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101 Chapter Seven Elie Neau and French Protestant Pietism in Colonial New York On August 20, 1697, Elie Neau, a prisoner for his faith, was forced into a gravelike cell. Air entered only through a tiny aperture; he could not walk or stand; and the hole was filled with excrement. Neau said that worms came from the walls and crawled along his body. Yet even in such circumstances, he did not despair: “My God mocks the attempts of my persecutors. I can hear His voice in my heart, telling me, as He told the prophet Isaiah, . . . ‘Lift up your voice like a trumpet . . . and declare the riches of My mercy’ . . . And I am utterly convinced that . . . God will cover me with His Providence even until the end.”1 The Life of a Confesseur Neau was born in Saintonge in 1662. He taught himself to read and to write. Although of fairly humble beginnings, as a young man he became a sailor, like many Rochelais, and eventually became quite a wealthy merchant, trading from his home port of La Rochelle across the Atlantic. He also traveled extensively in the south of France, where he came to know many Camisards. When the dragonnades began, he decided to go to the Americas and work as a sailor off the island of Hispaniola. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he fled to Boston. There he became a naturalized British citizen. He met, and married, Suzanne Paré, a French refugee, in Boston in 1686. They settled in New York in 1690. By 1692, he had been given command of a merchant ship. Shortly after the birth of his first son, while Neau was on a return voyage to London from New York in 1692, he was captured by a privateer belonging to the French navy. On being identified as a French Protestant, he was remanded to France, where he was sentenced to the galleys.2 To be released, he would have had to sign an oath abjuring his Reformed faith: at the time, any criminal imprisoned for any act whatsoever could obtain release by signing such an abjuration .3 Neau refused, in staunch Calvinist fashion quoting Mark 8:36 as his 102 • chapter seven response: “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”4 Put on trial “for having followed Jesus,”5 Neau again refused to convert, and when told to choose between “death or the Mass,”6 he chose “chains,” invoking, as Camisards often did, the need to preserve his “conscience”: “We must never obey or try to please men above what God asked of us . . . God alone has power over our souls, and our consciences are answerable only to Him.”7 Taken in irons to a galley at anchor in Marseille, he arrived on the day of Pentecost, a meaningful date for a man who was to become a “spiritist.” Neau spent the next several years chained to the ship, shoulder to shoulder with other galley slaves, whom he strove always to encourage and comfort, sharing the gospel through preaching, prayers, and song. His constant prayer was that God would grant him “pleasure in this pain, in oppression and persecution . . . for Your Name’s sake . . . May Your love enable me to bear with joy the most cruel torture . . . May I find the way to glorify You through my suffering.”8 Neau found a paradoxical freedom in his bondage, stating that his chains liberated him: whereas before he had been bound by sin, in chains his opportunity to sin was felicitously denied. He said, “I understand now that true freedom consists in being freed from sin.”9 Shackled, he could be shaped “in conformity with Christ.”10 Neau was eventually placed in a solitary confinement cell at Marseille for his steadfast refusal to abjure his faith. Known as the “galley preacher,” he converted many by his ardor and his insistence on passive resistance, a tactic typical of the early stage of the Camisard experience, and one that distinguished him from the activist, militant piety of his coreligionists later in the Camisard uprising.11 Aware that many of the Reformed faith were saving their lives but losing their souls by abjuring, Neau, while still in solitary confinement, inveighed against such behavior and against Catholicism, citing many of the same “abuses” as those listed by Camisard coreligionists. He denounced, among other things, the veneration of the Virgin, the intercession of saints, the repetition of...

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