Text of a talk given at a Scottish Reformation Society Meeting in Inverness, Monday 1 November, 2010. I have cited from several books on the Huguenots and these are indicated by quotation marks.
Although Antoine Court was born in 1696, I want to begin this presentation of his life and work by going back eleven years to 1685, the year in which the Edict of Nantes was revoked. The Edict had been passed in 1598 by a French King, Henry IV, who had sympathetic leanings towards the Huguenots. The point of the Edict was to provide freedom of worship for Protestants. It also gave them the right to education and to hold public office. Unfortunately Henry was assassinated in 1610 and his successors were strongly opposed to the Protestant religion.(1) Gradually various privileges were taken from the Huguenots, despite their efforts to maintain their natural rights. Eventually, on October 18, 1685, Louis XIV revoked the religious freedoms granted to Protestants by the Edict of Nantes eighty-seven years previously. The Revocation of the edict was very popular throughout the country and not merely among the ruling elite and the army. After the Revocation, the lower class got involved and destroyed Protestant churches and reported Huguenot pastors and people to the authorities.
The Revocation contained twelve articles. Among them were the following nine requirements:
- all remaining Huguenot temples should be destroyed immediately;
- all kinds of religious assemblies were forbidden;
- the upper classes were to cease unauthorised religious practices or they would lose their estates;
- all ministers were given fifteen days to leave the country – otherwise they would be sent to the galleys;
- any ministers who became Roman Catholics would be rewarded;
- all children had to be baptised and brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, and parents who refused to send their children there would be fined;
- Protestant schools were abolished;
- those Protestants who had already fled from France were given four months to return, otherwise they would lose their property;
- all Protestants were forbidden to leave the country, and any who attempted to do so, whether men or women, would be severely punished.
The king’s aim was to remove Protestantism from most of France within a generation. Protestants were not allowed to hold services of public worship and they were not allowed to teach their children about the Protestant faith. Severe penalties were enacted for infringements of the law or by hanging: (1) the penalty for any preacher caught holding a service was death by breaking at the wheel; (2) men who attended a Protestant service faced life sentence as a galley slave and women faced life in a convent; (3) parents who did not send their children for Roman Catholic instruction faced a heavy fine.
In addition, doctors, lawyers, teachers, tax-collectors, grocers, librarians, booksellers, horsemen, domestic servants, etc., if they were Protestants, were not allowed employment. Protestant literature was publicly burned, and Protestant property was confiscated. Dragoons were stationed in Protestant homes and forced entire Protestant communities to conform to Roman Catholicism. Those who would not conform were tortured and imprisoned, and there they were denied food and visitors (except for unwanted visits from monks and priests urging abjuration of the Protestant faith).
The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had several effects on the Protestant church in France. First, because of the ruthlessness of the government, many Protestants, under such pressure, returned to Roman Catholicism and were lost to the Protestant faith (one estimation is that 500,000 returned to the Catholic church in the first three months after the Revocation). Yet within this large number of returnees to Rome we have to distinguish two groups – the frightened and the nominal.
Persecution is an awful experience and there is no doubt that many conformed out of fear of physical pain and of deprivation to their families. We know that such did conform because many, once they were able to flee from France, resumed the Protestant faith and made public repentance of their pretence at accepting Roman Catholic doctrine and practice.(2) Their conforming was wrong, but would we have been braver? We should be thankful that the Lord, in his mercy, gave opportunity to many of them to repent.
Regarding the nominal returnees, it is not surprising that many did conform because their connection to Protestantism was in name only and they had no difficulty in switching religions. The removal of such persons would have reduced the numerical size of the Protestant church and perhaps removed some political clout the Protestant nobility may have had. Yet the return of such people to Roman Catholicism would not have weakened the true strength, that is the spiritual strength, of the Protestant church.
Second, many Protestants chose to emigrate. Since accurate figures were not kept, the exact number cannot be known; nevertheless a figure of 100,000 would be conservative. Indeed the effect of this exodus on the French economy was so marked that the king had to introduce ruthless measures to stop the migration. Yet we can imagine the effect such mass emigration had on a church that was facing such strong persecuting pressure. Of course, great spiritual benefits came through these Huguenots to the countries and communities in which they made a new start.
Third, the arrest, imprisonment, exile and even martyrdom of Protestant pastors resulted in the Protestant church in France becoming largely leaderless. This vacuum allowed for the appearance of strange prophetic movements, the promoters of which made extravagant predictions. Unorthodox doctrines were taught and very few saw the errors.
We can note in passing that those in power mistook completely the real threat to their hold on it. At that time, there were three religious outlooks in the country – a large Roman Catholicism, a small Protestant church, and an even smaller number made up of deists and atheists. The Roman Catholic-dominated authorities chose to wipe out the Protestants and to leave alone the smaller section composed of deists and atheists. In a sense, they achieved their goal of obliterating the Protestant church; in contrast, within a century the small section of deists and atheists had grown so powerful that in the French Revolution they removed the monarchy from the throne, sent many of the nobility and government officials to the guillotine, and removed the Roman Catholic church from its place of power. In trying to destroy only the Protestant church, the regime arranged for its own downfall.
Louis XIV died in 1715, thirty years after he issued the Revocation. These three decades had been years of intense persecution of the Protestants. The temples of the Huguenots were in ruins, and any preacher who attempted to take a service in a secret location knew that if he was caught death would be the result, as well as various punishments for his listeners. Louis XIV was very pleased with his success so far in stamping out the Reformed Faith, yet he was not satisfied and wanted to ensure that even surviving remnants of Reformed Christians would be destroyed. So in March 1715, when he was seventy-seven, he enacted new laws designed to punish any dying Protestants who refused to take the Roman rites. The bodies of such were to be drawn through the streets and then flung on the local rubbish tip.
Yet around the time of the king’s death, a young man rose to prominence in the Church of the Desert in the south of France. We now turn to the story of Antoine Court.
The Church of the Desert
Why this name? As we have seen, state-organised persecution had caused the believers to meet in secret or deserted places where they could speak together about the things of God. The link with the biblical concept of the desert was used by themselves as a mark of identification, and was even used by their enemies as a description. The Huguenots identified themselves with this concept in a threefold manner: (1) They were like the children of Israel travelling through a desert to the promised land; (2) they were like John the Baptist who became a voice in the desert against the corrupt established religion; (3) they were like the woman in the Book of Revelation who, because of persecution by the dragon, fled into the desert and found safety there from God. It was in this religious environment that Antoine Court was reared.
Antoine was born in 1696 in Villaneuve de Berg, a village in Southern France, to parents who were poor in earthly terms but who were rich in heavenly ways. Before he was born, his parents dedicated him to God as a Protestant minister, even although persecution was then at its height. His father died when he was four years old, and although she lived in an unfriendly locality his mother determined to bring him up, along with two siblings, in the Protestant faith.
Young Antoine revealed from an early age that his sympathies were with the persecuted Huguenots. He was reviled in his community as ‘the eldest son of Calvin’, both by children and adults. His adherence to the Protestant faith made school difficult, so he taught himself as much as he could, including study of the Bible. His determination paid off, and he became very knowledgeable, and more importantly even as a teenager he became mighty in the scriptures.
Antoine began attending the forbidden Huguenot meetings when he was a child. The story of his first attendance is moving. He suspected correctly that his mother was attending one of the meetings. So on one occasion he followed her and discovered that she was attending a small gathering of Huguenot women, during which each exhorted one another. Because he was so young, he found it difficult to walk to the meetings, so others attending the services used to carry him.
These gatherings did not have regular preaching by a trained pastor. Instead individuals would address the gatherings. Antoine, by the age of seventeen, was used as a Bible reader in the gatherings, but during one meeting he felt compelled to address the gathering and his hearers quickly realised that he was a gifted preacher. Soon he was travelling to preach in different places, some a considerable distance away. He possessed great physical energy and was marked by courage. On one occasion, he went to Marseilles where the royal galleys were located. About 300 Huguenots were galley slaves and Antoine managed to make contact with them and organise a system by which they could engage in a form of worship.
As he made his preaching tours, Antoine found that there were problems in the methods adopted by the Huguenot gatherings. We must remember that the Protestant church had been deprived of its pastors because of persecution and therefore instability and innovations were inevitable.
First, Court was aware that many who had succumbed to the pressure to abandon Protestantism and return to Catholicism were still Protestants at heart.
Second, he was very concerned about persons who claimed to speak under divine inspiration (but clearly did not). This state of things in the Huguenots had two negative consequences. One was that preaching was despised. ‘I found that the prevailing disorder and the unfortunate affair of the Camisards, in conjunction with fanaticism, had so alienated the minds of the Protestants themselves and brought [religious matters] into such disrepute, that everybody and everything styled “preacher” or “assembly” was viewed with a sort of horror.’ The other negative consequence was that the notion that anyone could preach meant that any person who wanted to could attempt to do so. Both men and women preached and such lack of control opened the door of the church to sinful people.
Third, he had come across many Huguenots who had remained committed to their faith.
These three factors led him to resolve to do something about the state of the Protestant religion. The first step in recovering it was for Court to call a meeting of suitable persons to discuss the issues.
The first synod
In August, 1715, Antoine arranged for all the preachers in the Cevennes and in Lower Languedoc, along with some suitable laymen, to meet at Monoblet in southern France. They met in a deserted quarry and had to use stones for seats and writing tables. Only nine persons, not all preachers, attended this gathering (one well-known Huguenot preacher called Pierre Corteiz was unable to attend because he was abroad; if he had been present, every preacher currently in the region would have been there). It is striking to observe that the only one of the preachers present that day who did not eventually suffer a martyr’s death was Court himself. At the meeting Court explained to those gathered why they needed to restore order among their people. Having heard this explanation, the meeting appointed him as its moderator and secretary. So occurred the first synod of the Church in the Desert.(3)
The first item on their agenda was the making of elders and they chose the laymen present to fulfil this role. It was the intention ‘that elders should be established in all places where preaching and preachers were welcomed.’ Elders were expected to fulfil a fivefold task: ‘They were to be charged, first, with watching over the flocks in the absence of the pastors, and over the conduct of the pastors themselves; in the second place, with selecting suitable places for holding the meetings; thirdly, with gathering them with all possible prudence and secrecy; fourthly, with making collections to help the poor and prisoners; fifthly, with providing sure places of shelter for the preachers and furnishing them with guides to conduct them from one locality to another.’
A second matter concerned two resolutions proposed by Court: ‘the first, that, according to Saint Paul’s command, women should hereafter be forbidden to preach; the second, that it be ordained to hold to the Sacred Scriptures as the only rule of faith, and that, consequently, all the pretended revelations which were in vogue among us should be rejected, not only because they had no foundation in the Scriptures, but also because of the great abuses which they had created. These two articles were carried by a majority of the votes.’
Nevertheless they had a major problem and this matter was connected to the issue of ordination to the ministry. None of the preachers present, including Court, had been ordained ecclesiastically, mainly because there had not been an organised Protestant ecclesiastical body in France in recent decades. So while these men were able to preach, they did not regard themselves as set apart for dispensing the sacraments. ‘They preached because the oppressed Protestants, deprived by violence of the opportunity of obtaining spiritual nourishment, hungered and thirsted for instruction, and because no others came forward able or willing to make the perilous attempt to satisfy in some measure that hunger and thirst.’
The synod concluded that the two men who should be ordained were Corteiz and Court and it was decided that they should be sent to churches in other countries in order to be ordained. Since Corteiz was the elder man, he was sent first. He travelled to Switzerland: first, he went to Geneva, but the inhabitants were reluctant to do anything that could offend France. A similar response was given in Berne. Eventually he was ordained by pastors in Zurich on August 15th, 1718, three years after the first meeting of the synod of the Church of the Desert.
The original plan had been for Court to go abroad for ordination after Corteiz returned, but this was changed when Corteiz returned, having been ordained. It was now possible for Corteiz to ordain Court and a meeting for this purpose was arranged. In the afternoon of the chosen day, November 21, 1718, Court was examined by Corteiz and another man called Colom on his theological understanding, especially on the differences between Protestant and Roman Catholic beliefs, an examination which he easily passed. His abilities were greatly appreciated by those who attended.
‘But the enthusiasm of the day was as nothing in comparison with the wild joy of the evening, when in the joint meeting of several neighbouring churches gathered to witness the scene, the eloquent young preacher himself addressed an appreciative audience upon the duties of the office with which he was about to be invested, and praised Almighty God that, touched at length by the unhappy state of His church in France, He was raising up ministers for her at the very time when her enemies were most infuriated and most bent upon her destruction.. The pious excitement reached its height when Court knelt before Corteiz, and the latter placing a copy of the Bible upon the candidate's head and laying on his clasped hands, conferred upon him, in the name of Jesus Christ, and by the authority of the synod, the right to exercise all the functions of the ministry. Then did the gladness of the spectators burst forth, exceeding all bounds; and, amid exclamations of praise and thanksgiving, the whole assembly, at the suggestion of the revered examiner of the morning, joined in singing the words of the one hundred and second psalm, of Theodore Beza’s metrical version, so appropriate to the occasion… The emotion manifested was extraordinary and striking. But it was not strange nor misplaced. Since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes no similar event had taken place. Antoine Court was the first Protestant pastor ordained in France since the proscription of the Reformed faith.’
Growth of the Church of the Desert
The original meeting of the synod in 1715, three years before Court’s ordination, had taken place around the same time as a new king came to the throne in France. Louis XV was only a boy of five, which meant that the government was in the hands of regents. His reign was to last 59 years, and during that long period the laws against the Huguenots remained on the statute book. It is true that at times some of the severities that marked the previous kings were reduced, yet it was still dangerous to practice the Reformed Faith. The Churches of the Desert faced a prolonged period of great difficulty as under the leadership of Antoine Court it attempted to revive the Reformed faith in France.
Initially the Huguenots had great hopes that freedom of worship would mark the new reign and large numbers of them returned from refugee life in foreign countries. Meetings for worship were held in various places, including Paris, and often attended by large numbers. Yet the relaxation was short-lived and the government resumed its crackdown. Among its victims was one of the men who had attended the first meeting of the Synod. Etienne Arnaud was hanged in Montpelier because he preached at a service in the area. Initially some Huguenots had wanted to try and rescue him from the government troops, and it is assumed that they could have done so by force of numbers. But Court, who was a very close friend of Arnaud’s, counselled against such an act of rebellion and said: ‘Better were it that a brother should seal the truths he has preached by a death that may edify and be fruitful to the church, than that, by his rescue, blame should be drawn down upon the Protestant religion and disastrous consequences upon the province.’
Yet despite the strength of the opposition and the ferocious punishments (men sent to the galleys, women sent to convents, children taken from them), the Churches of the Desert began to grow. In 1821, five years after the first meeting of the synod, one of the king’s advisors wrote in a letter: ‘I am advised that no traces are left of [Roman Catholic] religion in certain provinces, in which the curates sometimes find themselves alone in their churches; that the meetings of the Protestants are frequent and public, that the signal of the bell for the mass, on Sunday, serves to call together the meetings of the preachers, and that the priest when he leaves the altar frequently hears at the door of his church the singing of the psalms of Marot.’
In 1822, Court married a young Huguenot woman who he had met on one occasion when he was hiding from spies. During his travels, she remained in her home town of Uzes and was never seen in Court’s company. It was obvious that she had married because three children came along, and spies were curious to discover the identity of the husband. Meantime Antoine continued his preaching circuit.
In 1823, the Bishop of Alais informed Paris that ‘The meetings that previously were very rare and very secret have become so frequent, public, and well attended that there have been some of more than three thousand persons, and with as many as four hundred horses at hand. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were administered, preachers were commissioned, and the singing of psalms was heard as far as in the neighbouring villages, and, although men knew that the carrying of arms made their meetings still more criminal, scarcely any were held where there were not found a number of armed persons to favour escape in case of surprise. Our churches, which they formerly frequented, at least out of regard for men, are at present forsaken; there are large parishes in which there can scarcely be found a single Catholic to wait upon the curates in their ministry. Parents cease to send their children to our schools.... The children whom we have reared with great care in the doctrines of the church, soon fall into error and succumb to the caresses or hard usage of their parents.... Within a few years we have perceived that a great number of New Converts who appeared to have sincerely returned to the Catholic faith and who persevered in it for a long time, suddenly stopped attending our churches and plunged into error and disorder. But what touches us most keenly and may have disastrous consequences, is the fall of many Old Catholics who are being perverted. There is scarcely a town or village where sad examples of this cannot be seen, and the number of such is increasing every day.’
What was the response of the authorities to this letter of complaint? ‘In consequence of these representations, the then Regent, the Duke of Bourbon, sent down an urgent order to the authorities to carry out the law – to prevent meetings, under penalty of death to preachers, and imprisonment at the galleys to all who attended them, ordering that the people should be forced to go to church and the children to school, and reviving generally the severe laws against Protestantism issued by Louis XIV. The result was that many of the assemblies were shortly after attacked and dispersed, many persons were made prisoners and sent to the galleys, and many more preachers were apprehended, racked, and hanged.’
As the church has often experienced, persecution and growth go hand-in-hand. Meetings had to be very carefully arranged because there were spies everywhere. Elders were normally responsible for arranging a meeting and its location was passed on by word of mouth. Some would walk ten miles to be there. Before Court had re-arranged the system, 100 in attendance was a good gathering. After the re-arranging, it was common for pastors to have congregations twenty times larger.
Although persecution was still being ruthlessly enforced, many young men offered themselves as pastors. These men were thoroughly trained by Court, but the method adopted was unusual. They followed Court as he travelled to preach in different places. Whenever they found a suitable spot, they would have their theological class, sometimes in the open air. For several days, they would study doctrines, Bible passages and other matters, sometimes listening to Court, at other times discussing an issue of importance. All had to participate, and in order to ensure they did, Court would usually ask the youngest to state his opinion, after which the others contributed in turn. They also discussed one another’s sermons.
Court was fully aware that this method could not continue, and that a regular school for training pastors was needed. One problem was an almost complete lack of funds because the Huguenots had no assets.(4) In order to rectify the situation, Court decided to approach sympathisers in foreign countries for help. He wrote to Huguenot refugees in Holland and England, and even obtained promise of support from William Wake, then the Archbishop of Canterbury. In order to obtain regular support, Court went to Switzerland to try and arrange support from Huguenots there. Having explained the situation in France, especially the need for trained pastors, it was agreed to start one in Lausanne. A committee, composed of refugees, was formed to continue raising support for the school as well as for the preachers and pastors in France. Eventually support came from several countries (including £550 annually from the British monarch). The school was started in 1726, and over the next quarter of a century it prepared about 100 pastors, many of whom were put to death for their preaching once they returned to France.(5)
Court himself was the main target of the authorities. ‘Repeated attempts were made to apprehend Antoine Court, as being the soul of the renewed Protestant organization. A heavy reward was offered for his head. The spies and police hunted after him in all directions. Houses where he was supposed to be concealed were surrounded by soldiers at night, and every hole and corner in them ransacked. Three houses were searched in one night. Court sometimes escaped with great difficulty. On one occasion he remained concealed for more than twenty hours under a heap of manure. His friends endeavoured to persuade him to leave the country until the activity of the search for him had passed.’ Court saw the wisdom in their request, even although some of his colleagues disagreed with his decision to move to Switzerland. He was also concerned about his family because he suspected that the authorities had discovered the identity of his wife. So he moved his family to Switzerland in 1829, with himself reaching Geneva a few months later.
Court was only thirty-three, but he had been helping the Protestant cause for almost two decades. Despite the intense persecution, staggering results had been achieved under God’s blessing. ‘Court had begun his work in 1715, at which time there was no settled congregation in the South of France. The Huguenots were only ministered to by occasional wandering pastors. In 1729, the year in which Court finally left France, there … were now over 200,000 recognised Protestants in Languedoc alone. The ancient discipline had been restored; 120 churches had been organized; a seminary for the education of preachers and pastors had been established; and Protestantism was extending in Dauphiny, Beam, Saintonge, and other quarters. Such were, in a great measure, the results of the labours of Antoine Court and his assistants during the previous fifteen years.’
In Switzerland
I mentioned earlier the concern expressed by Court’s friends over his decision to move to the security of Switzerland. Some pastors accused him of putting his family before his faith, and the churches which he founded pled with him to remain as a travelling preacher and leader among them. But he refused to listen to their suggestions. It was not because he had put his family first or because he had lost affection for the churches. Instead he had several valid reasons. First, he had to raise money for the support of pastors and preachers in France and for the seminary in Lausanne. Second, he wanted to help the many Huguenot refugees in Switzerland. Third, he wanted to inform the Protestant public in Europe of the horrendous suffering being endured by the Protestants in France, which he did by letters and by writing books about the situation. It takes a wise man to know the right time to move on in God’s providence.
From 1730 onwards, Court immersed himself in helping the Huguenot cause from exile. He was able to return to Languedoc fourteen years later, during a period of respite in the state persecution because a war in which France was engaged had caused the soldiers to leave the region. One reason for his visit was to reconcile a pastor who was involved in a dispute, and Court received a great welcome. He stayed for a month, preaching virtually every day to large congregations. At one gathering in Nismes, the congregation numbered over 20,000. What a change from earlier days when numbers could be about a hundred. He also attended a national synod meeting at which he was appointed Deputy General for Protestant countries. The role assigned him to obtain funds from exiled Huguenots in order to help the church in France and allow students to study at the seminary in Lausanne. He had been doing this for years, so perhaps it was a long overdue recognition.(6)
In 1753, Court published an important defence of the Church of the Desert – the title in English is The French Impartial Patriot. He argued that historically French Protestants had always been faithful to the monarchy, that those attending meetings of the Church of the Desert meetings were not seditious, and that the only desire of French Protestants was to worship according to freedom of conscience. The persecution did continue, although signs appeared that indicated it was abating, so it is possible that Court’s book had some effect.
Court died on June 17, 1760, at the age of 64, five years after his wife. His bodily powers had been failing for some years before his death, probably caused by the intensity of his labours for the Protestant church in France. For almost fifty years, he had been devoted to the Huguenot cause. He was busy to the end, actually engaged in writing a history of the Huguenots, although it has never been published.
Court spent two decades in France itself and three in Switzerland. They had been years of fierce persecution of the Protestants in France, although the ferocity was beginning to decline by 1760. France was about to enter other periods of uncertainty, leading up to the French Revolution of 1789, when many of the ruling party in the government and the Catholic church, as well as some political Protestants, ended their lives at the guillotine. It can hardly be denied that many reaped what they sowed, and much of that sowing was done in the fields of the Huguenots.
The Protestant church in France was affected by the French Revolution of 1789 and subsequent historical developments. In the early nineteenth century, Napoleon put in place a system which ensured that Roman Catholicism was the national religion of France but also guaranteed the rights of Protestants. The Protestant church had to re-organise itself, and it had to take into account the effects of revivals, the changing ideas in theology, and the discoveries of modern science. Perhaps the biggest challenge then, as well as now, was the indifference of the people in general to religion. It may be that the greatest consequence of Antoine Court’s work was that he was the means, under God, of ensuring that thousands heard the gospel in a saving manner, whether from himself, the pastors he trained, and the preachers he guided. In heaven, I’m sure, many give thanks to God for raising up this gifted servant, and we should do the same.
Lessons from the life of Antoine Court
The obvious lesson concerns the amount that God can do with one man who is totally devoted to his cause. There is no doubt that dedication to the Lord is stamped over everything that Antoine Court did. Obviously, the Lord took care of him providentially in preserving his life on numerous occasions. For years, he was only one step ahead of the government’s spies and soldiers. He was often in danger of his life. Yet through him and his friends God did a great work. Court’s sense of self-discipline was extraordinary and his commitment was wholehearted. He did not receive any financial help from the Huguenots during the early years of the persecution, yet he remained faithful to his calling.
A second lesson is that timing belongs to God. After all, he is the God of providence, and out of many examples here are two. As we saw, at the very time when Louis IV imagined he had destroyed the Protestant cause, there was a teenager in the south of France thinking about how the Protestant cause could be restored. When Court sensed that he should go to live in Switzerland in 1829, God had already provided the church in France with a leader to carry on Court’s work there – Paul Rabout. The study of Rabout’s life is as rewarding and challenging as that of Court.
Third, we see once again the truth of Tertullian’s dictum that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. The Protestant cause in France has suffered great oppression, both at the time of the Reformation and later on during the persecutions after the Revocation of the Treaty of Nantes. Men were sent to the galleys (some were there for decades), women and children were put into convents, and pastors were executed (hangings caused great excitement). Such are only the official sentences. Many attending public services were mown down by soldiers, Huguenot women were raped by soldiers, families lost their property, and even the dead bodies of Huguenots were abused. Yet the church continued to grow.
Fourth, we can also see that persecution in itself can lead to disturbing practices that will hinder the growth of the church. This happened when there was a lack of pastors and church discipline, which allowed the appearance of ranters and others claiming to speak for God under divine inspiration. Antoine Court realised this early on and it was his quick insertion of church structures that provided a framework within which the persecuted Protestant cause could continue to develop amid much harassment and ferocious opposition. Looking back to that awful period, it is clear that meetings of elders and of synods helped the suffering church in a great manner.
Fifth, there was the use of lay preachers to help the pastors with their work. A look at the figures of pastors throughout Court’s life reveals that the Church in the Desert never had sufficient pastors in order to have one in every congregation.(7) It was possible for elders to read a sermon of one of the pastors in a service, a practice that was common. Yet use was also made of persons capable of exhorting.(8) Who can tell how much good was done by these unknown persons!
Sixth, this period showed the value of teaching children about the faith. One of the striking features of the Huguenot gatherings was the presence of children at their meetings. This was the case with Court himself, who accompanied his mother from a young age. The parents knew that they might pay a heavy price because, if caught, the children would be taken from them and sent to convents. Yet one reason for the continuation of the Huguenot cause throughout several decades of intense hostility was the faithfulness of these children once they grew into adulthood. I have no idea what happened to the children who were sadly taken from their parents and put into convents. I would suspect that many of them would not have forgotten what they had been taught at home and in the gatherings.
Much more could be said about Antoine Court. Unfortunately not much is available in English. Yet he is a reminder that the Lord had and has his servants in many places where English is not spoken, where they are working for him in dangerous situations, and sowing the seed of the gospel. If nothing else, his life should challenge us to pray for France (a land of Protestant martyrs) and to pray for persecuted churches in the world today.
Endnotes
(1) One reason was the possibility that the Protestant cities and areas could prevent government decisions from functioning nationwide. Inevitably the Protestants attempted to organise themselves because they knew that they were going to come under attack sooner or later. There were very competent Protestant political and military leaders, and they put in place what can be described as a state within a state.
(2) On one occasion in London in 1687, two years after the Revocation, 497 such persons publicly confessed their repentance at conforming under pressure to accept Roman Catholicism.
(3) Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a regional synod. Similar local synods were held in 1717, 1718 (the one in which Court was ordained), 1720, and 1721. A national synod, with delegates from three provinces, was held in 1726. Further national synods met in 1727, 1730, 1744, 1748, 1756, 1758 and 1763; one reason for the time gaps between them was the intense persecution of the Protestants. The details are taken from the Musée Virtuel du Protestantisme Français.
(4) Court, himself, received nothing from the churches in France between 1713 and 1723.
(5) The seminary in Lausanne functioned until 1812. Its outlook changed somewhat after Court’s death in 1760. As opposition disappeared, the seminary became more like a theological institution rather than a training school for pastors in times of persecution.
(6) Benjamin Duplan, whom Court had met in Geneva in the 1820s, had been given this role by the 1727 synod.
(7) In 1718 the ‘Church of the Desert’ had three pastors; in 1730 there were 12 pastors for 120 churches; in 1744 there were 28 pastors for 300 churches; in 1756 there were 48 pastors and18 ordinands; in 1770, there were about 100 pastors; in 1788, there were 180 pastors. In 1778 there were 472 Churches.
(8) For example, in 1763, there were 62 pastors, 35 preachers, and 15 students.
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