‘RÉveil’ is Swiss for Revivalism. The movement was the Genevan analogue of our Wesleyan Methodism, though it did not begin till more than five-and-twenty years after John Wesley’s death. The originator of it was the Scotch evangelist, Robert Haldane. He came to Geneva, made the acquaintance of the theological students, and was surprised and shocked.

‘Had they been trained,’ he writes, ‘in the schools of Socrates or Plato, and enjoyed no other means of instruction, they could scarcely have been more ignorant of the doctrines of the Gospel. To the Bible and its contents their studies had never been directed. After some conversation, they became convinced of their ignorance of the Scriptures, and of the way of salvation, and exceedingly desirous of information.’

The young men fell into a habit of dropping in upon Mr. Haldane, at all hours of the day and night, to talk over the mysteries of revealed religion. He decided to organize his efforts for their evangelization, take them in classes three nights a week, and expound the Epistle to the Romans. His influence over them was the more remarkable because he was, at first, obliged to converse with them by means of an interpreter. And he had remarkable men among his pupils: Adolphe Monod, of Paris; FÉlix Neff, the Alpine missionary; and Merle d’AubignÉ, the historian of the Reformation. A friend, too old to be his pupil, and already of his way of thinking, was CÆsar Malan, the hymnodist.

The movement thus inaugurated was, it may be presumed, neither wholly good nor wholly bad. No doubt it was well for the old-fashioned Calvinists to be shaken out of their old-fashioned formalism, and taught to regard religion, not as the placid and docile acceptance of a theological code, but as the special experience of the individual soul. The history of religion is the history of such reactions against formalism; and, on the whole, they make for progress. But revivalists, being only human after all, have, like other people, their besetting sins. They are prone to hypocrisy, to spiritual pride, to sour austerity, to the passing of uncharitable judgments on their neighbours, and to the unwarranted assumption of the right to cast the first stone at sinners.

These vices of the revivalists attracted the attention of that section of young Geneva which was not absorbed in the contemplation of their virtues. They disliked to see them stand at the corners of the market-place and, for a pretence, make long prayers. They took the same line towards them as was taken towards Calvin and Farel by those earlier Friends of Liberty who demanded permission to ‘live as they chose without reference to what was said by the preachers’; and they chiefly expressed themselves in verse. They formed a club—the Caveau Genevois; and though the waters of oblivion have swept over most of their writings, they were the choice spirits of the Geneva of their time, and one of them has left us a graphic word-picture of their meetings:

‘Our gathering, to which every member was expected to contribute a new song or a new air, took place irregularly, and in various places. Sometimes we met on the beautiful banks of our lake, at Cologny, on the terrace of the Hotel du Lion d’Or. We used to come home arm-in-arm, larking and singing, good friends and jolly fellows, ready to begin again those charming scenes which politics never troubled, and in which music, poetry, and joy—those crowns of harmony and loyal friendship—reigned alone.’

And one at least of their songs still lives—the song written by J.F. ChaponniÈre, which opens thus: