F I R E & a S H E S—I R O N & C L a Y

It was the year of the Lord 1685. With only the clothes they were dressed in, their Bibles hidden in loaves of hollowed bread, they fled before the French Catholic authorities. Die or be Catholic! were shouted by the heartless dragonnades with emphasis on the die. And when the second word followed, the Protestant Huguenot victims were already struckdying, brutally slaughtered in the name of Catholic Christianity! This terror swept through Paris, continued through the rest of France, after King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes proclaimed by his grandfather, King Henry the Great of France. This bloody highway in the name of Christianity took thousands of Huguenots lives and hundreds of thousands fled their country of birth to find refuge in America, other parts of Europe, and also South Africa. In South Africa, they started anew, with their God (of Israel) and their Bibles, and the home and the freedom to serve their God they so longed for and found would become a nightmare again. With their blood, they paid for freedom, twice; and today they are still dying, slaughtered by the criminal elements that rule in South Africa, unfortunately, in the entire Africa.