Love Under Fire

Berquin at the Stake

At the stake, Berquin tried to say a few words to the people, but the monks began to shout and the soldiers to strike their weapons, and their noise drowned the martyr's voice. So in 1529 the highest church authority of cultured Paris “gave the populace of revolutionary France in 1793 the detestable example of suppressing on the scaffold the sacred words of the dying.”⁶ Berquin was strangled, and his body was consumed in the flames. LF 92.7

Teachers of the reformed faith left for other fields. Lefevre made his way to Germany. Farel returned to his native town in eastern France, to spread the light in his childhood home. The truth that he taught found listeners. Soon he was banished from the city. He traveled from village to village, teaching in private homes and hidden meadows, finding shelter in the forests and among rocky caverns that he had known in boyhood. LF 93.1

As in the apostles’ days, persecution had “actually turned out for the furtherance of the gospel” (Philippians 1:12). Driven from Paris and Meaux, “those who were scattered went everywhere preaching the word” (Acts 8:4). And so the light found its way into many remote provinces of France. LF 93.2