Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typ...os. Excerpt from book: no strange and startling transformation. Persecution was not now to begin; it had long since begun, and was raging with fury in various parts of the realm. The edict only made general and uniform the reign of violence that had hitherto been partial and spasmodic, and threw the mantle of the law about the lawless acts of iniquity. Emigration, too, the emigration to foreign lands that was to deplete France of its best blood, had not now and the em- o begin; the Huguenots had for months been pouring igration. ou of e country in an ever-increasing stream, which not all the king's efforts, not all the barbarous laws he might publish, and the inhuman punishments he might visit upon those that failed to make good their escape, could sensibly retard. Over the borders the Protestants that were so fortunate as to inhabit the provinces touching upon Switzerland, Germany, or the Low Countries had been passing into districts more hospitable to religious freedom. A week before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was published, a news-letter sent to a journal of Harlem from Maastricht, stated that there were in that friendly town already more than two thousand refugees from Sedan. They had come a distance of over eighty miles. The Archbishop of Rheims, after ineffectually trying to proselyte the Reformed of Sedan, had sent the dragoons to accomplish what his persuasions had failed to do, and almost the entire Protestant population had taken to flight. Stragglers?men, women, and children?that had wandered in the woods, daily came in to swell the numbers of the fortunate fugitives.1 The chief difference that is noticeable from this time forward is, that the movement now takes on colossal dimensions. The rivulets become torrents. The flood-gates are opened. On the part of the government there...Detailed info »« Brief info