Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts in the Second Through Nineteenth Centuries, Part 4: From the 13th to the 18th Centuries

 

The experiences of Louis Bertrand may not have been unique; it is possible that many others who gave their lives for American missions were accorded the gift of languages in their attempts to preach to the savages in North and South America.

 

The “French Prophets”

One of most remarkable records left to us in the annals of history with respect to spiritual gifts is that of “the little prophets of the Cevennes” at the close of the seventeenth century. About one hundred years earlier, in 1598, King Henry IV of France had issued the Edict of Nantes granting the French Protestants freedom of private worship, civil rights, and the right to public worship in many places. In 1685, however, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, and there was a renewal of persecution of the Huguenots (French Protestants). More than half a million of them fled the country. Thousands of others suffered martyrdom, some renounced their faith, and a remnant of them fled to the Cevennes mountains. It is among this remnant that miracles of healing, prophecy, and tongues became manifest.⁹⁵ One of the most commonly reported phenomena there was that “people everywhere began to hear strange sounds in the air; the sound of a trumpet and a harmony of voices. They did not doubt the music was celestial.”⁹⁶ Gifts of the Spirit first became manifest among Huguenots who had not fled to the Cevennes mountains. On February 12, 1688, a young girl, Isabeau Vincent of Dauphiny, stood and spoke, exhorting everyone to repent. One of the earliest accounts described her prophetic gifts as follows:

For the first five weeks she spoke during her ecstasies no language but that of her country, because her only auditors were the peasantry of the village. The noise of this miracle having spread, people who understood and spoke French came to see her. She then began to speak French, and with a diction as correct as if she had been brought up in the first houses of Paris.⁹⁷

Isabeau Vincent would not recant, and she was therefore imprisoned at Greville, and later in the Tower of Constance. She said to her captors, “You may take my life, but God will raise up others to speak better things than I have done.”⁹⁸ According to a French historian, Peyrat, within a year of this event there were not less than a thousand prophets in Languedoc. The “contagion” had spread from Dauphiny to Viserais, and from there to the Cevennes mountains.⁹⁹ These people became known as the Camisards after King Louis XIV sent heavily armed troops against them from 1701 until 1710 and they attempted to defend themselves. Many of them became refugees in England, where they became known as the French Prophets, and were often the objects of ridicule. The Earl of Shaftesbury, in the Characteristics, wrote of a puppet show at St. Bartholomew’s Fair in 1708 at which these French Prophets were mocked.¹⁰⁰ In the same work, he mentions that one of them prophesied “in a pompous Latin style, of which, out of his ecstasy, it seems, he is wholly incapable.”¹⁰¹ Some of the French Prophets became refugees in America, and Benjamin Franklin wrote that his first employer, Keimer, the printer of Philadelphia, “had been one of the French Prophets and could act their enthusiastic agitations.”¹⁰² Some of the Cevennol prophets were very young children. In 1701, a fourteen-month old child who “had never of itself spoken a Word, nor could it go alone,” began exhorting in a loud childish voice “to the Works of Repentance,” in perfect, fluent French.¹⁰³ This was reported by John Lacy, one of the leaders of the Cevennol refugees in London. Sir Richard Bulkley, a wealthy English baronet who became a convert to their faith, said that he heard Lacy repeat long sentences in Latin, and another of them in Hebrew, “neither one of whom could speak a single word in these languages when not in spiritual ecstasy.”¹⁰⁴ In an unfavorable study of the gift of tongues, George Cutten admitted that among the French Prophets “the most important phases of the gift were the extraordinary fluency of the young and the illiterate, and the speaking in correct French, which was so different from their native patois.”¹⁰⁵ In another unfavorable work on the gift of tongues, Alexander Mackie wrote:

The Stories of the Cevennes abound in miracles. It is only to be expected that John Lacy and the London French Prophets would expect and would attempt to perform miracles.¹⁰⁶

Mackie includes a story about Betty Gray, who laid her hand upon John Lacy and prophesied that he would make the blind to see. She admitted that she did not believe this prophecy, and she was struck blind, later to be healed by John Lacy.¹⁰⁷ Mackie ends this account of healing with these words:

With the gift of prophesying and the gift of healing, we naturally expect—and we are not disappointed—the gift of tongues.¹⁰⁸

The remaining pages of Mackie’s volume, which continues in an attempt to discredit the claims of the French Prophets, contain a few anecdotes, including a description of John Lacy’s gift of languages, which enabled him to speak in Latin when he was at Chelsea.¹⁰⁹

 

Tags: 13th, 18th, centuries, gifts, miraculous, nineteenth, part, tongues

Category: Church History, Summer 1999