The destinies of Protestantism in France have, to a singular degree, been at once varied and uniform, confused and simple. After having in the sixteenth century valiantly disputed the victory, it was vanquished, decimated, expelled. But it resisted, and survived not only its defeat, but the gradual process of its enfeeblement and its expulsion. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the French Protestants lost the protection of the laws, their secure sanctuaries, their great chiefs, their great divines, their great writers; but they preserved nevertheless their faith and their religious honor. In the times that ensued their successors remained faithful to the belief and the customs of their fathers; even persecuted and condemned to death, having their property confiscated, or become tenants of prisons and laborers in the galleys, they found in their very sufferings a resource to confirm them in the principles of Protestant piety. {144} Theological controversies died away from among them, leaving behind them the fundamentals of Christianity--living and guiding principles. Among the higher and wealthier classes, the philosophical ideas of the eighteenth century made also their way; the great liberal movement filled the Protestant section of the nation with joy, and commanded its sympathy without detaching it from its religious habits and traditions. In its members faith had ceased to be erudite; the popular Protestant sentiment had been always profoundly biblical and evangelical. Freer and more fortunately situated than their fathers, the French Protestants now anxiously desired to remain, as they had been, Christians; and when, in 1790, Rabaut Saint-Etienne, who succeeded the Abbé de Montesquieu as President of the Constituent Assembly, wrote to his aged father, the Pastor Paul Rabaut, "The President of the National Assembly is at your feet," he manifested to the humble and zealous preacher in the assemblies of the desert, the pride at once of a politician, the piety of a son, and the fidelity of a Protestant. {145} M. Daniel Encontre was, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, the faithful representative of this traditionally religious character of French Protestantism; just as M. Samuel Vincent was the well-meaning and sincere introducer to it of the science and criticism of the Germans. The former corresponded more closely to the pious and national spirit of Protestant France of the olden times; the latter to the tendencies, at once novel and indefinitely latitudinarian, of a foreign philosophy and a foreign erudition. Doubtless, neither measured the range of the religious crisis of which they were themselves the symptoms; neither foresaw that within the bosom of Protestantism that crisis was to be marked by an avowed struggle between Rationalism in its progress and Christianity in its reaction. {146}