Cesar Malan

Cesar Malan was not brought up an evangelical, far from it. His father, J. I. Malan, though of Huguenot background, was a son of the 18th century, with whom the Encyclopaedie of Diderot supplanted the Bible, and who in his “good sense” smiled at “enthusiasm.” The brilliant son, Cesar, thought he would be a Genevan pastor. Genevan pastors of the time were skeptics. “During my four years of theology,” wrote Malan, “I never heard a single word which could lead me to a belief in Christ’s divinity. They taught us only the dogmas of religion.” “The New Testament was not among the books required in our theological studies,” adds his fellow-student in divinity, Ami Bost, “they praised the majesty of the Scriptures, after the manner of Rousseau, but thought it presumption to base one’s religious and Christian faith upon the Word.”

It is not surprising then that, after his ordination, Malan confessed to little interest in Scripture. Once having taken the Bible with him to lighten a journey he “found its style antiquated and common-place.” Yet such is the chasm yawning between rationalist opinion and statement that, when in October 1810, at the age of twenty-three, he was inducted into the pastorate, he assented to the following formula:

“You promise before God and on the Holy Scriptures, open before you, to preach the pure Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, to recognize as sole and infallible rule of faith and conduct the word of God as it is contained in the holy books of the Old and New Testaement?”

Malan took oath before the church and upon the Bible which was still a sealed book to him.

For four years he was in darkness, describing himself later as, at that time, “an entire stranger to the evangelical doctrine of salvation by grace, establishing the righteousness of human merit, flattering man’s virtues, and showing him heaven as the infallible reward of his efforts. I preached only the morality of reason, the lies of an unbelieving heart.”

A passage from a sermon of the time illustrates this. It was on “The Natural Innocence of Man and the Justification of the Sinner by his Worth and his Virtues.”

“When seeing the virtues which you have attained, you will open without difficulty the way to new virtues and will taste secret and inexpressible delights. The consciousness of your progress will fill your hearts with a sweet hope and it will be, in increasing each day your precious treasure, that treasure of gold purified by fire with which one buys immortality, that you finally reach, full of heavenly emotions, the happy hour when you will return to the Creator your soul, beautified with virtues.”

We swim in the full sentimentalism of Rousseau, a sentimentalism which Channing introduced into New England. No wonder an outraged village pastor said to Malan, “Monsieur, it appears as if you did not know that to convert others you yourself must be converted. Your sermon was not Christian and I hope my parishioners have not understood it.”

Then came the great change which blotted out every trace of rationalism in his heart and mind. One evening, the reading of the fifth chapter of Romans made on him a profound impression. On the following day he was reading Scripture at his desk while his class was busied with study. The passage was the second of Ephesians. “When I reached the words, ‘For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God’ the very book seemed afire. I was so moved that I had to leave the room. I walked about the college court saying to myself, “I am saved.”

He compared his conversion to the feeling of a child when awakened by a motherÂ’s kiss.

Immediately he destroyed all his old sermons and with them his collection of classical writers, for he was a fine classicist, who in later life spoke Latin to Hungarian visitors and used nothing but Latin as vernacular to his eldest boy. At Easter, 1817, he preached in the Church of the Madeleine, Geneva, and made it the occasion to announce his new-found Christian faith.

“The church was too full for the audience that crowded it. It was toward evening. This enhanced the solemnity of the appeal which, for the first time, I addressed to the conscience of the unbelievers and Pharisees. They listened at first in profound silence, but the calm was of surprise and disgust. Signs of dissatisfaction showed themselves here and there as I displayed the falseness of human righteousness, exalting that of God alone by faith in Christ. Murmurs arose. Then pointing to a wall on the right of the pulpit, I said firmly: ‘If at this moment the mysterious hand which once, in Babylon, wrote silently the death-doom of a vicious king, should come out and write on this wall the story of your life; if the lines should truly declare what you had done and thought, far from the eyes of men and in the secret of your hearts, which of you would dare to lift his eyes?’”

At this moment many gazed at the wall. Others shrugged their shoulders. There was a movement of anger in the assembly. When the preacher descended from the pulpit he passed through the crowd of his fellow-citizens as a soldier running the gauntlet. “And they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath, and rose up and thrust him out of the city.”

It was literally so, if not with violence. His parents turned against him, and his wife was profoundly grieved. The liberal theologian, Chenevier, led the pastors of the Venerable Company of Geneva to adopt a ruling which all young pastors should sign. They must pledge themselves not to preach on original sin, the action of grace, the manner in which two natures were united in Christ. This barred Malan from the pulpits of Geneva.

“The representatives of comfortable Christianity,” says Malan’s biographer in describing this episode, “who have invented a new theology which suits their lukewarm life, are able to dig in behind crushing majorities. Then courageous and consistent personalities, who refuse to take part in this infidelity, must detach themselves as franc tireurs.” They suspended Malan from his ministerial status. “He had substituted the Bible for the manual of religion.” When the Moderator finished speaking Malan arose, bowed to the Assembly, and left the hall without saying a word – that hall which he was never to re-enter.

“When I was near the door a pastor left his place and approached me before the whole assembly. He locked my hand and looked lovingly in my face. May the Lord remember this brother in the day of his distress.” A prophetic prayer! Eight years later this saint and doctor, Gaussen, went through the same experience of expulsion.

Malan left the city to preach at Ferne-Voltaire, the home of the great antagonist of Christianity. Presently a large wooden building was constructed, his Chapel of Witness. Then began a prodigious ministry, as author of hymns, tracts, catechism for young people. These were widely translated. Great numbers of visitors from other lands attended his preaching, so that he had to summarize his discourses, in English or German, for their sake. Some of these were New York Presbyterians and he relates that, when he introduced them to his little Latin-speaking boy, the latter in disappointed tone said, “Non sunt cum plumis” (They haven’t feathers,” that is, like North American Indians). The Revival, of which Malan was an early figure, brought back into the churches the custom of hymn-singing after a century of silence. Malan wrote music as well as words for his hymns. He supported himself by teaching. Each child had its own Bible and there was always one on the desk of the teacher. Though barred from city pulpits he had, nevertheless, a great Sunday School in Geneva.

All in all, he was a man of great spiritual influence whose departure beggared the church to that extent. “Malan incarnated the anguish which at periods torments the sons of the Reformed Calvinist Church when they feel that their church is no longer faithful to its glorious past, nor faithful to the divine Word which called it into being, nor faithful to the plans of God for the world.” They are the Fils Inquiets d’Eglise, “The Church’s Troubled Sons,” to use the title which a present-day Genevan group uses.

Malan’s was a well-rounded and long-continuing life of service. To the end he kept his lucidity of mind. Shortly before his death, he asked his eldest son to recite the 23rd Psalm with him. The latter began in Latin but the father interrupted with, “In Hebrew! In Hebrew!” and with hands joined and in low voice he repeated it with him.

Note:
A minor figure in the European revival was Jean Frederick Lobstein, a teacher of classics who, after his conversion, preached in the lands of the French tongue. The rationalist pastors of Switzerland lived easy lives, composing only five or six sermons annually. They persecuted the morniers, as they called the spiritually awakened, and through their official connections kept them out of the parishes. So Lobstein was obliged to preach first in a mission church in Odessa, then to serve among the scattered Protestants of Alsace-Lorraine. The Russian church had the same persecuting spirit as the modernists of France. “If,” said Lobstein, “I had happened to give the communion to a Protestant who had even once taken it in the Greek or Russian Church, I would have immediately been sent to Siberia.” Strange perversion of the spirit of Christ’s feast of love! Equally strange that which he reported as seeing, as a student in Berlin, in the Prussian Domkirche. Prussian princes coming to the Communion were given pieces of communion-bread twice as large as others!

Men would walk all night to attend Lobstein’s meetings. In arch-Catholic regions he preached the Bible, and circulated the Bible, and commended the Bible. “Then only is there hope that a community will revive,” he would say, “when the Bible is in every house, when every one realizes he has a soul, and that soul will die of famine if it is not fed with the good Word of God.” And again “if the preaching of the Gospel is not sustained by daily meditations on the Scripture at home.

He left a volume for personal religious meditation called Daily Hours of Reviving, which has, for a century, been much used on the European continent. He put truth in a sententious way. Thus: “The more a man is buffeted the more awake he remains. Faith lived in a fauteuil (armchair) is no faith but faith lived in a fournaise (furnace) brings out the gold.”

“May the Lord quiet in me the old man, who forever visits me with his calculations and his future projects…Teach me to put my knife to all my Isaacs.”

There was a cheery side to this devoted man. He was a concert flutist and often in the spring-time would, in the open air, play duets with warblers and finches in praise of the Creator.