| HOME Go to  Homepage
GENERAL |
|
CHAPTER
V
PASTOR AT LASALLE Student life was to end abruptly. After the Easter recess of 1944 the Germans decided that the seminary held far too strategic a position above the southern approaches to Montpellier. The Germans, ever-more-fearful of the threat of an American invasion, wanted to be sure of their southern coast. They ordered the seminary closed and the students dispersed. The church to which I was then assigned, in Lasalle, was a large parish in the Cévennes mountains, about sixty miles north of Montpellier. It had lost its minister when Georges Crespy had taken advantage of the visa arrangements of Pastor Toureille, and had left Lasalle for the security of Switzerland, only hours ahead of the Gestapo. I was to take his place for the time being in the hope that the hostilities would end before Autumn. In the meantime I was left to my own devices, with nobody to assist or to advise me in any way. The nearest Pastor was eight miles away over a steep mountain pass. Lasalle was a small resort town of about 2,000 inhabitants, of whom half, at least, were nominally my parishioners. There had been a large church prior to 1685, which had been destroyed after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. An armed revolt had pitted the Protestants of the Cévennes against the troops of Louis XIV in the so-called "Camisard Wars," which ended in a moral victory for the Protestants, whom Louis had attempted to convert by the usual violent means. Deprived of church buildings, they continued their assemblies in the "desert" in open fields and in clearings in the forest. The flock was held together by occasional ministers from Geneva and Lausanne, many of whom were caught and put to death on the Esplanade in Montpellier. Their long and sad list was inscribed on large marble tablets on both sides of the pulpit in the Montpellier church whose Pastor I was later to become. After the French Revolution,
which gave the Protestants the freedom to rebuild their churches, the Protestants
of Lasalle had built a huge, semi-circular sanctuary for at least 600 Sunday
worshipers. During the first part of the 19th century the large balcony
above had been reserved to the old-timers who had worshipped in the Desert
Assemblies, for attending which the men had risked a sentence of life in
the galleys, chained to their oars, and the women had risked incarceration
for life in the Tower of Constance in Aigues-Mortes. They came to |
