[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.]
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.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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]