Merle d'Aubigne

Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné (16 August 1794 – 21 October 1872) was a Swiss Protestant minister and historian of the Reformation.

Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné was born at Eaux Vives, a neighbourhood of Geneva. A street in the area is named after him. The ancestors of his father Robert Merle d'Aubigné (1755–1799), were French Protestant refugees. The life Jean-Henri's parents chose for him was in commerce; but in college at the Académie de Genève, he instead decided on Christian ministry. He was profoundly influenced by Robert Haldane, the Scottish missionary and preacher who visited Geneva and became a leading light in Le Réveil, a conservative Protestant evangelical movement.

It was in small extra-curricular groups led by Haldane, that Merle d'Aubigné and his peers studied the Bible; according to church historian John Carrick, no classes were offered in the Christian scriptures at the school at that time, their having been replaced by the ancient Greek scholars.

When Merle d'Aubigné went abroad to further his education in 1817, 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. Studying at Berlin University for eight months 1817–1818, Merle d'Aubigné received inspiration from teachers as diverse as J. A. W. Neander and W. M. L. de Wette.

In 1818, Merle d'Aubigné took the post of pastor of the French Protestant church at Hamburg, where he served for five years. In 1823, he was called to become pastor of the Franco-German Brussels Protestant Church and preacher to the court of King William I of the Netherlands of the House of Orange-Nassau.

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