As we left St. Laurent
our host and his wife bore us company to the brow of a little hill
whither we had sent on our chaise, and stood there to wave us an adieu
as we descended on the other side. Then we saw them turn back toward the
group of thatched and moss-grown cottages which was all their world.
That evening we reached Gap, the capital of the department of the High
Alps, and once an important Protestant centre. Farel, the French
Reformer of the sixteenth century, was born and for a time preached
here. But since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes until very
lately--during a period, that is, of nearly two hundred years--no
Protestant pastor has been tolerated in the town, and the once numerous
flock was long since dispersed. A Swiss society undertook two or three
years ago a Protestant mission at Gap, and a friend in Geneva had given
us the name of the present evangelist. A humbler or more thankless
charge could scarcely be imagined than such a work in such a place.
There is no nucleus of hereditary Protestants, as in the
mountain-parishes of the department, and at the same time the little
city is so isolated that its people have retained the superstitions and
religious animosities of the Dark Ages. It was therefore with much
compassionate thought of his pitiful case that we sought the
evangelist's house. He was not, however, a man toward whom one could
maintain for a moment that frame of mind. Brisk, cheerful, polished in
manner and with an unsought elegance of dress and carriage, he had not
in the least the air of a despised heretic struggling hopelessly against
social as well as ecclesiastical contempt.
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