Daily Quote for Monday, December 23, 2024

Some of the early settlers of South Africa were the Huguenots - French Protestants that fled France after the St. Bartholomew Massacre of 1572, where 1,200 Huguenots were massacred (Source). Pastor Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892) tells a sad anecdote about a 12 year old "Boy King" (Charles IX) who was encouraged by his mother (Catherine Medici) to order the massacre:

"Charles IX of France, in his youth, had humane and tender sensibilities. The fiend who had tempted him was the mother who had nursed him. When she first proposed to him the massacre of the Huguenots, he shrank from it with horror: 'No, no, madam! They are my loving subjects." Then was the critical hour of his life. Had he cherished that natural sensitiveness to bloodshed, St. Bartholomew's Eve would never have disgraced the history of his kingdom, and he himself would have escaped the fearful remorse which crazed him on his death bed. To his physician he said in his last hours, 'Asleep or awake, I see the mangled forms of the Huguenots passing before me. They point to their open wounds, and mock me. Oh, that I had spared at least the little infants at the breast!' Then he broke out in agonizing cries and screams. Bloody sweat oozed from the pores of his skin. He was one of the very few cases in history which confirm the possibility of the phenomenon which attended our Lord's anguish in Gethsemane." - Austin Phelps, as quoted in Spurgeon's Sermon Notes