An eloquent passage by Henry Martyn Baird:
In the long conflict that arose out of the effort to crush the Protestant doctrines and their professors in France, from the first outbreak of civil war in the middle of the sixteenth century down to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the seventeenth, and indeed far beyond that time, when the Reformed faith was supposed to have been annihilated, the psalms were the badge by which the Huguenots were recognized by friend and foe alike, they were the stimulus of the brave, the battle-cry of the combatant, the last consolatory words whispered in the ears of the dying. (Theodore Beza, the Counsellor of the French Reformation, 1519-1605 [New York: Putnam], p. 288)
