[We find the following "labour of love" recorded by the Rev. W.S. Gilly,
in his Life of Felix Neff, Pastor of the French Protestants in these
cheerless regions. Its philanthropy has few parallels in the proud folio
of history, and will not be lessened in comparison with any record of
human excellence within our memory.]
It was among the grandest and sternest features of mountain scenery,
that Neff not only found food for his own religious contemplations, and
felt that his whole soul was filled with the majesty of the ever present
God, but here also he discovered, that religious impressions were more
readily received and retained more deeply than elsewhere by others. In
this rugged field of rock and ice, the Alpine summit, and its glittering
pinnacles, the eternal snows and glaciers, the appalling clefts and
abysses, the mighty cataract, the rushing waters, the frequent perils
of avalanches and of tumbling rocks, the total absence of every soft
feature of nature, were always reading an impressive lesson, and
illustrating the littleness of man, and the greatness of the Almighty.
The happy result of his experiments, made the pastor feel anxious to
have a more convenient place for his scholastic exertions than a dark
and dirty stable; and here again the characteristic and never-failing
energies of his mind were fully displayed. The same hand which had
been employed in regulating the interior arrangements of a church, in
constructing aqueducts and canals of irrigation, and in the husbandman's
work of sowing and planting, was now turned to the labour of building a
school-room. He persuaded each family in Dormilleuse to furnish a man,
who should consent to work under his directions, and having first marked
out the spot with line and plummet, and levelled the ground, he marched
at the head of his company to the torrent, and selected stones fit
for the building. The pastor placed one of the heaviest upon his own
shoulders--the others did the same, and away they went with their
burthens, toiling up the steep acclivity, till they reached the site of
the proposed building. This labour was continued until the materials
were all ready at hand; the walls then began to rise, and in one week
from the first commencement, the exterior masonry work was completed,
and the roof was put upon the room. The windows, chimney, door, tables,
and seats, were not long before they also were finished. A convenient
stove added its accommodation to the apartment, and Dormeilleuse, for
the first time probably in its history, saw a public school-room
erected, and the process of instruction conducted with all possible
regularity and comfort.
I had the satisfaction of visiting and inspecting this monument of
Neff's judicious exertions for his dear Dormilleusians--but it was a
melancholy pleasure. The shape, the dimensions, the materials of the
room, the chair on which he sat, the floor which had been laid in part
by his own hands, the window-frame and desks, at which he had worked
with cheerful alacrity, were all objects of intense interest, and I
gazed on these relics of "the Apostle of the Alps," with feelings little
short of veneration. It was here that he sacrificed his life. The severe
winters of 1826-7, and the unremitted attention which he paid to his
duties, more especially to those of his school-room, were his
death-blow.
[Neff then relates some preliminary arrangements.]
Dormilleuse was the spot which I chose for my scene of action,
on account of its seclusion, and because its whole population is
Protestant, and a local habitation was already provided here for the
purpose. I reckoned at first that I should have about a dozen élèves;
but finding that they were rapidly offering themselves, and would
probably amount to double that number, at the least, I thought it right
to engage an assistant, not only that I might be at liberty to go and
look after my other churches and villages, but that I might not be
exposed to any molestation, for in France nobody can lawfully exercise
the office of a schoolmaster without a license, and this cannot be
granted either to a foreigner or a pastor. For these reasons I applied
to Ferdinand Martin, who was then pursuing his studies at Mens, to
qualify himself for the institution of M. Olivier, in Paris. It was a
great sacrifice on his part to interrupt his studies, and to lose the
opportunity of an early admission to the institution; nor was it a small
matter to ask him to come and take up his residence at the worst season
of the year, in the midst of the ice and frightful rocks of Dormilleuse.
But he was sensible of the importance of the work, and, without any
hesitation, he joined our party at the beginning of November. The short
space of time which we had before us, rendered every moment precious. We
divided the day into three parts. The first was from sunrise to eleven
o'clock, when we breakfasted. The second from noon to sunset, when we
supped. The third from supper till ten or eleven o'clock at night,
making in all fourteen or fifteen hours of study in the twenty-four.
We devoted much of this time to lessons in reading, which the wretched
manner in which they had been taught, their detestable accent, and
strange tone of voice, rendered a most necessary, but tiresome duty.
The grammar, too, of which not one of them had the least idea, occupied
much of our time. People who have been brought up in towns, can have no
conception of the difficulty which mountaineers and rustics, whose ideas
are confined to those objects only to which they have been familiarized,
find in learning this branch of science. There is scarcely any way
of conveying the meaning of it to them. All the usual terms and
definitions, and the means which are commonly employed in schools, are
utterly unintelligible here. But the curious and novel devices which
must be employed, have this advantage,--that they exercise their
understanding, and help to form their judgment. Dictation was one of
the methods to which I had recourse: without it they would have made no
progress in grammar and orthography; but they wrote so miserably and
slowly, that this consumed a great portion of valuable time. Observing
that they were ignorant of the signification of a great number of French
words, of constant use and recurrence, I made a selection from the
vocabulary, and I set them to write down in little copy-books,[14] words
which were in most frequent use; but the explanations contained in the
dictionary were not enough, and I was obliged to rack my brain for new
and brief definitions which they could understand, and to make them
transcribe these. Arithmetic was another branch of knowledge which
required many a weary hour. Geography was considered a matter of
recreation after dinner: and they pored over the maps with a feeling of
delight and amusement, which was quite new to them. I also busied myself
in giving them some notions of the sphere, and of the form and motion of
the earth; of the seasons and the climates, and of the heavenly bodies.
Every thing of this sort was as perfectly novel to them, as it would
have been to the islanders of Otaheite; and even the elementary books,
which are usually put into the hands of children, were at first as
unintelligible as the most abstruse treatises on mathematics. I was
consequently forced to use the simplest, and plainest modes of
demonstration; but these amused and instructed them at the same time.
A ball made of the box tree, with a hole through it, and moving on
an axle, and on which I had traced the principal circles; some large
potatoes hollowed out; a candle, and sometimes the skulls of my
scholars, served for the instruments, by which I illustrated the
movement of the heavenly bodies, and of the earth itself. Proceeding
from one step to another, I pointed out the situation of different
countries on the chart of the world, and in seperate maps, and took
pains to give some slight idea, as we went on, of the characteristics,
religion, customs, and history of each nation. These details fixed
topics of moment in their recollection. Up to this time I had been
astonished by the little interest they took, Christian-minded as they
were, in the subject of Christian missions, but, when they began to have
some idea of geography, I discovered, that their former ignorance of
this science, and of the very existence of many foreign nations in
distant quarters of the globe, was the cause of such indifference. But
as soon as they began to learn who the people are, who require to have
the Gospel preached to them, and in what part of the globe they dwell,
they felt the same concern for the circulation of the Gospel that other
Christians entertained. These new acquirements, in fact, enlarged their
spirit, made new creatures of them, and seemed to triple their very
existence.
In the end, I advanced so far as to give some lectures in geometry, and
this too produced a happy moral developement.
Lessons in music formed part of our evening employment, and those being,
like geography, a sort of amusement, they were regularly succeeded by
grave and edifying reading, and by such reflections as I took care to
suggest for their improvement.
Most of the young adults of the village were present at such lessons, as
were within the reach of their comprehension, and as the children had a
separate instructor, the young women and girls of Dormilleuse, who were
growing up to womanhood, were now the only persons for whom a system of
instruction was unprovided. But these stood in as great need of it as
the others, and more particularly as most of them were now manifesting
Christian dispositions. I therefore proposed that they should assemble
of an evening in the room, which the children occupied during the day,
and I engaged some of my students to give them lessons in reading and
writing. We soon had twenty young women from fifteen to twenty-five
years of age in attendance, of whom two or three only had any notion of
writing, and not half of them could read a book of any difficulty. While
Ferdinand Martin was practising the rest of my students in music, I
myself and two of the most advanced, by turns, were employed in teaching
these young women, so that the whole routine of instruction went on
regularly, and I was thus able to exercise the future schoolmasters in
their destined profession, and both to observe their method of teaching,
and to improve it. I thus superintended teachers and scholars at the
same time.
It is quite impossible for those who have not seen the country, to
appreciate the devotedness to the Christian cause, which could induce
Neff to entertain even the thought of making the dreary and savage
Dormilleuse his own head quarters from November to April, and of
persuading others to be the companions of his dismal sojournment there.
I learn from a memorandum in his Journal, that the severity of that,
winter commenced early. "We have been in snow and ice since the first of
November, on this steep and rugged spot, whose aspect is more terrible
and severe than any thing can be supposed to be in France." He himself
was the native of a delightful soil and climate, and even some of the
mountaineers, whom he drew to that stern spot, were inhabitants of a
far less repulsive district, but had yet made it their custom to seek a
milder region than their own, during the inclemency of an Alpine winter.
To secure attendance and application, when once his students were
embarked in their undertaking, he selected this rock, where neither
amusement, nor other occupations, nor the possibility of frequent egress
or regress, could tempt them to interrupt their studies:--and he had
influence enough to induce them to commit themselves to a five months'
rigid confinement within a prison-house, as it were, walled up with ice
and snow.
It was a long probation of hardship. Their fare was in strict accordance
with the rest of their situation. It consisted of a store of salted
meat, and rye bread, which had been baked in autumn, and when they came
to use it, was so hard, that it required to be chopped up with hatchets,
and to be moistened with hot water. Meal and flour will not keep in this
mountain atmosphere, but would become mouldy,--they are, therefore,
obliged to bake it soon after the corn is threshed out. Our youthful
anchorites were lodged gratuitously by the people of Dormilleuse, who
also liberally supplied them with food for fuel, scarce as it was,
but if the pastor had not laid in a stock of provisions, the scanty
resources of the village could not have met the demands of so many
mouths, in addition to its native population.
A note of the expenditure upon this occasion will excite some wonder in
the minds of many readers, who are not aware how much good may be done
at a small cost, when the stream of bounty is made to pass through
proper channels.
"Our disbursements for the adult school, including candles, ink, and
paper, the salary of an assistant master, and food for the sixteen or
seventeen students who came from a distance, did not exceed 560 francs
(about 22_l._ 10_s._) for four months. Of this sum I can replace a
little more than two-thirds, because some of the students have repaid
their share of the expense, and even the poorest furnished their quota
of bread. We did not provide commons for those who belonged to
Dormilleuse, because they boarded at home."
[14] They have no slates in this country--nor in the valleys of
Piemont.--Two benevolent benefactors to the Protestant cause
in Italy, who wished to confer a benefit upon the schools of
Piemont, have enabled me to supply the Vaudois schools with
this useful and economical article.
* * * * *