ABOUT three hundred and fifty years ago, when the Reformation was just beginning, a poor artisan named Bernard Palissy was wandering about Germany, trying to earn a living by the labor of his hands. He could glaze windows, mend furniture, paint on glass, and turn his hand to various other useful employments. Wherever he went he heard men talk of one Martin Luther, and of a book called the Bible. His curiosity was excited by the things which were told him, and he determined to learn to read; and so at length he began to study a copy of the Bible to which he occasionally had access.
By the time he was thirty years old, that is to say in 1540, Palissy had become a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. He now settled at Paris, where he painted and glazed, mended broken crockery, and made himself generally useful. Seeing one day a beautiful piece of pottery, he determined to try and imitate it. The story of his perseverance is a long one. Experiment after experiment was made, only to end in failure. On one occasion he sat by his furnace for days and nights without changing his clothes. During his last attempt, when the fuel began to run short, he rushed into his house, seized and broke up sundry articles of furniture, and hurled them into the furnace to keep up the heat. Such perseverance was sure to succeed; but in the meantime Palissy was reduced to poverty, besides which he suffered much mockery and persecution, even from his own family.
In the midst of his distress, he used to comfort himself by calling to mind passages of the Scripture which he had learned by heart. Unable to afford a Bible, he succeeded in copying out several extracts from one which was sometimes lent to him, and he was in the habit of calling his neighbors together to listen to the Word of God. This was a very common plan in those days. In some districts the poor people used to arrange to learn different parts of the Bible by heart, so that, if their books were seized and burnt, as was too often the case, they might fall back upon the various portions of Scripture which they had committed to memory.
Amongst Palissy’s friends at that time was a remarkable man named Hamelin. He had become converted through reading the Bible, and had learned the art of printing on purpose that he might multiply Bibles. He then became a colporteur on his own account, for there were colporteurs even in those days. Staff in hand and basket on back, through heat and cold, by lonely ways, such faithful men as Hamelin used to go from door to door, often at the risk of their lives, not knowing in the morning where they should lay their head at night. After a time Hamelin was imprisoned, and “hanged like a common thief,” because of his love of the Word of God, though Palissy went to remonstrate with the magistrates and point out what a crime it was thus to shed innocent blood.
Meanwhile Palissy’s work was spreading. The little town of Saintes, where he lived, became a center of good. “In those days,” he writes, “might be seen, on Sundays, bands of workpeople abroad in the meadows, singing psalms and spiritual songs, or reading and instructing one another. There might also be seen girls and maidens seated in groups, in gardens, singing hymns; or boys diligently listening to the teaching of their elders. Not only were the habits and ways of the people changed, but even their countenances seemed to be improved.
Such a state of things was too good to last, and soon persecution began. All followers of the Bible were condemned to be burnt, and terrible scenes took place. Palissy was now famous for his pottery, which was very fortunate for him, as it ensured him some protection when he was seized and charged with heresy. “I assure you,” he writes to his noble protector, the Duke of Montmorency, “my enemies have really no cause against me, except that I have many times shown them certain passages of Scripture.” He was afterward made potter to the Queen of France, and worked at the Tuileries, or Tile-works, in Paris. When he was seventy-eight years old he was again arrested, and imprisoned in the Bastile. Though so old and feeble, his spirit was brave as ever. He was as determined now in holding to the truth as he had been forty years before in finding out how to enamel pottery. At length Henry III. of France, who had a high regard for him, went to see him. “My good man,” he said, “you have now served my mother and myself for forty-five years. We have put up with your religion as long as possible. But now I am so constrained by others to let justice be done, that I must leave you in the hands of your enemies, and tomorrow you will be burnt unless you return to the Roman Catholic Church.”
“Sire,” said the brave old man, “I am ready to give my life for the glory of God. You have often said that you have pity on me; now I have pity on you, for you say you are constrained by others. Such words ought not to fall from a king’s mouth. At any rate, no constraint will have any effect on me, for I know how to die.”
Palissy was not burnt on the following day, but he was kept in prison, and there he died in the course of the next year, thanking God that he was permitted to suffer on Christ’s account.
Thus lived, and thus died, one of France’s noblest sons. Would that God might raise up many such Frenchmen as Palissy, the Potter!