Were it not well that we, who feel ourselves called upon to maintain the Protestant cause, should have some real acquaintance both with the history and also with the meaning of Protestantism? So shall we pursue our great conflict, not only because we think it useful, and necessary, and according to the will of God, but because we feel the glory, the beauty, the magnificence of that for which we have to contend — because we remember the mighty things that have been done by those who fought this battle in the old times before us, and the great cloud of witnesses with whom we are encompassed about. So great is that cloud that it tempts us to think, if the inspired author of the Hebrews had had to write his grand eleventh chapter in the Twentieth century instead of the First, what a story he could have told! Well might he have said that “time would fail” him! We do not think his task would be finished yet — nay, that it would ever be finished.
It is some broken fragments of that story which, as specimens of the whole, we would fain present to your notice when we ask you to think of the Romance of Protestantism — what does it mean, and what is it like?
But we must first ask another question — What is romance? I suppose the general idea of romance would be — stirring adventures, hair-breadth escapes, great deeds wrought, great perils faced, exciting stories. But these are not all. There might be all these, and yet no real romance. It would be a very exciting thing if a burglar were to leap from a high-up window with a lady’s jewels under his arm — but would we call that romantic? I don’t think so. We might call it romantic, however, if the house was on fire, and someone who knew there was a child asleep in the top story, rushed in, saved the child, and leaped from the window with it in his arms. Especially if, though he did not know it at the time, the child proved to be a near relation of his own — his brother’s or his sister’s child — that would indeed be romance.
What makes the difference? The high moral qualities engaged. The exciting adventures and all the rest are but the outward adornments — these are the things by which God touches our hearts, and shows us that the men and women who did them were inspired by that “breath of life” which He breathed into us at our creation.
Take, then, our motto as the definition of romance — “All high deeds that make the heart to quiver” — and they do quiver when we hear or read of them! But what are they? “Courage, high endurance, generous deed.” And we must add something else. There would not be much romance in the world if we all stood separate, like grains of sand — near, yet apart from each other in mind and heart. No, it is the strong and tender human affections which make the most attractive part of all romantic stories. It may be the kind of love usually called romantic; or, just as truly, the deep, deep love of friend for friend, of brother for brother, of parent for child or of child for parent — and I will add another which has many illustrations in the theme before us — the love of the pastor for the flock and of the flock for the pastor. All these help to make true romance, and they will be found abundantly in the annals of that great conflict which, I believe, when all is told, will prove to be the grandest epic this world has ever known — the conflict of Faith and freedom with the superstition and the tyranny of Rome.
Nothing helps so much as illustration. Let us then take these four qualities of romance—“courage, high endurance, generous deed,” and strong and tender affection — and see if we can find them exemplified in the annals of Protestantism. Yes, the examples are so numerous — or rather so numberless — that it would take, not one hour’s talk, but many, to exhaust them. And then they would not be exhausted after all.
Still, one fact or one story impresses the mind more than any amount of general statements. Take the first quality we have named — Courage.
Where so many have stood the supreme test of courage by laying down their lives, how shall we choose? Just listen to a few words from the great historian Motley about the Protestant martyrs of one short period and one small country in Europe — “The chronicles contain the lists of these obscure martyrs, but their names, hardly pronounced in their lifetime, sound barbarously in our ears, and will never ring through the trumpet of Fame. Yet they were men who dared and suffered as much as men can dare and suffer, and for the noblest cause which can inspire humanity. Fanatics they were not, if fanaticism consists in show without corresponding substance. To them all was terrible reality. The Emperor and his edicts were realities; and the heroism with which men took each other’s hands and walked into the flames, and women sang a song of triumph while the grave-digger was shoveling the earth upon their living faces was a reality also.”
There were so many who died thus! But as the story of one man, which we can feel and realize means more to us than the bare mention of many, we will tell of Robert Glover, one of our own Marian martyrs. Others, in those days of trial, had gone to the stake with a smile on their lips and a deep joy filling their hearts, knowing that Christ was with them, and that they would go straight from the fire to see His Face. Not so Robert Glover. Deep despondency had laid hold upon him; he thought that Christ had turned His Face away, and that, though he cried to Him in agony, the Lord had shut out his prayer. No voice, no answer came to him. All was dark. Yet still, with firm step and unfaltering heart, he went forth in the dark to die for Him.
There was with him a sympathizing friend — Austen Bernher, a Swiss, and formerly a servant of Latirner’s, who had earned the honorable title of “ The friend of the martyrs,” for he gave himself to the work of comforting, encouraging, and sustaining them. He walked beside Robert Glover — the martyr with the firm step and the set, hopeless face. They came in sight of the stake. Then, suddenly, the face was transfigured, and a glad cry broke from the lips — “Austen, He is come! He is come!” Christ had come to him, in that strange, mysterious way which no man knoweth save he who receiveth the wonder and the joy. Not in joy only, but in rapture, the few remaining steps were trod. The fire was kindled, and in one minute and a half after it rose around him, he saw the Face of Christ. It was as if he died, not so much by the anguish of the fire, as—
“Heart-broke by new joy too sudden and too sweet.”
I think that man’s courage was supreme.
High endurance is another thing we expect to hear of in romance. For an example of that I will not ask you to look at the rack or the stake — only at a quiet room where a, pale woman sits sewing. I do not think she is weeping: I think her tears will come later. What is she sewing? Only a shirt—
“Seam and gusset and band, band and gusset and seam.”
Ah! but this shirt she is making is for a singular purpose. She makes it by her husband’s request. He lies in prison awaiting death for Christ’s sake; and now the sentence has come, and the day is named. In the terrible days of the Marian persecution there came into use what has been called “The uniform of the martyrs” — the long, white shirt down to the feet which many of them wore at the stake; and Lawrence Saunders had written to his true wife — “My wife, I would that thou wouldst send me that shirt whereof thou knowest the destination.” And she did it! That was high endurance indeed. Think with what feelings she worked at her task, knowing — knowing all the time “its destination,” yet “content,” like the wife of another martyr, John Frith, to whom Tyndale wrote, “Your wife is quite content with the will of God.” I think the endurance of these women was even greater than that of the men who faced the fire.
We ask now what generous deeds we have got to show. Take one for a sample, from the story of the Netherlands. Under the crushing tyranny of Alva hosts of martyrs and other innocent victims were slaughtered, until at last the people rose in the cities, the towns, and the country to shake oft the intolerable yoke. It was not to be wondered at that those who were most active in the persecution should run some risk of having done to them what they had done to others.
The Burgomaster of Gouda had been particularly zealous in hunting the heretics to death. The people sought for him in their wrath, and ill would it have fared with him had they found him. Horribly frightened and seeking concealment, he turned into the house of a certain widow. She led him to a secret closet — in those days of peril there were such in many houses. “Shall I be safe here?” he asked trembling. “Oh yes, sir,” she said, “you will be quite safe, for it was here my husband hid when you sought for him and could not find him.”
Ah, but he had sought for him again, and had found him; and now his widow, in the day of vengeance, saved the life of him who had hunted her husband to his death. Nor is that the only such story we can find in the records of Protestantism.
We have spoken of the part the tender affections of humanity bear in all true romance. How many conflicts of the affections crowd into our minds as we recall the long, long story of the struggles of Protestantism! Take an illustration from a picture — which, whether or no it represents any single fact, certainly represents a type of innumerable facts. Most of us already know Millais’ “Huguenot,” at least in engravings. It gives a visible presentment of what must have happened again and again in times of persecution; the struggle between the tenderest earthly love and the love of Him who is unseen. There stand the two figures — the Huguenot, with his earnest, steadfast face, looking tenderly down at his betrothed, while her beautiful face is raised up to his in intense and agonized entreaty. She is trying to bind a white scarf upon his arm, and he is taking it off. It was the token worn by the Catholics in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and she wants to make him pass for a Catholic and thus to save his life. No, no! not merely not for life — that were a little thing — but not even for the love of her will he betray his Faith, and forsake his Lord. Does not that picture make us think of the words of the Cavalier poet—
“I could not love thee, dear, so much Loved I not Honor more?”
Only, instead of abstract, impersonal honor, we put a personal name — even the Name that is above every name.
These are the things we find so plentifully in the records of Protestantism; and they are a joy to the heart and a help to the life, for they bring us into closer communion with Him whose power and love so filled the hearts of men and women in the past, that they were able thus to do and thus to suffer for that Name’s sake.
But some of us may think, “This is all very well. But after all, though Protestantism may have its heroic side, to say that it is romantic sounds strangely in our ears. We never thought of it so before; we thought it was rather the opposite — something that might indeed be right, and the best thing to believe on the whole — but still something cold, negative and prosaic.” Cold! — Not only do our enemies say this, but sometimes also our friends. For instance, a novelist of the present day, himself a Protestant, says of one of his fictitious characters, a Roman Catholic who married a Protestant and adopted his Faith, “She died young; perhaps she was withered by the colder creed.” Cold! — It has stirred the hearts of men and women, not alone to a burning enthusiasm, but to that intensity of white heat which is far beyond the crimson glow of the ordinary furnace. Hear the testimony of another contemporary author, “ Owen Wistar,” an American. He is describing the churches in a New England town — “Of these three houses of God, that one which holds the most precious flame, the purest light, is the one that treasures the holy fire that came from France (at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes). It was for liberty of soul, to lift their ardent and exalted prayer to God as their own conscience bade them and not as any man directed, that these French colonists sought the New World. No Puritan splendor of independence and indomitable courage outshines theirs. They preached a word as burning as any that Plymouth and Salem ever heard. They were but a handful, and yet so fecund was their marvelous zeal that they became the spiritual leaven of their whole community.”
The secret assemblies for worship held by Protestants in times of persecution furnish an overwhelming refutation of the charge of coldness. These assemblies were of many kinds, and held in many times and places — often in towns and cities, within closed doors. But by far the most numerous and important were held in the country — in mountains and forests, in dens and caves of the earth. Holland and Belgium in the Sixteenth century, and Bohemia both before and after, witnessed many such. But the most remarkable were those of France, from the period of the Revocation until the eve of the Revolution, when religious toleration was granted at last. During most of that time, to attend those assemblies meant to face perils worse than death, the galleys — “those floating hells” — for the men, and cruel imprisonment for the women and children. Yet in the worst of weather, in cold and rain and sleet, when a whisper went round the district that there was to be an Assembly in such and such a place — even though it was miles away, and only to be reached by the most rugged and toilsome of paths — joy filled the hearts of the oppressed and sorrowful Protestants. What did they reek of cold, of hunger, of weariness, of peril, if only they could hear once more, “La Parole de Dieu,” for which their hearts were thirsting? Peradventure also the opportunity would be given them of meeting at His Table, where truly “ He was known of them in the breaking of bread.”
The longing to go to these Assemblies grew early, even in the hearts of the children. One little child was very eager about it, but his mother thought him far too young to go. So on the eventful night she waited until he was in bed, and as she thought asleep, and then set off with her friends. He lay still until all was quiet, and then (she had not forbidden him) he dressed himself again, and set off, in the cold and dark, until he came up with the party. His mother was horrified; she dreaded what might happen to him. “Oh, why did you come?” she said.
“Mother, you are going to pray to God — I know you are,” he answered. “Won’t you let me come too?”
She could not send him back, and as the way was far too long for his little feet, the men of the party took turns to carry him, and so he came to the Assembly. He heard the prayers, the singing, and the sermon, and—
“Thoughts in that young child’s heart took root
Which manhood could scarcely bear.”
At another Assembly a few years later he was so stirred by what he heard that, when there was a pause, he said a few words and prayed.
The people recognized a voice of power, and said he must be a pastor. In France, at that time, every Protestant pastor was, by the very fact of his calling, doomed to the gallows. And yet this lad, Antoine Court, while still almost a boy, received some kind of informal ordination, and became a pastor. He was only nineteen when there arose in his heart the thought of gathering together again the scattered flocks of the faithful Protestants in France, and arranging an ordained ministry and a settled government for “the Church of the Desert” — “the Church under the Cross” as it was most appropriately called. And he actually accomplished it. The name of Antoine Court will be ever remembered as that of the reviver and restorer of French Protestantism after the Revocation.
So much for the “coldness” of Protestantism. There is another thing commonly said of it — that it is negative, that it consists in saying this or that is not so, in exposing and denouncing error. But Protestantism in its essence is not negative, but positive. Primarily it is a witness for, and not a witness against; but though we certainly live by affirmations, not by negations, and “yes” is undoubtedly a better word than “no,” — still, when people want to impose things upon us which would destroy our “yes,” we have got to say “ No” to those things. That is the way, and the only way, in which Protestantism is negative.
A great historian has said, in speaking of Queen Mary, the persecutor — who yet was not so bad as some I could mention, for she had a heart, and that heart was broken by her odious husband, Philip of Spain — “With a broken spirit and bewildered understanding she turned to Heaven for comfort, but instead of Heaven she saw only the false roof of her creed, painted to imitate and shut out the sky.” Could there be a better description of Roman Catholicism than that? The only way in which we Protestants are negative is that we say “No” to that false roof. We will not have it — No! No! No! Down with it! Down with it, even to the ground! Let us look up straight to the glorious sky — to the face of God our Father, Christ our Redeemer, the Spirit our Sanctifier!
Another thing sometimes said, and we fear often thought, about Protestantism is that it is prosaic. It is not supposed, at all events, to present things in a very poetical light. But what if we find, on examination, that Protestantism is the true friend of poetry, and poetry of Protestantism? Our poets at least have thought so. Look at the record of the noblest of our English “lords of the lyre.”
“Shakespeare is with us, Milton is for us.”
Here perhaps you object “Oh, but we cannot be sure what Shakespeare was, because Shakespeare was everybody.” True, he was everybody, in the sense that he could personate everybody, could throw himself into everybody’s mind by his genius. It may be said “God gave unto Shakespeare largeness of heart, like the sand that is upon the sea-shore.” But, without mentioning other good reasons for assuming his Protestantism, do you remember the magnificent eulogy that he puts into the mouth of Cranmer at the baptism of Queen Elizabeth, in his drama or Henry VIII? Surely no one who sympathized with Rome would have chosen to write that — even dramatically!
Of Milton we need not speak. His Protestantism was patent to all the world.
Look now at our own Age. Look at the two great singers of the Victorian Era, both gone from us, and gone assuredly to the presence of their Lord — Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. You can see from the whole trend of his poems what Browning was, and here are two or three lines by way of specimen—
“... Belief’s fire, once for all Makes of the rest mere stuff to show itself.
Why, to be Luther — what a life to lead,
Incomparably better than my own.
He comes, reclaims God’s earth for God,
Sets up God’s rule again by simple means;
He opens a shut book, and all is done.”
Or, those lines from the close of “Christmas Eve,” when he prays that “no worse blessing “than a simple faith may “befall the Pope”—
“Turned sick at last of to-day’s buffoonery,
Of posturings and petticoatings,
Beside his Bourbon bully’s gloatings
In the bloody orgies of drunk poltroonery!”
Tennyson too — you know his “Queen Mary,” and you cannot doubt that he puts into the mouth of Cranmer his own conviction—
“It is but a Communion, not a mass,
A holy Supper, not a Sacrifice.”
You know, too, what he thought of Rome by his splendid ballad of “The Revenge,” where he speaks of—
And he tells us, in words that may well be taken now upon our own lips, of England’s
“ — Legacy of war against the Pope.
From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from age to age,
Till the sea wash her level with her shores,
Or till the Pope be Christ’s.”
May we give you also the testimony of one or two of the minor singers of our day? Some of these have witnessed well for our Protestant Faith; amongst them Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who used to be thought by many a greater poet than her husband. We do not think so now, but we think her a true poet for all that. If there is anything that people do not usually associate with romance, or poetry, it is doctrine, or dogma. They have a way of thinking of “doctrines” as if they were dry and abstract things, chiefly interesting to students of theology, and remote from ordinary feeling and experience. But this must be a mistake; for what are true doctrines but spiritual facts, and what are false doctrines but spiritual lies? And does not what is spiritual pertain to the spirit — that is, to the very highest and the very deepest within us? When poetry at her best touches with a true touch the things of the spirit, then indeed “deep calleth unto deep,” and wonderful is the harmony in which they blend. Hear how Elizabeth Barrett Browning touches a distinctive doctrine — and one of the most distinctive doctrines — of Protestantism — the sole priesthood of Christ—
“Priests, priests! — there’s no such name — God’s own except
Ye take most vainly. Through Heaven’s lifted gate
The priestly ephod in sole glory swept,
When Christ ascended, entered in, and sate
With victor Face sublimely overwept
At Deity’s right hand, to mediate,
He alone, He forever. On His breast
The Urim and the Thummim, fed with fire
From the full Godhead, flicker with the unrest
Of human, pitiful heart-beats. Come up higher,
All Christians.”
Yes, let all Christians “come up higher,” and acknowledge also that Poetry is never more true to herself than when she pours out her gold, her frankincense and her myrrh at the feet of Christ.
Turning from higher themes to what falls unquestionably within the realm of romance, we will quote next the historian-poet who has given us the “Lays of Ancient Rome.” Many of us will remember Lord Macaulay’s spirited song of the Battle of Ivry, the great victory of the Huguenots. Have not our young hearts thrilled to the martial music of its concluding lines—
“Our God hath crushed the tyrant, our God hath raised the slave,
And mock’d the counsel of the wise, and the valor of the brave;
Then glory to His holy Name, from whom all glories are;
And glory to our Sovereign Lord, King Henry of Navarre!”
But since it is ever true that “our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” some of us may love, better than the tale of victory, the simple verses from the same pen that tell the story of failure and disaster—
“O, weep for Moncontour! O, weep for the hour
When the children of darkness and evil had power;
When the horsemen of Valois triumphantly trod
On the bosoms that bled for their rights and their God.
O, weep for Monoontour! O, weep for the slain!
Who for faith and for freedom lay slaughtered in vain;
O, weep for the living who linger to bear
The renegade’s shame, or the exile’s despair!
One look, one last look to the cots and the towers,
To the rows of our vines, and the beds of our flowers;
To the church where the bones of our fathers decayed,
Where we fondly had deemed that our own should be laid.
Alas! we must leave thee, dear desolate home,
To the spearmen of Uri, the shavelings of Rome;
To the serpent of Florence, the sultan of Spain;
To the pride of Anjou, and the guile of Lorraine.
Farewell to thy fountains, farewell to thy shades,
To the song of thy youths, the dance of thy maids;
To the breath of thy gardens, the hum of thy bees,
And the long waving line of the blue Pyrenees.
Farewell and forever! The priest and the slave
May rule in the halls of the free and the brave.
Our hearths we abandon, our lands we resign,
But, Father, we kneel at no altar but Thine.”
Poets, by reason of their mystic gift, have sometimes voiced “thoughts beyond their thought,” telling more than they quite knew themselves. It is doubtful if Macaulay knew how simply and how truly the leaders in that disastrous fight of Moncontour did actually look up to their Father and their God, and find comfort there. This is what happened. After the crushing defeat, Coligny and one of his most trusted councilors, L’Estrange, were borne away on litters, both wounded and both also well-nigh broken-hearted. The road was too narrow for their bearers to walk abreast. But once it widened a little, and L’Estrange asked his to move forward. Then, raising his head, he looked in the face of his chief — who returned his look — but neither of them could speak a word. At last L’Estrange turned away, his eyes filled with tears. But as he did so he said just this, “Si est ce que Dieu est trѐs doux”— “So is it that God is very sweet.” Coligny said Afterward that through this one brief word God Himself spoke to his heart, and restored his courage for the present and his hope for the future.
Nor have other singers and romancers disdained the themes which Protestant Faith and Protestant history afford in such abundance, though certainly in this domain “there remaineth yet very much land to be possessed.”
No; our faith is neither cold, nor negative, nor prosaic. While as for the characters it has formed and the deeds it has inspired — the courage, the endurance, the self-sacrifice, the faithfulness to heavenly and to earthly love—“Unroll the records,” search and read, and let them speak for themselves.
“True to Truth, and brave for Truth, as some at Augsburgh were.”
E. B. BROWNING.