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AST year I told you how the Refor-
mation was set up quite firmly in
England; and I hope you, dear
young friends, saw how much you
have to be thankful for. God has
spared you such trials and woe as
they had to bear, who lived before the Gospel
was freely made known in this country, and the
Bible became the book for all men. You saw
how, by means which no one could have thought of be-
forehand, these things, which you enjoy, were gained
for Englishmen. There was, however, one thing, which
perhaps you did not notice,-that there had always

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been, from the days when John Wickliff first preached the good news of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ alone, many men in England who desired to see that message told to all their fellow-countrymen. Men who did not want to be bishops, nor ministers of the King, nor commanders of the army, nor, indeed, to be known at all; but who did wish that their Saviour should be known, and that He should rule in every heart, and by His truth govern all the world. Once only did these men show themselves very plainly, and that was when the Parliament rose up against Charles the First, and Oliver Cromwell was made general to fight with him. That which they tried to gain then was what I have just said, and nothing else. It was by the prayers, and lives, and sufferings for righteousness' sake of these men, that the Reformation grew to be so strong in England that nothing could overthrow it.

And now I am about to tell you the story of the Reformation in France. It is a very different tale from that I have been speaking of; but it will show you, quite as plainly as it did, what great blessings you have received from God. It is a story of persecutions from the beginning to the end; and of such persecutions as England never knew. We have had here one war about religion; and in it, they who were on the side of religion conquered. In France there have been wars about religion over and over again; and they conquered who were against it. In England, those who were guilty of nothing but desiring the Bible to be given to all, and the Gospel to be preached as Jesus commanded, were shut up in prisons,

But in France they

and died there by thousands. were hunted and killed by the order of the King, in houses and streets, as if they were wild beasts. And, in France, though there have been some of the noblest and best men that ever followed Christ; there do not appear ever to have been such men, as those I told you had always been found in England. And for this reason, much more than because the Kings persecuted the true Christians, with such wicked fierceness, it happened that, to this very day, the Bible and the Gospel are not free in France. an unhappy country. Sometimes its rulers are tyrants, and no man's life is safe. Sometimes there are no rulers, and every one does what is right in his own eyes. Sometimes every one believes without daring to think for himself all the absurdity and falsehoods the priests tell him. Sometimes, no one will believe anything at all;—no, not even that there is a God in heaven, who made us, and who rules this world and all worlds, in justice and in love! It is an unhappy

country;

it so happy!

It is

and the truth as it is in Jesus would make

I must begin a long while before the Reformation; for I should like you to know as much as these short chapters will contain, of what God has done, in his kind Providence, to show this people the way of life.

Between France and Italy, as any map of Europe will show you, are the Alps; a double or triple range of mountains, so lofty, that the tops of them are always covered with snow, and which, even in the summer time, have glaciers, like rivers of ice, running down

into the valleys. Some of those valleys are nothing but huge clefts in the mountains, surrounded by precipices; and all of them are rocky, and afford little pasture for cattle, or soil for the growth of corn. There used to be no roads at all; travellers made their way across them as well as they could, by the beds of the streams, and by ledges of rock, and pieces that had fallen over the great rifts like bridges. There is always danger from the fall of monstrous masses of snow, called avalanches, some of which have buried whole villages. The streams, too, are torrents, and full of thundering waterfalls. Only the bravest and most hardy races of men could live here; and here it was that, many hundreds of years ago, numbers of those who would not believe in all the wickedness which was taught by the church of Rome, hid themselves from the violence by which the priests tried to force them to believe. Here they lived for a long time, and the world heard little of them. They were wretchedly poor, but they were free; and they could live as disciples of the Saviour should. They were called Waldenses, or Vaudois, which meant, "Men of the Valleys."

The Pope never liked to think of their having the Bible for themselves, and calling Jesus, and not him, Lord but he did not know how to make them submit to him. About seven hundred years ago, a rich merchant of the city of Lyons, named Peter, in the course of his journeys (for merchants in those days travelled about with their goods, and sold them at the fairs, which were held in different places)

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