The Huguenots: A Study of a Minority, Part II
J.B. Morrall offers his study of the events that led to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and of the French Calvinists’ fortunes thereafter, both at home and abroad, down to the beginning of the present century.
It might have seemed, after the removal of the Huguenots’ political privileges in 1629, that the way was open to their peaceful absorption into the body of the nation, and even to a mutually accepted union between the two confessions.
The prospects for such a rapprochement were improved by the undoubted fact that, in both theory and practice, Catholics and Protestants had moved closer to each other in France.
Catholic teachers such as St. Francis de Sales laid emphasis on personal piety as a necessary accompaniment of participation in corporate religious observance. Jansenism, though ultimately condemned, did much to make clear that Catholicism as well as Protestantism believed in the central importance of God’s freely given grace for the achievement of salvation.
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