Part 7

No such embarrassment was experienced by M. Daniel Encontre when he began his career to serve the movement of awakened Christianity in the bosom of French Protestantism. I will not venture here to cite the precise words, harsh and severe, employed by him on the 13th of December, 1816, at Montauban, in his capacity of "Doyen" of the faculty of Protestant Theology, respecting those termed by him "the pretended ministers of the Gospel, disbelievers in the Gospel and in the divinity of Jesus Christ." {139} He regarded harmony of faith and language, harmony between shepherd and flock, as the first law of religious society. Born in a grotto of La Vaunage, to which his mother had fled to escape from the flames of persecution; devoted from his birth by his father, the Pastor Pierre Encontre, to the service of a "preacher in the desert," M. Daniel Encontre belonged to that class of indomitable Protestants who cling to their faith through all the perils, sufferings, and sacrifices which it entails. His first steps in life seemed to indicate in him other aptitudes, and to promise for him a different career. After having studied divinity at Lausanne and at Geneva, and been consecrated by his father himself to the ministry of the Gospel "in an assembly in the desert," he seemed to doubt his own vocation; for while performing the functions of his ministry he devoted himself to the study of mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the classical languages, with an enthusiasm eager to become familiar with every department of knowledge, and encountering no hinderance from, internal obstacles or from preconceived opinions. {140} Having established himself at Montpellier, where his taste for science found subjects of gratification, he led there, during the dark days of the Revolution, a life very obscure, and at the same time most laborious; giving lessons to the master masons upon stone-cutting, imparting instruction, rendering the aids of religion to Protestants, celebrating the baptismal and marriage services, and pursuing at the same time his labors in geometry, botany, philosophy, divinity, literature, and even poetry. When order began to be re-established, he was led by his own natural tastes and the counsel of his friends to select as his career that of public instruction. He competed for and obtained, first the appointment of professor of literature at the École Centrale of Montpellier; then that of the higher mathematics, at the Lycée and in the faculty of science, of which he was nominated "Doyen." {141} As his merits established themselves by repeated proofs, his reputation increased; the papers of learned societies were filled with his contributions, and the École Polytechnique with his pupils. "I have met in our department," said Fourcroy, "two or three heads equal to his, but not one superior." M. de Candolle gladly selected him to aid him in his "Researches respecting the Botany of the Ancients;" and M. de Fontanes has more than once spoken of him to me as one of the men who most honored the University. But in him, neither the mathematician, the botanist, nor the philologist took precedence of the Christian. At one time as expounder of Moses and of Genesis, [Footnote 18] at another as a writer defending the Apostles, accused of being a copyist of Plato. [Footnote 19] he neglected no occasion of placing his scientific attainments at the service of Christianity;

[Footnote 18: Dissertation sur le vrai système du monde comparé avec le récit que Moïse fait de la création. Montpellier, 1807.]

[Footnote 19: Lettre à M. Combes-Dounous, auteur d'un Essai historique sur Platon. Paris, 1811.

A remarkable essay of M. Daniel Encontre, "sur le Péché original," was published, after his death, in 1822, and he left a great number of manuscripts, among others a "Traité sur l'Église," (600 pages,) written in Latin; "Etudes théologiques," a Hebrew Grammar, a "Cours de philosophie," a "Cours de litérature Française," a "Flore biblique," several "Memoires de mathématiques transcendantes," etc. As a teacher of transcendental mathematics at Montpellier he had as pupil M. Auguste Comte, the head of the "École positiviste," who, in spite of the profound diversity of their opinions, regarded it as a duty to dedicate to him in 1856 his treatise, "Sur la Synthèse subjective," in testimony of admiration and of gratitude.]

{142}

and when, in 1814, he was asked to quit Montpellier, to abandon his habits, his tastes, and his friends, for the chair of the professorship of divinity at Montauban, where he was to fulfill the functions of "Doyen," he sacrificed without hesitation the enjoyment of his life to his religious vocation, and applied himself with unceasing energy to the warlike activity of a Christian professor, until the day when, overcome by fatigue and sickness, he accorded to himself the melancholy satisfaction of returning to Montpellier, in order to die near the tomb of a beloved daughter, who had long aided him in his labors.

{143}

The destinies of Protestantism in France have, to a singular degree, been at once varied and uniform, confused and simple. After having in the sixteenth century valiantly disputed the victory, it was vanquished, decimated, expelled. But it resisted, and survived not only its defeat, but the gradual process of its enfeeblement and its expulsion. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the French Protestants lost the protection of the laws, their secure sanctuaries, their great chiefs, their great divines, their great writers; but they preserved nevertheless their faith and their religious honor. In the times that ensued their successors remained faithful to the belief and the customs of their fathers; even persecuted and condemned to death, having their property confiscated, or become tenants of prisons and laborers in the galleys, they found in their very sufferings a resource to confirm them in the principles of Protestant piety. {144} Theological controversies died away from among them, leaving behind them the fundamentals of Christianity--living and guiding principles.

Among the higher and wealthier classes, the philosophical ideas of the eighteenth century made also their way; the great liberal movement filled the Protestant section of the nation with joy, and commanded its sympathy without detaching it from its religious habits and traditions. In its members faith had ceased to be erudite; the popular Protestant sentiment had been always profoundly biblical and evangelical. Freer and more fortunately situated than their fathers, the French Protestants now anxiously desired to remain, as they had been, Christians; and when, in 1790, Rabaut Saint-Etienne, who succeeded the Abbé de Montesquieu as President of the Constituent Assembly, wrote to his aged father, the Pastor Paul Rabaut, "The President of the National Assembly is at your feet," he manifested to the humble and zealous preacher in the assemblies of the desert, the pride at once of a politician, the piety of a son, and the fidelity of a Protestant.

{145}

M. Daniel Encontre was, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, the faithful representative of this traditionally religious character of French Protestantism; just as M. Samuel Vincent was the well-meaning and sincere introducer to it of the science and criticism of the Germans. The former corresponded more closely to the pious and national spirit of Protestant France of the olden times; the latter to the tendencies, at once novel and indefinitely latitudinarian, of a foreign philosophy and a foreign erudition. Doubtless, neither measured the range of the religious crisis of which they were themselves the symptoms; neither foresaw that within the bosom of Protestantism that crisis was to be marked by an avowed struggle between Rationalism in its progress and Christianity in its reaction.

{146}

This crisis began to manifest itself at Geneva. The mocking skepticism of Voltaire, the rhetorical deism of Rousseau, proclaimed at its gates, had deeply undermined the faith of Christ in the very city of Calvin. It was not merely some of the Calvinistic doctrines of the sixteenth century that the pastors of Geneva doubted or denied, but it was also the fundamental articles of Christianity; they abandoned not only the Dogmas of predestination and salvation by faith alone, but the dogmas of original sin, and of the divinity of Jesus Christ. In 1810 according to some, as far back as 1802 according to others, symptoms of an evangelical reaction showed themselves at Geneva among the students in theology, some of whom afterward became distinguished pastors or writers. It was not long before MM. Gaussen, Malan, Gonthier, Bost, Merle d'Aubigné, displayed their orthodox fervor and their ability. In 1816 a pious Scot, Mr. Robert Haldane, previously an intrepid sailor, who had only quitted his calling to devote himself entirely to the service of his faith, went to Geneva, and contracted with the young Methodists of that city relations of the greatest intimacy and activity. {147} They had meetings; they discussed, they preached, they prayed, they wrote. Mr. Haldane could hardly express himself in French; having his English Bible continually at hand, he turned over its pages incessantly, pointed out to his friends the passages that he regarded as decisive, invited them to read them aloud from their French Bible, and then commented upon them in a manner that always commanded their favorable attention, the conviction of the commentator had such moving and persuasive power. [Footnote 20]

[Footnote 20: Genève religieuse au XIX siècle: par le Baron de Goltz; traduit de l'allemand par C. Malan: 8vo., pp. 137-149. Genève et Paris. 1862.]

{148}

In 1816 and 1817 the evangelical reaction made rapid progress, and the body of Genevese pastors resolved to combat it by the voice of authority. They found, however, no better method of doing so than by insisting upon what, twelve years later, even M. Samuel Vincent did not scruple to recommend; they prescribed silence even whilst they proclaimed liberty. "Without"--these are their words--"giving any judgment upon the questions really involved, and without controlling in any respect the liberty of opinions," they imposed a solemn engagement both upon students demanding to be consecrated to the sacred ministry, and upon ministers candidates for pastoral functions in the Church of Geneva. It was conceived as follows: "As long as we reside and preach in the churches of the Canton of Geneva, we promise to abstain from establishing, either in entire discourses or in parts of discourses directed to this object, our opinion--first, of the manner in which the divine nature was incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ; secondly, of original sin; thirdly, of the mode in which grace operates, or grace is efficient; fourthly, of predestination. We promise also not to combat, in any public discourse, the opinion of any pastors or ministers touching these subjects." [Footnote 21]

[Footnote 21: Genève religieuse au XIX siècle: par le Baron de Goltz; p. 153.]

{149}

It is difficult to understand how men ever could have flattered themselves with the hope of re-establishing peace in the Church by the employment of so sorry an expedient. Liberty, that has rent asunder such heavy chains, does not permit itself to be confined by so flimsy a net. The immediate effect of the regulation of the Genevese pastors was an outburst of discontent. The more violent Methodists, MM. Malan and Bost at their head, proclaimed aloud their separation from the established Church; the more moderate, among others, MM. Gaussen and Merle d'Aubigné, persisted in remaining, by right of their ministry, in its bosom, holding themselves responsible representatives _there_ of the doctrines of the Reformation, which, in fact, they did continue to preach and to teach. {150} The body of pastors at first used great forbearance toward them, and respected their liberty; and when the populace, irritated at the agitation caused in families by the Dissenters, and offended by the austerity of their precepts, made hostile demonstrations toward them, the Council of Geneva had the wisdom and fairness to use measures of repression; but, soon becoming weary of this painful duty, the Council formally forbade, without its express permission, any book of religious controversy to be printed at Geneva. {151} The body of pastors soon pronounced as vehement a condemnation of the moderate Methodists as of the ultra Dissenters. The moderate Methodists then in their turn resorted to energetic measures in support of their cause: they founded an evangelical society and a school of theology; devoted the one to propagate the zeal and the other to teach the principles of the Christian reaction; and fifteen years after the commencement of the struggle, the chiefs of the party which had proclaimed that the free divergence of individual belief in the bosom of the Church was "the great fact of our epoch, and the great step that the Reformation had in our days to make"--these chiefs, being the body of pastors, the Consistory, and the Council of State at Geneva, suspended M. Gaussen from his functions of pastor in the parish of Satigny for having taken part in the organization of an independent form of worship, and of a school of independent theology; "a proceeding," they said, "incompatible with the peace of the Church, and to be regarded as an act of insubordination, tending to bring ecclesiastical authority into discredit." [Footnote 22]

[Footnote 22: Genève religieuse au XIX siècle: par le Baron de Goltz; pp. 379-384.]

Such religious ferment in the primitive home of the French Reformation, and at the very gates of France, could not fail to exercise a powerful influence upon the French Protestant Church. {152} On quitting Geneva in 1817, Mr. Robert Haldane proceeded to Montauban, where he formed friendships with some of the Professors of the Faculty, and among others with M. Daniel Encontre. He published there also a work in French, which his friends hastened to circulate. It was styled "Emmanuel: vues Scripturaires sur Jésus-Christ." In 1818, a society formed in England, named the "Continental Society," specially devoted itself to the purpose of seconding on the Continent the progress of this Christian reaction. An English dissenter, Mr. Mark Wilks, pastor of the American community formed at Paris, was the most efficient agent of the societies which had this object in view. "It might be said of Mr. Wilks," wrote lately the Pastor Juillerat, "that he might have governed an empire, his character was so energetic, his mind so active and enterprising. He brought me aid of every description: money was required, he had money; pamphlets and books were wanted, no one was better provided; no one understood better the details pertaining to the printing and publication of papers." {153} Several Protestant journals and magazines, "La Voix de la Religion Chrétienne au XIX siècle," "Les Archives du Christianisme au XIX siècle," "Les Mélanges de Religion, de Morale, et de Critique Sacrée," "L'Evangeliste," "La Revue Protestante," "Le Semeur," etc., etc., were at this epoch successively founded and carried in different directions throughout the scattered Protestant Church, from its central organization, the fervor which had there been kindled. Genuine zeal for religion is not satisfied by action from a distance, or by action upon unknown persons, or by indirect means, as by books and by journals: it demands direct oral communication from man to man--the union of men's souls in common prayer. Certain young pastors who had at first shared in the evangelical movement at Geneva, MM. Neff, Pyt, Bost, Gonthier, scattered themselves over France, some assuming functions as local pastors, others as traveling missionaries, attracting to their proximity groups of zealous Protestants, animating the lukewarm, and erecting in every place where they made any stay little centers of Christianity, which radiated to the neighboring country around. {154} Distinct associations, some officially recognized by the State, others having no public character, [Footnote 23] gave to the labors of isolated individuals the publicity, the unity, the permanence which they required; and a special organization (colportage biblique) which at its commencement numbered only seven, but a few years afterward had sixty agents, all of them, although obscure individuals, as zealous as their patrons were zealous, caused the Holy Scriptures and religious tracts to penetrate into parts of France hopelessly inaccessible to any other method of communication and of instruction.

[Footnote 23: La Société biblique, la Société pour l'encouragement de l'instruction primaire parmi les protestants, la Société évangélique de France, la Société des traités religieuse, la Société des missions protestantes, la Société centrale pour les intérêts protestants, la Société d'évangelisation, etc.]

{155}

To a movement so earnest and so general, although propagated by a small number of persons in the heart of a population itself forming but a small minority in the nation at large, obstacles would inevitably occur. They were encountered on all hands and of all kinds, religious and political--from the administration, from popular prejudices, from the distrust of the Government, from the hostility of the Roman Catholic clergy, from differences of opinion on theological points among Protestants themselves, from the _amour propre_ of individuals, and the perplexed or timorous ideas of subalterns in authority. The activity of the Protestant societies created uneasiness in bishops and priests, who strove not merely to counteract their influence, but to interfere with their liberty of action. Mayors of towns, judges of the peace, sometimes too, magistrates and administrators of more elevated rank, lent their aid to these exceptionable proceedings. Hence arose suspicions, complaints, and struggles which retarded the new-born impulse of awakening Christianity. {156} But the earnest perseverance of its patrons, the general wisdom of the supreme Government, and the authority, growing more and more each day, of the principles of justice and of liberty, gradually surmounted all these obstacles. It was the Restoration that recognized the chief Protestant societies and gave them the sanction of the law. Under the Government of 1830 they used their rights with more confidence and fewer hinderances. The equitable intentions of King Louis Philippe and of his counselors upon religious matters could not be doubtful, whatever their caution not to cause uneasiness or wound the susceptibilities of the Roman Catholics. The Protestants now believed it to be no longer necessary to look to foreign support. Formed at Paris in 1833, the Evangelical Society of France experienced a momentary impulse of national jealousy, the result of which was some coldness in its relations with the Continental Society of London; but as soon as the latter perceived that its direct interference was rather an embarrassment than a necessity to the Christian reaction in France, it withdrew its agency without withholding its sympathy, and handed over to the Evangelical Society of France all the "stations" and religious charities which had up to that time been founded by its exertions.

{157}

The awakening of Christianity among the Protestants of France had now produced such results that it mattered little who the patrons of the movement might be; it had assumed its true character, and was drawing its strength from the fountain of truth. In times of religious incredulity and of religious indifference, and even in the transitional times which immediately ensue, it is the error of many, and even of men who respect and support religion, to consider it in the light of a great political institution--a salutary system of moral police, however necessary to society, indebted for its merits and its prerogatives rather to its practical utility than to its intrinsic truth. {158} Grave error, misconceiving both the nature and the origin of religion, and calculated to deprive it both of its empire and its dignity! Utility men hold as of great account, but it is only truth that commands unconditional surrender. Utility enjoins prudence and forbearance; truth alone inspires feelings of confidingness and devotion. A religion having no other guarantee for its influence and its endurance than its social utility would be very near its ruin. Men have need of, nay, they thirst for truth in their relations with God, even more than in their relations with one another; the spontaneous prayer, adoration, obedience, suppose faith. It was in the very name of the verity of the Christian religion, of that verity manifested in its history by the word and even by the presence of God, that the awakening of Christians was accomplished among us. The laborers in this great work felt the faith of Christianity, and they diffused it; had they spoken only of the social utility of Christianity, they would never have made the conquest of a single human soul.

{159}

At first sight one is tempted to attribute this success to energy of faith on the part of these laborers in the cause, to the active and devoted perseverance of their zeal. Again a mistake! Not that human merit was without its share in the results; but even where the faith was thus propagated, the share that that faith itself had in the result was infinitely greater, from its own proper and inherent virtue, than any share of men. Incredulity and indifferentism may diffuse themselves and pretend to dominate; they leave unsolved the problems that lie in the depth of man's soul: they do not rid him of his perplexities, of instinct or of reflection, as to the world's creation and man's creation, the origin of good and evil, providence and fate, human liberty and human responsibility, man's immortality and his future state. {160} Instead of the denials and the doubts that had been thrown over these unescapable questions, those who applied themselves fully to rouse awakened Christianity, recalled the human soul to the memory of positive solutions of these questions; solutions in accordance with the traditions of their native land, in accordance with their habits as members of families, and in harmony with the recollections of early childhood; solutions often contested, never refuted; always recurring in the lapse of ages, and century after century! It was from the intrinsic and permanent value of the doctrines which they were preaching, and not from themselves, that the laborers in the work derived their force and their credit.