Although the Protestant Church of France thereby sustained an immense loss, it had a striking and salutary spectacle also presented to it by the end of these two servants of Christ, the one dying suddenly, in the plenitude of his strength, at the very moment when from his pulpit he was maintaining with distinguished ability the doctrines of his Master; the other, from his bed, gathering with pain what of breath remained to him in this world, to pour once more a flood of faith into the souls of his auditors. Such lives, such deaths, could not remain sterile of result; under their influence the Christian faith was relumed; it again spread itself among the Protestants of France. Nor was this that arid cold faith which men accept to acquit their consciences, and to rid themselves of a trouble and a scruple; nor that vague and dreamy faith which feasts rather upon its own emotions, than nourishes itself with the truths which are the voice of God. {204} A Christian's faith is neither an act of prudent submission nor a paroxysm of mystic fervor. Conviction and sentiment, the firm adhesion of the mind, and the filial love of the heart, meet in that faith in essential and intimate union. It is the light coming from on high, and bringing down with it the genial principles of vital warmth and fecundity; out of which, like salubrious waters from a pure source, flow freely and in abundance the works of human charity. I have lying before me a list of the different charities to which Christianity has in our own days since the reaction given birth in the Protestant Church of France. [Footnote 33] [Footnote 33: Exposé des oeuvres de la charité protestante en France, par H. de Triqueti, membre du conseil presbytéral et du diaconat de l'Église réformée de Paris. 18mo. 1863.] {205}