Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,

so that you may be able to prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

Romans 12. 2.

This is resistance and reformation. On the Fight, laugh, Feast Network.

Though he is best known today for his magisterial,

multi-volume narrative history of the Protestant Reformation.

In his own day, Jean-Hen-Réle-Daubeinier was renowned as the court preacher to the House of Orange

and the provocation for a great continental revival that continues to shape the Christian church two centuries later.

He was born in the city of Geneva in 1794, though his family on both sides were beneficiaries of a rich Huguenot legacy,

and he was educated at the Genevaan Academy, where John Calvin,

Theodore Beza, Pierre Vire, and Francis Turriton had taught, the young Merle did not encounter

the doctrines of grace in either his church or his school. Instead, in 1815, quick on the heels of the cessation of the hostilities of the Napoleonic wars,

Robert Haldane, the third laird of Air Three, and a confidant of Thomas Chalmers, ventured Scotland to the city of Geneva and began a verse-by-verse study of Paul's letter to the Romans.

There in a coffee shop and inn, adjacent to the academy, under the discipleship of Haldane, Merle was dramatically converted.

It was then that he began an intense study of both the scriptures and of church history,

a history that somehow living in Geneva, he did not know.

Just a year and a half later, he determined to visit Saxony

and the University of Wittenberg for the tricentennial of Luther's Reformation.

Surprised by the posity of available information about that great turning point in history,

even from the eminent speakers, theologians, and churchmen who attended the festivities,

he determined to undertake its documentary history.

It would prove to be a monumental, lifelong task. During those tumultuous days between the French Revolution

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