all the more zealous in word and writings against them.” (Geschichte des christlichen Lebens in Rheinland und Westphalen. II, 62 f. 65.)
Oh, that we Lutherans might recognize with fervent thanks what a great boon we enjoy, by God's grace, in the glorious and perfect religious and ecclesiastical liberty which is also guaranteed to us by the Constitution of the United States of North America.
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