LA SAINTE
  BIBLE,
  INTERPRETEE PAR JEAN DIODATI,
  MDCXLIII. 
  IMPRIMEE A GENEVE.

The sacred book is 219 years old, in excellent condition, and well covered with white dressed deerskin, its ties of the same material.  It was brought to America by Louis Bevier, a French Protestant of Ulster, and has been preserved as a precious family relic through nine generations.  It was carried from France to Holland, and thence to New Paltz.  ’Blessed Book! the hands of holy martyrs have unfolded thy sacred pages, and their hearts been cheered by thy holy truths and promises!’ There is also a family record written in the volume, faintly legible, of the immediate descendants of Louis Bevier and his wife, Maria Lablau, from the year 1674 to 1684.

Above anything else did the Huguenots of France love their BIBLES.  Various edicts, renewed in 1729, had commanded the seizure and destruction of all books used by the Protestants, and for this purpose, any consul of a commune, or any priest, might enter the houses to make the necessary search.  We may therefore compute by millions the volumes destroyed in obedience to these royal edicts.  On the 17th of April, 1758, about 40,000 books were burned at one time in Bordeaux; and it is also well known that at Beaucaire, in 1735, there was an auto-da-fe almost equal to that of Bordeaux.  It was a truly sad day, in France, when the old family BIBLE must be given up; the book doubly revered and most sacred, because it was the WORD of GOD, and sacred too from the recollections connected with it!  Grandparents, parents, and children, all, from their earliest infancy, had daily seen, read and touched it.  Like the household deities of the ancients, it had been always present at all the joys and sorrows of the family.  A touching custom inscribed on the first or last pages, and at times even upon its margins, the principal events in all those beloved lives.  Here were the Births, Baptisms, Marriages, and the Deaths.  Now all these tender, pious records must perish at once in the flames.

But mind, immortal mind, could not be destroyed; for free thought, and truth, and instruction, among the people, were companions of the Reformation, and books would circulate among all ranks throughout Protestant France.  The works generally came from Holland through Paris, and from Geneva, by Lyons or Grenoble.  Inside of baled goods, and in cases and barrels of provisions, secretly, thousands of volumes were sent from north to south, from east to west, to the oppressed Huguenots.  The great work which Louis XIV. believed buried beneath the ruins of his bloody edicts still went on silently.  At Lausanne was established a seminary, about the year 1725, where works for the French Protestant people were printed and circulated.  The Bishop of Canterbury, with Lord Warke, and a few foreign sovereigns, actively assisted in the founding of this institution.  Thus did that beautiful town become the source of useful and religious knowledge to thousands, although it was conveyed far and wide in a very quiet and secret way.  One man was condemned to the galleys for having received barrels, marked ’Black and White Peas,’ which were found full of ‘Ostervald’s Catechisms.’