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The French
Protestant (Huguenot)
Church
Corner of Church and
Queen Streets, CHARLESTON
Transcribed for
South Carolina Genealogy Trails by D. Whitesell
THE FRENCH
PROTESTANT CHURCH IN THE CITY OF CHARLESTON
"The Huguenot
Church”
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CHURCH AND TWO ADDRESSES
DELIVERED ON THE
TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIFTH
ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDING OF THE CHURCH, APRIL
FOURTEENTH, NINETEEN HUNDRED AND TWELVE
WALKER,
EVANS & COGSWELL CO., CHARLESTON, S. C.,
1912
THE FRENCH PROTESTANT
CHURCH IN THE CITY OF CHARLESTON
"THE HUGUENOT
CHURCH"
The congregation worshipping at the corner of
Church and Queen Streets, in the City of Charleston, South
Carolina, represents today, as it has done for perhaps a
century, the only Huguenot Church in all America which
continues its distinctive service. The adherents of this
church had grown strong and self-sustaining by the year 1687.
But, although we know that the Huguenots in the first few
years of their residence in the Province of Carolina had
established four, and probably five, churches between the
Santee River and the coast, yet only this congregation held
together beyond the middle of the eighteenth century; while at
least two of the country churches resigned their separate
existence soon after the year 1700.
The first colony on
the Carolina coast was planted by Huguenots under Jean
Ribault, in 1562. This settlement failed, but after the lapse
of a hundred years, when Carolina had begun to fill up as an
English Province, we again find Huguenots migrating, and they
were, indeed, the first people to preach the Gospel in the
country districts around Charleston.
But when an
emigrant pastor died there was always difficulty in securing a
successor, while the people had to meet the terrible ravages
of a malarial climate, whose diseases they had not the means
or knowledge to combat. The mortality at Jamestown, on
the Santee River, one of the principal settlements, was so
great that it had soon to be abandoned. Then there were the
troubles of new and untried conditions, with lack of roads and
easy means of transportation, and the absence of many
facilities of life.
The congregations had to care for a
percentage of very poor members, and even those who had been
rich in France had generally escaped with the loss of their
estates. On the other hand, the Church Act of 1706,
established the Church of England, giving it permanence and
support from the public funds, and at the same time placing
other religious bodies under some
disabilities.
Episcopal ministers were sent out from
England, and in order to attract the refugees, the English
service was translated into French, and many pious families,
availing themselves of church privileges which were thus
rendered more regular and stable than their own, ultimately
became affiliated with the Episcopal communion.
The
absorption of the Carolina Huguenots was not different from
the experience of their brethren elsewhere. Half a century
ago, it was stated by a careful enquirer, that only two
Huguenot Churches were then to be found in England, although
so many thousands of exiled French had taken root
there.
Notwithstanding the large migration of French
protestants to Virginia and New York, and the considerable
settlements made by them in New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts and North Carolina, as early as 1836 the church
in Charleston had the distinction of being the sole survivor
in America.
But the church and its records have had a
vicissitudinous history. Twice are its
records known to have been lost. In 1740 a conflagration
visited Charleston, and though the church itself was not
burnt, the archives, which were probably at some officer's
home, were destroyed, leaving considerable breaks in our
knowledge of the previous history of the
organization.
Again, during the War between the States,
when Charleston had become unsafe, a box of invaluable
records, and the communion service were sent to Cheraw, in the
interior, for safekeeping, but, after the Federal army had
visited the town, in 1865, no trace of the property could ever
be obtained. This is published in the dim hope that it may be
seen by some one who can aid in the discovery of the lost
treasure.
On June 13, 1796, during what is called by
old writers "a great fire" in Charleston, the French Church
itself was blown up in an unsuccessful effort to arrest the
flames, but the church books are not supposed to have been
lost on that occasion.
Mr. Daniel Ravenel (1789-1873)
had prepared a history of the church, supported by many
valuable documents and publications, prior to the War between
the States, but its publication was interrupted, and when he
resumed the work after the War, so much had been lost, that he
could make only a partial restoration. This post-bellum paper
was published by the Huguenot Society of South Carolina in
1900, in Transactions No. 7.
It is practically certain
that the first pastor of the Huguenots in Charleston was the
Rev. Elias Prioleau, who had succeeded his father as pastor of
a large flock in Pons, in Bretagne, where, during a short but
heroic career, he and his congregation had been in constant
peril. His church was torn down on April 15, 1685, in the
violent persecutions attendant upon the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, and he came to Carolina followed by a large
portion of his people, and served the Charleston church until
his death in the Fall of 1699. He seems for a time to have
been assisted by Rev. Florent Philipe Trouillard, who
subsequently removed to St. John's, Berkeley, to serve one or
more of the country churches.
The form of government of the
French church is Presbyterian, although the service is
liturgical. Its confession is said to have been the work of
Calvin himself, and was adopted by the first Synod in France,
assembled at Paris in 1559, under the title " Confession de
Foi, faite d'un commun accord par les Eglises Reformees du
Royaume de France." The liturgy is translated from that of the
churches in the principalities of Neufchatel and Vallangin,
from their second edition, published in 1737, with some minor
adaptations to local needs.
The refugees brought with
them the hymns of Clement Marot and Theodore de Beze, which in
the lapse of time, have given way to, and have been
supplemented by, books containing the more modern poetry of
Christian worship and praise.
On the walls of the
Huguenot Church, in Charleston, are a number of monuments of
unusual beauty and historic value. The limits of this notice
forbid quotations, but memorials of such families as Gourdin,
Prioleau, Ravenel, Porcher, de Saussure, Huger, Mazyck,
Lanier, all repay inspection, while more recently the
corporation has allowed the insertion in the interior walls,
under certain conditions, of plain marble stones, of fixed
size, inscribed with only the name, location and
date. Among these stones we see — de la Plaine, Bacot,
Maury, Gaillard, Meserole, Macon, Gabeau, Cazenove,
L'Hommedieu, L'espenard, Serre, Marquand, Bayard, Boudouin,
Marion, Laurens, Boudinot, Gibert, Robert, Fontaine, and
others whose descendants have embraced this opportunity to
memorialize their ancestors.
Many stones in the ancient
burial-ground surrounding the church also have a story for the
visitor.
Following the blowing up of the church during the
fire of 1796, a new building was erected in the year 1800, but
by that time many of the younger people, and others who might
desire to unite, were unfamiliar with French and could not
enjoy the services, so that attendance fell very low in the
early part of the century— indeed, the church almost died. But
in the year 1828 steps were taken for a permanent change to
English, and Messrs. Elias Horry, Joseph Manigault, William
Mazyck, Sr., George W. Cross, Daniel Ravenel, Thomas S. Grimke
and William M. Frazer were appointed a committee to translate
the liturgy from French to English.
The committee did
its important work well and deliberately, and a final report
having been submitted, the book containing the version of the
confession, and the various parts of the service now in use,
was first printed as a whole in 1836, and revised in
1853.
The church having been revived, it was decided to
take down the building of the year 1800, and the beautiful
structure, represented by the sketch at the head of this
paper, was erected, and was dedicated on May 11,
1845.
The congregation was fortunate in securing the
ministry of Rev. Charles W. Howard, and with the newly
translated liturgy, the attractive new building, and the
drawing power of Mr. Howard's personality and preaching, such
an impetus was given and so many accessions made to the roll,
that serious consideration was given to the question of
enlarging the church to accommodate the
congregation.
From the completion of the church to the
beginning of the War between the States was, however, only a
period of sixteen years, and when the War ended, four years
later, Charleston, with her churches, her banks, her schools,
and all her cherished institutions had felt its withering
touch.
There were then left very few persons of means
whose devotion and liberality maintained the church, but these
are all dead; other adherents have removed from the city, and
the congregation has at last become so small that it cannot
sustain the church. It is also unable adequately to support
the venerable pastor, the Rev. Charles S. Vedder, D. D., LL.
D., and still is it less able to supply him with an assistant
so greatly needed now, when after forty-six years ministry he
remains faithful to duty, and though stricken" by blindness,
conducts the entire service from memory.
The two
hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the
Huguenot Church on the present site was celebrated with much
distinction on April 14, 1912, when able discourses were
preached; in the morning by Dr. Vedder, and at night by the
Rev. W. H. S. Demarest, D. D., LL. D., President of Rutgers
College, New Brunswick, New Jersey, himself of Huguenot name
and lineage.
The large attendance at both of these
services would lead the visitor to believe that there must be
interest enough in Charleston for the abundant support of the
church, and with outside encouragement there is a field for
hope of usefulness. When the present edifice was opened in
1845, there were but seventeen persons who would definitely
unite and pledge themselves to attend. Therefore, this sketch
is sent out for the information of all who wish to know the
true condition of the church, and who are interested in its
preservation. It goes forth with mingled feelings of pride and
humiliation. Pride in the heritage and history of the church,
humiliation that aid is asked to preserve it. But so
widespread has been the kindly expression of interest, and so
generous the attitude of some of its outside friends, that its
officers cannot justify themselves in allowing this church to
perish without inviting co-operation from all interested in
its preservation, embracing workers and leaders in every
branch of thought and activity who look back with pride to
Huguenot forbears. The historical appeal is strong enough,
when we remember that the first child born in New York City
was Jean Vigne, and the first in Albany, New York, was Sarah
Rappelyea, children of Huguenot parents, and that in the year
1610 one-fourth of the population of New York City was
Huguenot; and when we assemble before the mind the noble
tributes to the Huguenot character and its contribution to
American life, by George Bancroft, John Esten Cooke, and the
host of historical and religious writers.
But the
historical appeal alone would not justify the keeping open of
a house dedicated to God. If it awakens any holy religious
sentiment, any reverence for a faith consecrated by suffering,
any tenderness for forefathers who sacrificed home, country,
fortune, and even life for the sake of principle; and if we
can also believe that in the twentieth century this little
temple may have a work to do, then let these words fall on
open ears.
Let us close with the benediction used by
the soldiers at the siege of La Rochelle and called the
"Huguenot Benediction":—
"The love of our good God and
Father, the grace, peace and favor of our Lord, Jesus Christ,
through the communion of His Holy Spirit, rest upon us and all
His church forever. Amen."
At the
annual meeting of the Corporation of The French Protestant
Church, in the City of Charleston, held January 8th, 1912, the
following resolutions were offered:
" While we do not
know the exact date of the establishing of the Huguenot Church
in the City of Charleston, still we have documentary evidence
of its existence in 1687.
Therefore; be it resolved,
that, this being the two hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary
of its recorded existence, a celebration be made with
befitting services.
Be it further resolved, that a
committee be appointed by the chair to make the necessary
arrangements for this celebration."
These resolutions
were unanimously adopted and the chairman appointed the
following committee: Mr. Daniel Ravenel, Chairman; Rev. Dr. C.
S. Vedder, Mr. H. E. Ravenel, Mr. J. R. P. Ravenel, Mr. F. G.
Ravenel and Mr. Isaac Hammond.
A meeting of the
congregation was held at a later date in the Huguenot Church.
At this meeting the congregation unanimously expressed their
approval regarding the celebration. It was suggested that four
ladies of the congregation be added to the General Committee.
The Chairman appointed Mrs. A. A. Palmer, Miss C. P. Ravenel,
Mrs. Philip Chazal and Miss Lena Logan.
The orator
chosen for the occasion was the Rev. W. H. S. Demarest, D. D.,
LL. D., President of Rutgers College, New Brunswick, New
Jersey, a devoted descendant of his Huguenot
forbears.
Letters and telegrams of congratulation from
all parts of the world were received by Dr. Vedder and the
Committee.
HISTORICAL ADDRESS
Rev. C. S. Vedder, D.
D., LL. D.
PASTOR 1866-1912.
TWO HUNDRED AND
TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY APRIL 14. 1912.
"Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets,
do they live forever?" Zechariah
1:5.
Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, on the 5th
of May, the title to the land upon which this church stands
was conveyed to the French Protestant Church, and forty-six
days after, namely on the 20th of June, the will of Caesar
Moze, now in the Secretary of State's office, in Columbia, S.
C, bequeathed to "the Church of French Protestant Refugees in
Charleston/1 a sum to aid in the building of a new Huguenot
Church in the country. It is conceded that the Huguenot
congregation had its organization years before, so that the
church may claim the date as early as 1681, but it is not
necessary to insist upon this, for the reason that there is no
documentary evidence of a church's organization in Charleston
before that of 1687. If there is any such evidence, after a
long and careful search, I have never been able to find
it.
What was the Charleston in which this church found
its place? A narrow area of creeks and marshes extended from
what is now Water Street, on the South, which was not Water
Street then, but water without the street; for it was
Vanderhorst's Creek, to a point North, which some authorities
quote as Queen Street, then Dock Street, and which we know did
not extend higher than Cumberland Street, a part of which,
perhaps for its nearness to this church was called Amen
Street. Meeting Street did not exist but waited for the time
when it should be laid out. Vanderhorst's Creek, now Water
Street, was an inlet of the sea and extended to Meeting
Street, and then up Meeting Street, when the tide served, to
what is now the southwest corner of Broad Street, where it
connected with the trenches of the fortifications, which stood
where now the stately walls of the New Postoffice rise. At a
much later date, 1751, boys swam and men shot water-fowl upon
this stream opposite the present St. Michael's Church. Every
part of the town, between the present Meeting Street and East
Bay, and the present Cumberland Street, and near to South
Battery, was protected by works of defense, not only against
the Spaniards but against savage Indians, So little did this
city give promise of what it has become, that ten large
creeks, and many smaller ones, crossed through the area
between the present South Battery and Calhoun Street. There
were but two prominent streets, Church and Broad, then called
Cooper Street, ending at what is now Meeting Street; here
stood the market-house. Our solid and earthquake-surviving
Charleston was then but a little collection of wooden houses,
inhabited only by a comparative handful of people. It was to
this seemingly unpromising locality that the early colonists
came.
It is to the Huguenot element of that population
that our present thought will be confined. As to the character
of these French refugees, who remained in the city, we have
pathetic evidence of their lofty piety, which made them
martyrs of conscience. Still extant are old Bibles, in which
are recorded prayers and thanksgivings to that God, who,
through tribulation and loss of all else, brought them to this
land of religious liberty. Of those Huguenots, who settled
outside of Charles Town, we have contemporary proof of the
purity of their lives and the harmony in which they dwelt
Lawson, the Surveyor-general of North Carolina, at that time
visited one of these colonies, and his description is that of
a people among whom "the welfare of all was the care of each."
A simple incident has come down to us of a resident of one of
these colonies who had gone in his boat to Charles Town, and
whose delayed return was a matter of great anxiety to his
friends and co-religionists. They feared that something had
happened to him. When the congregation assembled on the Lord's
Day morning, the pastor, who from the pulpit could see down to
the shore, suddenly paused in his sermon and cried; "There is
Monsieur Gendrbn," and the pastor, followed by the whole
congregation, adjourned the services, and went to the shore to
welcome their brother.
But long before these Huguenots
had scattered to other parts of America, there were Huguenot
settlements in Massachusetts, New York and Virginia. Among the
passengers by the "Mayflower," which landed in Plymouth, in
1620, was Priscilla; the Priscilla of romance and poetry, the
typical Puritan maiden, and her father, William
Molines.
In New York City as early as perhaps 1610, the
Huguenots constituted one-fourth of the population of the
city. They had their church within the walls of the fortress.
That church continued until 1707, when it became absorbed in
the Episcopal Church. Peter Stuyvesant, Governor of New York,
married Judith Bayard, a Huguenot; and Minuit,
Lieutenant-Governor, was a Huguenot.
In Virginia the
colony of Huguenots was formed, of whom John Esten Cooke, the
historian, says, they diffused an element of lofty character
throughout all the community in which they lived. Everywhere
the Huguenot secured a position of prominence all out of
proportion to their numbers.
John Jay was the first
Chief Justice of the United States, and Elias Boudinot the
first President of the American Bible Society.
The part
which South Carolina had in giving great names to American
history is found in the fact that Henry Laurens was the first
President of the Continental Congress. His son, John Laurens,
the idol of the American Army, received the sword of Lord
Cornwallis at Yorktown, while Henry Laurens, his father, was
prisoner in the Tower of London, of which Lord Cornwallis was
titular lieutenant.
General Francis Marion, with his
lieutenant, Elias Horry, and their faithful partisans, made
possible the surrender of the British arms and the failure of
the British cause at Yorktown. Gabriel Manigault loaned to the
Continental Congress $220,000. All of these
were Huguenots.
This present church edifice in
Charleston is the only one which survives, whilst all its
sister churches in the country were absorbed by the
established Church of England. It continued its automony amid
many difficulties and disabilities. Pour churches,
successively, stood on the spot whereon we now stand.
Owing to the fact that pastors could only be secured
from abroad, the services of the church were often interrupted
and the sanctuary unoccupied. During this time many of its
members found place in other churches, where their descendants
are prominent today. The present church building was erected
in 1845.
The liturgy of the Church was that of the
Swiss churches of Neufchatel and Valangin, which was
translated, together with the “Confession of Faith," by a
committee of eminent gentlemen. The trial service was held,
and the liturgy was so approved that it has ever since been
used. The government of the Church is by a bench of elders.
The spirit of the Church is wholly evangelical.
The
present church is a center of great interest to tourists
visiting Charleston, and they cannot understand why this
historic sanctuary lacks so much of that sympathy which ought
to be assured; but those who remain faithful to its traditions
are proud and happy in their attachment to the church of their
fathers. The Church continues isolated, not from any lack of
unity and sympathy with other churches, but because its merger
in any other ecclesiastical organization would be at the
expense of its memorial or monumental character.
At the
beginning of the French Revolution of 1848, with which
Charleston was in the deepest sympathy, a procession was
formed, at the head of which were all the dignitaries of
State, and the French Consul at Charleston. As it passed this
edifice, the procession halted, the French Consul dipped the
flag of France, and all uncovered before this sacred fane; the
procession passed to St. Philip's Church, where the oration
was delivered by the pastor of the Huguenot Church. Facts like
these are of interest on an occasion like the
present.
A recent writer, whose work of fiction has its
scene in Charleston and whose book has excited great interest,
speaks of the memories which this church enshrines. He speaks
of other churches, and then says of the French Church, that it
is:4The one of all these that holds the most precious flame,
the purest light; which treasures the holy fires which came
from France. It was for liberty of soul, to lift their ardent
and exalted prayer to God, as their own conscience bade them,
and not as any man dictated, that those French colonists
sought the New World. No Puritan splendor of independence and
indomitable courage outshines theirs. They preached a word as
burning as any that Plymouth or Salem ever heard. They were
but a handful, yet so fecund was their marvelous zeal that
they became the spiritual leaven of their whole community.
They are less known than Plymouth or Salem, because men of
action rather than men of letters have sprung from the loins
of the South. They stand a beautiful beacon shining upon the
coast of our early history."
There is a feature of the
spirit of the Huguenots, who accepted banishment from their
own land, which ought not to be unmentioned. It was the love
they still held for the land that cast them out. An admired
American poetess, Mrs. Sigourney, on visiting the ruins of a
Huguenot Church in Massachusetts, was shown a vine which the
French Protestants had brought with them to Oxford, where a
monument now stands to commemorate the Huguenot settlement at
that place. Mrs Sigourney apostrophizes this memento of the
patriotic love of the exiled sons of France.
"Green vine, who mantlest in thy fresh embrace
Yon old grey rock, I hear that thou, with them, didst brave
the ocean surge!
Hast thou no tale for me? Drank thy germ
the dews of Languedoc?
Or slow uncoiled thine infant fibre
in The fruitful moulds of smiling Roustllon? Or didst thou
shrink from the harsh tread of martial men, Brother fighting
with brother unto death in La Rochelle?
Hast thou no tale
for me?"
Yes, it had a "tale" for all! A "tale" that told
of the unalterable love for the mother-land, which had denied
them every right of conscience, life and liberty—an
unchangeable love which reproduced in the new world the
beloved names of the homes from which they had been banished
in the old.
Our church contains tablets to prominent
names among the original emigrants, and more than fifty
smaller tablets to eminent Huguenots throughout the land.
There is one beautiful stained window, the history of which
will be preserved. Some years ago the pastor of the church
received a letter from the Hon. Elihu B. Washburne asking how
he could commemorate in our church his wife, who was a
grand-daughter of General Gratiot, of General Marion's force.
Mr. Washburne had been Secretary of State of the United
States, and was our ambassador to Paris during the horrors of
the Commune. He was told that the walls were already covered
with tablets, but that place could be made for a stained
window. He replied by securing such a window and having it
erected, but before it could be placed in position Mr.
Washburne himself had died.
I am asked to speak
something with regard to my pastorate in the
Church. I do this less
reluctantly, because, what shall be said will pertain more to
the Church than to myself. When, forty-six years ago, the
present pastorate was instituted, the South was in the throes
of what is known as Reconstruction, when this grand old State
was harried throughout all its extent by organized brigandage.
In this ordeal, Charleston was, perhaps, the principal
sufferer. In common, with most of the churches of the city,
our church was largely depleted of its members, and deprived
of its means of support, but those who remained were
unfaltering in their determination to maintain the integrity
of the endeared sanctuary of their pious ancestors.
In
his opening sermon, the pastor took as his text, the question
of St. Peter to Cornelius, "I ask therefore to what intent
thou hast sent for me?" The answer, which he gave to the
question then, is the same as he has sought to give through
all the years since; namely, to preach Christ crucified. He
remembers, so vividly, the congregation over which he first
looked on that far-off day, that it requires no serious effort
of th imagination to re-people these pews with those who then
occupied them, and who have passed to the life beyond. He has
baptized three generations, and received them into the
communion of the Church.
While life lasts with him it
will retain endeared memories of saintly women and noble men
who then greeted him.
Of the pastorate who were in
charge of Charleston churches forty-six years ago, one
survives, Rev. Dr. John T. Wightman, of Baltimore, Maryland,
who though in his eighty-seventh year, continues to preach the
same Gospel which he proclaimed and exemplified here. All the
others have passed away. The Rev. Dr. John
Forrefet, Rev. Paul Trapier Keith, Dr. William C. Dana, Dr.,
afterwards Bishop, W. B. W. Howe, Dr. Thomas Smythe, Dr.
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Dr. John L. Girardeau, Dr. A.
Toomer Porter, the revered and honored Dr. John Bachman, Dr.
William S. Bowman, Dr. Edwin T. Winkler, the ideal Seaman's
Chaplain William B. Yates, Dr. A. W. Marshall, Dr. E. J.
Meynardie, and others of the Methodist Church, earnest and
faithful men. And among those, whose memory is still like
ointment poured forth, was Christopher Philip Gadsden, beloved
Rector of St. Luke's. Bishop Lynch then presided over the
Roman Catholic Church in South Carolina, to be followed by my
good and dear friend, Harry Pinckney Northrop.
Although
this Church has been always exclusive in its character, and
measurably isolated in its relation to other ecclesiastical
bodies, it has abounded in works of beneficence and in types
of exalted character. The senior elder of this Church, when
the present pastorate was formed was one of whom Hugh Swinton
Legare said: "Daniel Ravenel, ten such men would save a city."
One of the most beautiful creations of fiction is Charles
Dickens' protraiture of the Cheeryble brothers. It was left to
this church to make that ideal real in the character of the
two brothers, Henry and Robert Gourdin.
Time would
fail to tell of what this church has done in elevating and
exemplifying nobility of life and spirit. But one instance
more cannot be withheld. When this church was nearly shaken
down by the earthquake, and its means of restoration
apparently beyond reach, at a meeting of the elders, to
consult as to what should be done, one of their number, a
graduate of West Point, who had served in three wars, and was
as truly a Soldier of the Cross, as he had been of the
country, proposed that we should roof over the church, and
hold our services in the partially destroyed edifice as our
Huguenot fathers had done in the caves and fastnesses of
France. Fortunately, the necessity to do this was avoided, by
the generous munificence of Mr. Charles Lanier, of New York
City, who furnished the means by which the church edifice was
rehabilitated. It was a member of this church and her sister,
who, almost unaided, wrought, what, to me, was the most
beautiful example of patriotic devotion elicited in the War
between the States; namely, the removal of the Carolina dead,
who fell at Gettysburg, from their stranger graves to be
re-interred with solemn ceremony in our own Magnolia Cemetery,
where each year, patriotic love wreathes their graves with
tribute flowers. It was in this church and by the same sisters
that the Home for Mothers, Widows and Daughters of Confederate
Soldiers was established, to send forth, as it has, fifteen
hundred of its pupils, prepared to meet and overcome the
difficulties which confronted life after the desolation
wrought by the War. It was from this church, and the same
devoted sisters that the funds raised before the War for the
beautiful Calhoun monument were preserved amid all dangers and
difficulties. It is to this church, that our city owes the
beautiful and beneficent ministry of the district
nurse. It was to this church, that the Huguenot
Society of South Carolina was first organized, and it is to
the Huguenots of that early day that we are to refer the
founding of the South Carolina Society. But I may not continue
this rehearsal without wearying you. May I conclude with some
lines written by myself, for a like occasion in my native
church, in explanation of the propriety and value and need of
memorial occasions.
Oh guardian spirit of days long gone,
Whose
fadeless scroll behooves all days to read,
Who wait'st
unseen with wayward souls to plead;
For lives of those of
old, in word and deed,
Lift high the veil o'er mortal
vision thrown
That vanished years may live again, again be
known,
And our dead fathers' virtues name our own.
COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESS TWO HUNDRED AND
TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDING OF THE FRENCH
PROTESTANT CHURCH IN THE CITY OF CHARLESTON, “THE HUGUENOT
CHURCH"
Rev. W. H. S. Demarest, D. D., LL.
D.
"These all having received a good report through
faith, received not the promise, God having provided some
better thing for us that they without us should not be made
perfect."
This word of Scripture so summarily
completing the splendid story of the Old Testament heroes of
faith belongs as well, we believe without irreverence, to the
Huguenot heroes of long after generations. The spirit,
experience and triumph, the incompleteness and the surely
coming fulfillment, are essentially the same in Bible times
and other ages of the onward march of the Kingdom of God.
Today, everywhere, there are men and women and children,
stewards of the oracles and grace of God just as surely as
were prophets and apostles, and somewhere they are suffering,
conquering and waiting for faith's sake just as surely as did
the many unnamed heroes and martyrs enshrined in this great
panegyric to the Hebrews.
In the long and distinguished
succession of those who have received and transmitted the
traditions of the Church of Christ through good report and
evil report none, perhaps, deserve enduring fame and filial
remembrance more than the sons and daughters of France of the
days and after-days of the Reformation. To this generation as
to every generation there falls the duty and the privilege of
honoring the many groups of leaders in the world-movement of
the Gospel, and of deriving anew from them the direction and
inspiration which they have bequeathed their descendants. To
some comes such call to ever new remembrance of the Puritan
and Pilgrim; to some, of the Quaker; to some, of the Dutchman;
to some, of the Presbyterian, the Scotch-Irish; to some, of
the Englishman, the Anglican or Wesleyan. To you and to me,
with a true body of brethren, falls the honor of ever-new
exalting of the Huguenot and ever-new devoting of our lives to
his ideals and undertakings.
Your claim to this lineal,
filial honor seems, one might say, supreme. For here in
Charleston was the first Huguenot settlement on these Western
shores and here you have kept alive, and with its distinctive
characteristics; the one French Reformed Church in this
Western Republic. You dwell in a chief place of the noble
tradition and in a rare continuance of the original life. Nor
is my claim small to a part in this honorable service. The
early Huguenot planting in this country in which I have family
pride was an enduring one. David des Marest, leader of a
little band of fellow-churchmen, came to this new land in
1663; he lived a little while on Staten Island, and a little
while on Manhattan Island; and then he occupied a patent
between the Hudson and the Hackensack Rivers about fifteen
miles from Manhattan in New Jersey. His three sons established
their homes on the several portions of the patent, and at the
central home of the three my father was born, the line
unbroken there for eight generations. Near Hackensack, before
there was a Dutch Reformed Church nearer than that in New York
and that it Bergen, New Jersey, fifteen miles away, the
original David des Marest and his sons and their few
fellow-families founded their French Reformed Church. It could
not last long with its small French constituency in the midst
of the larger Dutch population, and especially when a little
later the Dutch Church was established close by. So the French
Church passed, merged in the Dutch. And the French blood was
with the passing generations more and more thinly mixed with
the Dutch blood. And with many descendants of today I own
allegiance to the Dutch Reformed Church and to the Holland
Society. But the French name has endured; it still stays on
the old patent; it has gone widespread throughout our land;
and the French strain is not all disappeared; and we strive to
keep in spirit and life something of the Huguenot type and
quality which, if it be in us, makes us in so far worthy of
the name we bear and the faith we profess.
My first
word, then, tonight is In Memoriam. You call this a
commemorative sermon. Your minister has told the story of this
church, of the men who founded and preserved it. I could not
deal with that; I have not known it; nor should I attempt to
repeat or add to the story if I could. But I may commemorate
the multitude of those who through long time and in many
lands, and widely in our own land, under the same banner of
fatherland and church, endured hardness and kept the faith. It
may well be said of them that they received a good report. For
even in their own generation, and increasingly through the
centuries since, the thought of men has given the Huguenot
peculiar fame and admiration. It has been a good report
through faith for it was their faith that wrought out the life
and works which deserved such good report. It was no worldly
ambition, it was no zeal for good by withdrawal from the
world, it was not devotion to a human high ideal, it was not a
purpose of service of fellowmen; it was faith in God, in Jesus
Christ, and in the Scriptures. Their good report through
faith, their fame, through all time, is born of their
sufferings, their endurance, their martyrdom. The story of
sacrifice, of suffering for truth's sake, of heroic stand for
principle, of death chosen rather than surrender, is the story
that masters men's minds and hearts and is written most
vividly in the annals of a nation or of the world. The heroes
whom the world honors are supremely those who by faith
fighting or waiting for the substance of things hoped for
remain to the last only heirs of the promise—the thing itself,
the rest, the peace, the freedom, the homeland, reserved for
others who come after.
These are they whom we call
great, they who, in God's name, were lifting the valleys and
leveling the hills of the hard highway of the marching souls
of men, that those who came after might easily enter into the
promised land, and find it a land of milk and honey. So when
God has provided the better thing for us, the liberty and the
prosperity, we are unerringly taught that they are not made
perfect without us, that the triumph which has so surely come
was necessary to complete their conflict, and that it
ministers forever to their satisfying after the travail of
their soul. We are unerringly taught that in a sense they are
not complete save as we give them the remembrance and the
honor they deserve, as we enshrine them in the memory and life
of each generation, as we nurture in our souls the virtue of
grateful understanding, as we carry out the work they so nobly
sustained, as we show ourselves of the same mould and spirit.
The noblest monument of worthy ancestors is noble emulation by
their descendants.
It is a long, sad story, all shot
through with the splendid light of unquenched faith and
far-reaching hope. It takes days and it takes volumes to weave
together the threads of that strange story running out from
the valleys and the towns of fair France, to picture the
scenes, to rehearse the names. We gather up the history of
that garden land, when it knew not the day of its visitation,
in one vast panorama. The stir of Reformation thought and
spirit; the turning of men, families and communities to the
new worship and the open Word; the challenge by an entrenched
church and by a despotic throne; the resistance of brave and
devoted life; sword and fire; cruelty, torture, exile, the
waste of fields and homes; the pitiless hurt of children, the
satanic dishonor of women, the lavish murder of men; the
faith, zeal and courage of God's people; the strong voice of
unflinching confession; the flight into mountain fastnesses;
the far-hidden assembly of those who sang and prayed and
listened to the pure preaching of the Gospel; the journey into
foreign and far distant lands; the seeming triumph of
persecution; the seeming overthrow of the Reformation in
France; yet the victory of a faith that overcomes the world;
and the bequest of triumphant life to all the generations
since.
I want to speak to you of two or three points
where the Huguenot has commanded place in history and
life.
1. The National Life;the Depleting of France and
the Enriching of America.
Never perhaps has any land
more plainly or more largely depleted its life by its own
wilful waste than France. A noble race, it cut out by
destruction or exile its noblest part and debased its less
fine remainder by giving rein to base, fierce passion. The
tens of thousands on tens of thousands who went out from their
homes, from their fertile fields, from their throbbing
industries, depleting the population, still more impoverished
the virile, noble quality of the nation. For it was the best
blood of France that thus poured itself out, literally to lose
itself on the soil of the fatherland or to pulse abundantly in
an alien, albeit a friendly land. They were ministers and
statesmen, noblemen and artisans, merchants and manufacturers.
Rank and wealth were common among them. They were pioneers and
promoters of the greatest material activities of the land.
They were ardent friends and patrons of education. They were
leaders in serious concern for the public welfare and national
prestige. They were men of vision, ideals, enthusiasm. They
were lovers of their country, patriots of the finest grain. In
them lay largely the secret of well-filled treasury, of a
noble common life, and of the national spirit. It was no small
drain upon the nation's vitality when its very arteries were
opened and this its richest blood streamed over the borders
and across the seas to mingle with other streams in new
commonwealths. Nor did the army of exiles go, sorrowful alone
for the loss of homes and fortunes, of friends and even
families, perhaps, but keenly sorrowful too that they were
torn from a land they loved, from a national allegiance
precious to them to the last, sorrowful that a land and throne
that had nurtured them had turned upon them in bitter strife,
and cruel injustice, sorrowful that fair France could give
itself to bigotry, hate and torture. France reaped the harvest
in the wrong and irreligion that grew apace, as well as in the
lessened product of the field and of the factory, in the
unbelief and reign of terror that blackly stained her life in
years long after, in the enduring defects of an impeded and
depleted civilization. But the happier side of the picture is
this— the enriching of nations elsewhere into which the
Huguenots came with all their genius for national life. Into
the countries of the old world round about they went, to
Switzerland, Germany, Holland, England; with that we have not
to do, save as many made Holland or England but stopping-place
en-route to America. It is our own national life we have in
mind. It is a surprise to some to learn how widespread were
the Huguenot pioneers upon these shores. Here in South
Carolina; many in Pennsylvania; in New Jersey on the
Hackensack; in New York at New Rochelle and New Paltz; in
Rhode Island; in Massachusetts. Here in larger number, there
in smaller, they almost everywhere by a community or a
personality touched upon and reached into the forming national
life. With the Puritan in New England, with the Dutch in New
York, with the German in Pennsylvania, with the Scotch-Irish
here and there, they made common cause and entered a composite
blood. Nor was it in any instance a strain to be readily lost
or dissipated or to prove of less moment than the other. Far
more than in proportion to their number did their life tell
upon the new American life. It was needed to soften the
austerity of the Puritan, to enliven the steadiness of the
Dutchman and the German, to broaden the
devotion of the Scotch-Irish, to
deepen the impetuousness of the Anglican and the Cavalier.
Beyond the well known leaders in the pioneer groups there were
those in the period of forming independence. Laurens and
Faneuil and Boudinot and Jay and Hamilton. Honoring as we do
the elements other than ours, and those others in which we
have a part, we are impressed with the singularly unprejudiced
place given the Huguenot. With all the virtues of the other
races there always urges in the mind of casual observer or of
more serious student the defect which invites ridicule or
rebuke. But somehow of the Huguenot we hear only the good.
Nothing seems to rise out of the past to discourage his lovers
or admirers; the destructive criticism, which seeks, and often
successfully, to shatter our happy notions of men and events
behind us, scarce challenges the Huguenot. Nowhere, I am sure,
in the early days of our land do we find the Huguenot a
disturbance or a detriment; nowhere in the beginning
statesmanship do we find him perverse, narrow or superficial;
in the large life of today we like to think that his
blood-bequest is still one of the strong, sweet and saving
elements in our national character. In the cultivating of a
virgin soil, in the every day making of a new home, in the
actual welding of varied people into a new community we find
him everywhere wise, ready and forceful.
The liberty which
is the keystone of our institutions was a passion of his soul
out of the price for it which he had paid. The righteousness
which exalts a nation had in him an impregnable stronghold.
The education which claimed its immediate and enduring place
beside the hall of law and justice and beside the sanctuary
with God's Word, found in him a first creator and a generous
support. The forming of the constitution or
of the institutions of the infant nation could not be wise or
effectual without the idealism, the charity, the poise of the
elect Frenchman, the Huguenot. And as the life of a nation is
more than its organic law or its corporate institutions,
rather the life of the people, his rare quality was rich asset
indeed for the nation that hoped, and still hopes, to be the
crowning civilization of the world. And as the nation today is
facing important and difficult problems, challenged by
ventures impetuous and footish or shrewd and unscrupulous, we
covet the clear wisdom, the brave readiness, the high
principles, and excellent poise of this pioneer
stock.
2. The Forsaking and the Sustaining of a Church,
of Religion.
We are reminded that the cause beneath
this whole story is religion and devotion to it. The motive
which started a Huguenot people, that separated them from
their fellow-countrymen, was the fear of God, the call of
faith. Their activity in factions of the court or on the field
of battle was but accessory to this—neither political ambition
nor the lust of war was the ruling force. As the rise of the
Dutch Republic was an uprising of true religion, so was the
fall of a united France. The zeal of the Reformation rent the
nation and made a new Frenchman over against the old. Religion
was worth living for, worth fighting for, worth dying for; its
call was rightly to forsake husband or wife, lands, houses,
and fatherland. The Huguenot was a protestant—a protestant
against a church gone wrong, against error in doctrine and
life, against the slavery of the mind and of the conscience.
His birth as a Huguenot was his claim to believe as he must
and worship as he pleased. To him the
essence of religion was not the form of worship or of the
Church; it was the soul's relation to its God, the setting of
the heart on Him Who is above; that was not subject to any
other man, be he priest or pope. Yet with religion thus
essentially within he was supremely zealous for the united,
outward worship of God's people. Those who held the faith must
not forsake the assembling of themselves together; it was
their right to assemble according to the dictates of their
conscience; denied that right, they must gather in the secret
chamber, in mountain valleys, or caves of the earth. Religion
with them meant a newly opened Bible, a Bible rightly and
frankly interpreted, a Bible in their own language, a Bible in
their own hands—a proclaiming of the truth which makes men
free, of the Gospel which saves the lost. Nor did their
spiritual principle of religion or free principle of worship
mean enmity to or neglect of church organization. Gladly would
they have honored and remained in the old organization had it
permitted them and had it provided that which their
consciences did not abhor and resist. They were not anxious to
depart from the ancient boundaries, thought of no such thing
at first. But, offended by the mother church, unable to secure
the things they might approve, driven out by official decrees
and the weapons of war, they coveted, and counted essential,
an organized church which should direct their order of worship
and maintain a reasonable and just government of religious
affairs. Thus arose the Reformed Church of France. It was
natural that, with their genius for liberty and their new
grasp of the Scriptures, the Presbyterian government should
have been chosen. Doctrinal standards and dignified liturgy
followed, of course; formal congregations and fixed
sanctuaries. But the organization, the ministry, must be
purged of faults, of crimes. The Huguenot was a protest-ant
against evil in high places, against common sins in sacred
things, against a priesthood given to extortion or
uncleanness, against the perverting of church power to
personal gain or self-indulgence. The hands must be clean that
touched the holy vessels, the life must be pure that would
speak the oracles of God or lead God's servants to His holy
hill. Nor might even clean hands and a pure heart dare stand
between as mediator, only Jesus Christ, when man would "find
acceptance with his God and win salvation in the only way, by
faith in Him. As the Huguenots came to this land, they brought
this unquenchable ardor of the faith. They brought their
church and their minister; they brought their pureness of the
Gospel and their cleanness of life; they brought their
devotion to the Word and their spirit of sacrifice. They were
not so many or so centrally located that their racial
assemblies could endure or ought to have endured.
But
swiftly as their language passed and their life spread out,
they entered into any near-by church of the Reformed. The
church was the heart of the social and civic life; the Bible
was the man of their counsel and guide of their life; the
minister was the adviser and patron of all their local and
personal affairs; religion was their vital brelath. My own
ancestors for years on Sundays travelled their fifteen miles
from Hackensack to Bergen to worship in spirit and in truth;
at New Paltz, New York, the settlement of Beviers and Du
Boises and their well-known Huguenot fellow-patentees, the
church records pass from French to Dutch to
English, the language
changing, the religion never changing, the
worshiping assembly and the membership roll the very life of
the developing American people. They had in their fair, free
land the priceless privilege denied them in their fatherland,
for which they had been willing to sacrifice all they
possessed and life itself. They were not singular in this
respect, of course; largely our pioneer peoples were those of
like devotion to faith and church, of like readiness to pay
the price, and some of them of like suffering and deprivation.
The voice of the new American life was thus of no uncertain
sound. The years have passed arid with them have passed in
some measure this spirit of supreme devotion to religion and
the outward signs and exercises of it. Later peoples of alien
sort have played their part in changing the standards and
reducing the habits of religious life. But it is unfair and
futile to charge all the change to their account. Straight
descendants of the Puritan, the Quaker, the Dutchman, the
Huguenot are conspicuous enough in the host of those who count
the Church and the Word and the Lord's Day and salvation by
faith a very little thing. Perhaps they defend the new aspect
of things, their new attitude; say that it is the right
standpoint of the age, the position properly advanced from the
earlier and more primitive idea and habit of a century or
three centuries ago. I cannot feel it so. I cannot but feel
that the great religious principles of that earlier time were
enduringly right. I can only feel that departure from them is
a decadence of life and of values which, if continued, must in
a few years show unfortunate issues which we as yet scarcely
discern. And the truth comes home that what we do not have to
pay or sacrifice for we value less. All this came to us
without slightest cost in money, toil or blood—the Church, the
Word, the Lord's Day, the faith. So we count things little
which the fathers thought great riches. I have wondered
whether, if an alien force should ride into our land, our
cities, our villages, forbidding us the privileges of
religion, men who now ignore them would not rise in new spirit
to defend them with their very lives. It does seem strange
that any man glorying in the Huguenot descent could with
uplifted head and open life cast aside the very things which
made the Huguenot what he was and which are the citadels of
our pride as his descendants. Everywhere there is yet the
multitude who hold aloft the ancient banner of Church and
faith. Let us be in the van.
3. The Making of the
Man, the Gentleman and the Christian.
Speak as we may
of a national life, speak as we may of a church life, we are
only emphasizing that which is the final element of each, and
that which is the one thing needful after all, the individual
man, his quality, his character, his personality. The marvel
of human life with its many races and its many millions of
souls is the essential sameness of each with every other and
at the same time the absolutely inevitable difference of each
from every other. The life of races and of men, we believe, in
the Providence and Kingdom of God, is going on toward the
perfect society, and toward the perfect man. In the age of
man's imperfectness a group, an individual, stands out here
and there in nobler mould than others. The Hebrew race in the
ancient world. These heroes of that race whom the writer of
the Epistle to the Hebrews eulogizes in our text. These men
were the makers of the best national life, their exile and
death were the depleting of the chosen people of God yet the
enriching of a far-flung life—and this because of what they
were in themselves, because of the virtues and nobilities
which made them a salt of the earth and a heaven of the
world. These were they who would not yield
their faith and sacred honor to the whim or the perversity of
apostate king or priest or people, but who would ever renew
and sustain the spark of true religion and of Jehovah's church
in a crooked generation; and any spiritualness or
righteousness of the Church in the
wilderness or in
the promised land simply
throws into relief these rare
lives. After all each man of us stands
for himself and is judged for what he is.
And we set before ourselves the ultimate ideal, not of vast
attainments or vast achievements, but the man, the gentleman,
the Christian. The
Huguenot, with all his
imperfection, stands out
second to none, it
seems to us, measured in
terms of life and
character. To commemorate him thus
seems to be but the rehearsing of virtues commonplace
enough, each in itself, yet a calling to
remembrance worth while perhaps lest we forget the things that
make life's strength and beauty in any age, in our own
age. The sturdy qualities of manhood were
his; industry, thrift and frugality. He led
the earnest and modest and simple life—but withal not a life
of dullness and monotony. He
was a man of ambition and enterprise;
one to forge his way ahead. He had the endurance,
the courage, the high spirit to press on into the wider
fields, larger activities, higher
attainments. Nor did he lack the
intelligence and skill to make good his
ambition, courage and industry.
In his veins was the blood of thinking
men; a quick and virile brain commanded his ready strength.
Then, if we allow the scarce justified distinction between the
man and the gentleman and permit the latter title to add
something to what we have said of the man, we look at his
refinement, at those graces of life which some may tend to
disparage but which are such happy marks of highest manliness,
graces which we so readily concede to the Frenchman but which
only too often consist with grosser spirit within. The
Huguenot had that gentleness which strictly means the
gentleman, which is more than an adornment, an essential
nobleness to which even the Scriptures call us—Be ye
courteous. And with that quiet grace the vivacity that made
his words and manners a stimulus of good. Then, once more, if
we are to allow the scarce justified distinction between the
gentleman and the Christian and permit the latter word to add
something to what we have said of the gentleman, we look at
his morality and piety—morality without which no man is a true
gentleman, piety without which the man and the gentleman so
unhappily tend to decay. Honoring the Huguenot, we tell his
fidelity to every trust, his staunchness in every duty, his
brave loyalty to principle. Pureness of life, holding the home
sacred and society harmless, was acknowledged of him by his
foes. To him the fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom
and the keeping of His commandments the whole duty of man. He
was a man of vision, the vision of Christ, and to it he was
not disobedient.
Such manhood, such Christianity,
speaks with vivid force to our own day and life. It calls us
from idleness and extravagance; it calls us from rudeness and
vulgarity; it calls us from laxness of home life and private
morals, from unfaithfulness to private and public trust, from
forgetfulness of God and independence of Christ. The Huguenot
stands before us, a man and a Christian, in heroic size, a
personality that beckons us on to spirit and virtue and high
endeavor like his
own. |