JEAN

See also:

• HENRI

HENRI MERLE

See also:

• AUBIGNE, CONSTANT
• JEAN HENRI MERLE AUBIGNE
• AUBIGNE, THEODORE AGRIPPA

AUBIGNE  D' (1794-1872), Swiss Protestant divine and historian, was born on the 16th of August 1794, at Eaux Vives, near Geneva . The ancestors of his father, Aline Robert Merle d'Aubigne (1755-1799), were French Protestant refugees . Jean Henri was destined by his parents to a commercial life; but at college he decided to be ordained . He was profoundly influenced by Robert Haldane, the Scottish missionary and preacher who visited Geneva . When in 1817 he went abroad to further his education, Germany was about to celebrate the tercentenary of the Reformation; and thus early he conceived the ambition to write the history of that great epoch . At Berlin he received stimulus from teachers so unlike as J . A . W . Neander and W . M . L. de Wette . After presiding for five years over the French Protestant church at Hamburg, he was, in 1823, called to become pastor of a congregation in Brussels and preacher to the court .

He became also

president of the consistory of the French and German Protestant churches . At the Belgian revolution of 1830 he thought it advisable to undertake pastoral work at home rather than to accept an educational post in the family of the Dutch king . The Evangelical Society had been founded with the idea of promoting evangelical Christianity in Geneva and elsewhere, but it was found that there was also needed a theological school for the training of pastors . On his return to Switzerland, d'Aubigne was invited to become professor of church history in an institution of the kind, and continued to labour in the cause of evangelical Protestantism . In him the Evangelical Alliance found a hearty promoter . He frequently visited England, was made a D.C.L. by Oxford University, and received civic honours from the city of Edinburgh . He died suddenly in 1872 . His principal works are—Discours sur l'etude de l'histoire de Chrislianisme (Geneva, 1832); Le Lutheranisme et la Reforme (Paris, 1844); Germany, England and Scotland, or Recollections of a Swiss Pastor (London, 1848); Trois siecles de lutte en Ecosse, ou deux rois et deux royaumes; Le Protecteur ou la republique d'Angleterre aux jours de Cromwell (Paris, 1848); Le Concile et l'infaillibilite (1870) ; Histoire de la Reformation au X Vltie"'e siecle (Paris, 1835-1853; new ed:, 1861-1862, in 5 vols.); and Histoire de la Reformation en Europe au temps de Calvin (8 vols., 1862-1877) . The first portion of his Histoire de la Reformation, which was devoted to the earlier period of the movement in Germany, gave him at once a foremost place amongst modern French ecclesiastical historians, and was translated into most European tongues . The second portion, dealing with reform in the timeof Calvin, was not less thorough, and had a subject hitherto less exhaustively treated, but it did not meet with the same success . This part of the subject, with which he was most competent to deal, was all but completed at the time of his death . Among his minor treatises, the most important are the vindication of the character and aims of Oliver Cromwell, and the sketch of the contendings of the Church of Scotland .

Indefatigable in sifting

original documents, Aubigne had amassed a wealth of authentic information; but his desire to give in all cases a full and graphic picture, assisted by a vivid imagination, betrayed him into excess of detail concerning minor events, and in a few cases into filling up a narrative by inference from later conditions . Moreover, in his profound sympathy , with the Reformers, he too frequently becomes their apologist . But his work is a monument of painstaking sincerity, and brings us into direct contact with the spirit of the period .