Today, I finished reading The Huguenot Galley-Slave: Being the Autobiography of a French Protestant Condemned to the Galleys for the Sake of His Religion by Jean Marteilhe. I started this book two days ago while vacationing in Arizona. Prompted by my church's sermon series in 1 Peter, I started studying 1 Peter on my own last month. In his commentary The Message of 1 Peter, Edmund Clowney mentions a museum display in the mountains of southern France that refers to "the words of a Reformed Christian galley slave: 'My chains are the chains of Christ's love.'" Motivated to learn more about these Huguenot martyrs, I discovered the aforementioned autobiography, which provided a fascinating and humbling glimpse into the suffering of fellow believers. I set out to better understand the nature of suffering for the faith through the eyes of this galley slave, and I achieved my goal. This galley slave wrote, "…the more we suffer afflictions, the more we remember God."
Throughout his account, Marteilhe shows a steadfast faith that exceeds any faith that I could imagine in the face of such dire circumstances. As a prisoner of the state for 13 years, half of those serving on a French galley, he never waivered from his conviction as that all his steps were in accordance with God's will, even when he missed an opportunity as a 16-year-old to avoid arrest: "But it was God's will that we should remain in this ignorance, so that our constancy and our faith should be put to trial during thirteen years of the most frightful misery in dungeons and in the galleys, as will be seen in the course of these memoirs."
His account should motivate Christian parents not to neglect our responsibility to instruct our children in the Lord: "We replied, that we placed our whole confidence in God, and that we resigned ourselves to His holy will; that we did not expect any human help and that by God's grace, which we should never cease to implore, we would never deny the Divine and true principles of our holy religion; that he must not believe it was through obstinacy or infatuation that we continued steadfast; that it was, thank God, through a firm conviction of the goodness of our cause, and that our parents had taken all possible care to instruct us in the truth of our religion and the errors of the Roman faith, that we might boldly profess the one, and avoid falling into the dangers of the other." Later in the book, he affirms the role of his parents once more: "…thanks to God and to my parents, I have been brought up and very well instructed in the principles of the reformed religion…"
The behavior of Marteilhe and his fellow Reformed prisoners reminded me of Paul and Silas in prison. While in prison, these Frenchmen "had prayers morning and evening," read sermons, and sang psalms, "so that [their] prison was something like a little church." In fact, their witness reversed the so-called conversions of many recent converts in Hayre-de-Grice to Roman Catholicism, who, after visiting these prisoners, recognized their own hypocrisy and, convicted by the actions and attitudes of the prisoners, came to a true faith in Christ.
If these men could face and endure bastinados (lashings to the brink of death), starvation, long marches carrying their 150-lb chains, endless days chained to a bench in a galley, and endless abuse and deceitful neglect by their captors, and yet affirm God's power, grace, and mercy on their behalf, what prevents me from giving all of myself for the sake of Christ, no matter what nature of persecution may follow? As Marteilhe so aptly states, "for when I consider that Jesus Christ, his apostles, and so many faithful Christians have been persecuted, according to the prophecy of their divine Saviour, I cannot but believe myself to be in the right road to salvation, since I am persecuted as they were."
