M. de Staël applied his zeal and efforts to several labours that might be called mixed, because, although evangelical faith lay at the base, their object was temporal improvement. We may mention among them the foundation of Savings-banks, popular elementary instruction, and the abolition of the slave-trade.
No one has forgotten the shudder of indignation which he excited at a general meeting of the Society of Christian Morality, when he exhibited the instruments of torture used in that abominable traffic. He did more. “From hall to hall, from office to office, from palace to palace,” says one of his biographers, “we saw him display these hideous proofs of the most atrocious cruelty and lust of gain. He brought before the notice of the princes and princesses of the royal family, these machines invented by the spirit of evil, and he explained to them their bloody use. He showed them to the peers of the realm in their places in the legislative assembly, and to all the friends of humanity in the public meetings of the benevolent societies.... We may, without hesitation, assert, that it is to his generous efforts we owe the cessation of the evil, and the change manifested in the system of government and in the legislature on this subject.”
The sympathies of M. de Staël were extended to all classes of the oppressed, and he defended the victims of an intolerant law in the Canton of Vaud. His writings, his letters, his solicitations, moved every right-thinking conscience, and if he did not succeed in procuring the repeal of this mischievous law, he succeeded in having it more mildly applied.
His character offered a rare mixture of earnestness and caution, of zeal and moderation. So great was his integrity, that it frequently prevented him from speaking to the extent of his religious convictions, from the fear of overstepping them. No one understood better than himself how difficult it is, in the midst of social affairs and relations, to make one’s life conform unerringly to the precepts of the Gospel. “This want of harmony between his life and his religion,” says the editor of his works, “was an insupportable load, under which he languished, and his very physiognomy bore the impress of this mental anguish. But by degrees his mind was calmed by the Christian faith, at once so consoling and so pure, which, without detracting from the beauty of the moral type which should be the object of our endeavours, teaches us to turn our eyes from our own misery to fix them upon that one divine, holy, and just Being, who has accomplished everything for us.”
The Baron de Staël died at the Château de Coppet, on the 17th of November, 1827, when only thirty-seven years of age.
The attention and the labours of the pious were also directed, during the Restoration, towards the scattered Protestants, who were threatened with the loss of their religious belief and habits, by the distance of their dwellings from regular pastoral action. The greatest of these new Evangelists was undoubtedly Félix Neff, who was born at Geneva, in 1798. Although a stranger to the Reformed churches of our country by his birthplace, he belongs to them by his missionary career; for it is in Dauphiny, more than elsewhere, that he spread the seeds of the Gospel, and he has been justly called the Oberlin of the Upper Alps.
Neff was not covetous of glory, and it is probable that the idea of a distinguished name never presented itself to his mind, when he went to expound the Bible in the huts of the poor mountaineers. Yet no name of the French Reformation in our day has been so famous as his: numerous original writings and a host of translations have been published concerning his life. In the heart of Germany, in the most distant valleys of Scotland, on the borders of the Orinoco and the Ohio, the name of Félix Neff is pronounced, and thousands of voices will re-echo, “He was a mighty servant of the Lord.”
In his youth he was fond of reading Plutarch and Rousseau; he studied mathematics and the natural sciences, and distinguished himself by the manliness of his character, as much as by the powers of his mind. Enrolled at seventeen years of age in the artillery of Geneva, his approach to the principles of Christianity was slow; but when he had once embraced them, he never quitted them. He immediately quitted the military service, and travelled through several of the Swiss cantons, preaching the Gospel from place to place. Thence he entered the department of Isère, and in 1823 went to the Upper Alps.
There, in the deep gorges, or upon peaks covered with eternal snow, dwells a population which, it is said, dates back by its symbols and its religious creed, to the primitive Christians of the Gauls. They form a link, not only with the disciples of Pierre Valdo, but with the apostolate of Irenæus, the second bishop of Lyons.
These Christians of Dauphiny, exposed to cruel persecutions, and continually straitened as the authority of Rome gradually more closely encircled them, had taken refuge from rock to rock, from mountain height to height, as far as the extreme limit where man can exist in the rarefied air. They had carried with them their Bible, their confessions of faith, and that firm piety, which welcomes the most terrible tortures in preference to apostasy. When the Reformation appeared, they saluted it as a sister of their ancient communion, and joined the churches of Dauphiny and Provence.