What America owes to Huguenot immigration you know. Had the Huguenots given us only Hugh Swinton Legare, John Jay, Francis Marion, and Commodore Maury, "the pathfinder of the seas," we should have owed them an everlasting debt of gratitude. But when we remember what they have been in Virginia itself--the Maurys, Maryes, Michauxs, Flournoys, Dupuys, Fontaines, Moncures, Fauntleroys, Latanes, Mauzys, Lacys, Venables, Dabneys, and many others--we cannot fail to see that we are under great and lasting obligation to that heroic race, whose banishment, while it resulted in the moral ruin of France, resulted in the moral enrichment of America. And we should count it a privilege to do what we can to retrieve the religious ruin of misguided France by giving her once more the pure Huguenot gospel. From a statement published by the Rev. J. E. Knatz, B. D., Delegate of the Huguenot Churches of France to America, I take the following facts:
[Sidenote: The Huguenot Revival in France.]
The population of France is composed of six hundred thousand Protestants and nearly thirty-nine million Catholics. The former are mostly descendants of the Huguenots. In spite of centuries of persecution, which reduced them to a mere handful, they have not only kept their ground, but made important advance. They are the strongest bulwark of republican institutions. In the Dreyfus trial, they were foremost in forming a better public opinion, fighting the hardest for the triumph of truth and justice. Lately a Catholic paper had to admit, reluctantly, that for the last twenty-five years the war waged against intemperance, immorality and other social evils, had been the work of the Protestants.
Outside of France the Huguenots carry on a great missionary work in the French colonies, which are many and extensive. The religious reorganization of Madagascar alone cost them two hundred thousand dollars.
In France they have to care for the spiritual welfare of an ever-increasing number of non-Protestant communities. The movement toward Protestantism is making great progress in the rural districts, the population of which, all Catholics, had been hitherto indifferent or bigoted. New Huguenot churches are springing up on all sides, often in places where Protestant worship had been abolished for over two hundred years.