A declaration of 1679 condemned the relapsed to _honorable amends_ (public recantation, &c.), to confiscation and to banishment.

The door's of all employments were closed against Huguenots; they could no longer sit in the courts or Parliaments, or administer the finances, or become medical practitioners, barristers, or notaries; infants of seven years of age were empowered to change their religion against their parents' will; a word, a gesture, a look, were sufficient to certify that a child intended to abjure; its parents, however, were bound to bring it up according to its condition, which often facilitated confiscation of property.

Pastors were forbidden to enter the houses of their flocks, save to perform some act of their ministry; every chapel into which a new convert had been admitted was to be pulled down, and the pastor was to be banished.

It was found necessary to set a guard at the doors of the places of worship to drive away the poor wretches who repented of a moment's weakness; the number of "places of exercise," as the phrase then was, received a gradual reduction; "a single minister had the charge of six, eight, and ten thousand persons," says Elias Benoit, author of the _Histoire de l'Edit de Nantes,_ making it impossible for him to visit and assist the families, scattered sometimes over a distance of thirty leagues round his own residence.

The wish was to reduce the ministers to give up altogether from despair of discharging their functions.