It Is Only Strange That
They Were Not Surprised More Often And More Effectually; For This Legion
Of Cassagnas Was Truly Patriarchal In Its Theory Of War, And Camped
Without Sentries, Leaving That Duty To The Angels Of The God For Whom
They Fought.
This is a token, not only of their faith, but of the
trackless country where they harboured.
M. de Caladon, taking a stroll
one fine day, walked without warning into their midst, as he might have
walked into 'a flock of sheep in a plain,' and found some asleep and some
awake and psalm-singing. A traitor had need of no recommendation to
insinuate himself among their ranks, beyond 'his faculty of singing
psalms'; and even the prophet Salomon 'took him into a particular
friendship.' Thus, among their intricate hills, the rustic troop
subsisted; and history can attribute few exploits to them but sacraments
and ecstasies.
People of this tough and simple stock will not, as I have just been
saying, prove variable in religion; nor will they get nearer to apostasy
than a mere external conformity like that of Naaman in the house of
Rimmon. When Louis XVI., in the words of the edict, 'convinced by the
uselessness of a century of persecutions, and rather from necessity than
sympathy,' granted at last a royal grace of toleration, Cassagnas was
still Protestant; and to a man, it is so to this day. There is, indeed,
one family that is not Protestant, but neither is it Catholic.
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