MEMOIRS

OF THE

REFORMATION IN FRANCE,

AND OF THE LIFE OF THE

REV. JAMES SAURIN.

The Preface to the First Volume of a Translation of

SAURIN'S SERMONS.

[THE THIRD EDITION: PRINTED 1800.]

MEMOIRS, &c.

THE celebrated Mr. Saurin, was a French refugee, who, with thousands of his countrymen, took shelter in Holland from the persecutions of France. The lives, and even the sermons, of the refugees are so closely connected with the history of the reformation in France, that we présume, a short sketch of the state of religion in that kingdom till the banishment of the protestants by Lewis XIV. will not be disagreeable to some of the younger part of our readers.

Gaul, which is now called France, in the timé of Jesus Christ, was a province of the Roman empire, and some of the apostles planted christianity in it. In the first centuries, while christianity continued a rational religion, it extended and supported itself without the help, and against the persecutions, of the Roman emperors. Numbers were converted from paganism, several christian societies were formed, and many eminent men, having spent their lives in preaching and writing for the advancement of the gospel, sealed their doctrine with their blood

In the fifth century, Clovis I. a pagan king of France, fell in love with Clotilda, a christian princess of the house of Burgundy, who agreed to marry him only on condition of his becoming a christian, to which he consented, 491. The king, however, delayed the performance of this condition till five years after his marriage, when, being engaged in a desperate battle, and having reason to fear the total defeat of his army, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and put up this prayer: : God of Queen Clotilda! grant me the victory, and I row to be baptized, and thenceforth to worship no other God but thee! He obtained the victory, and at his return, was baptized at Rheims, Dec. 25, 496. His sister, and more than three thousand of his subjects, followed his example, and christianity became the professed religion of France.

Conversion implies the cool exercise of reason; and whenever passion takes the place, and does the office of reason, conversion is nothing but a name. Baptism did not wash away the sins of Clovis; before it he was vile, after it he was infamous, practising all kinds of treachery and cruelty. The court, the army, and the common people, who were pagan when the king was pagan, and christian when he was christian, continued the same in their morals after their conversion as before. When the christian church, therefore, opened her doors, and delivered up her keys to these new converts, she gained nothing in comparison of what she lost. She increased the num

ber, the riches, the pomp, and the power, of her family; but she resigned the exercise of reason, the sufficiency of scripture, the purity of worship, the grand simplicity of innocence, truth, and virtue, and became a creature of the state. A virgin before she become a prostitute now.

Such christians, in a long succession, converted christianity into something worse than paganism. They elevated the christian church into a temporal kingdom, and they degraded temporal kingdoms into fiefs of the church. They founded dominion in grace, and they explained grace to be a love of dominion. And by these means they completed that general apostacy, known by the name of Popery, which St. Paul had foretold, 1 Tim. iv. 1. and which rendered the reformation of the sixteenth century essential to the interests of all mankind.

The state of religion at that time (1515) was truly deplorable. Ecclesiastical government, instead of that evangelical simplicity, and fraternal freedom, which Jesus Christ and his apostles had taught, was become a spiritual domination under the form of a temporal empire. An innumerable multitude of dignities, titles, rights, honours, privileges, and pre-eminences belonging to it, and were all dependent on a sovereign priest, who, being an absolute monarch, required every thought to be in subjection to him. The chief ministers of religion were actually become temporal princes, and the high priest, being absolute sovereign of the ecclesiastical state, had his court and his council,