[Illustration: THE HEAD OF LAKE ANNECY HTE. SAVOIE]
The movement thus inaugurated was, it may be presumed, neither wholly good nor wholly bad. No doubt it was well for the old-fashioned Calvinists to be shaken out of their old-fashioned formalism, and taught to regard religion, not as the placid and docile acceptance of a theological code, but as the special experience of the individual soul. The history of religion is the history of such reactions against formalism; and, on the whole, they make for progress. But revivalists, being only human after all, have, like other people, their besetting sins. They are prone to hypocrisy, to spiritual pride, to sour austerity, to the passing of uncharitable judgments on their neighbours, and to the unwarranted assumption of the right to cast the first stone at sinners.
These vices of the revivalists attracted the attention of that section of young Geneva which was not absorbed in the contemplation of their virtues. They disliked to see them stand at the corners of the market-place and, for a pretence, make long prayers. They took the same line towards them as was taken towards Calvin and Farel by those earlier Friends of Liberty who demanded permission to ‘live as they chose without reference to what was said by the preachers’; and they chiefly expressed themselves in verse. They formed a club--the Caveau Genevois; and though the waters of oblivion have swept over most of their writings, they were the choice spirits of the Geneva of their time, and one of them has left us a graphic word-picture of their meetings:
‘Our gathering, to which every member was expected to contribute a new song or a new air, took place irregularly, and in various places. Sometimes we met on the beautiful banks of our lake, at Cologny, on the terrace of the Hotel du Lion d’Or. We used to come home arm-in-arm, larking and singing, good friends and jolly fellows, ready to begin again those charming scenes which politics never troubled, and in which music, poetry, and joy--those crowns of harmony and loyal friendship--reigned alone.’
And one at least of their songs still lives--the song written by J. F. Chaponnière, which opens thus:
‘Qu’il est beau ce mandement De monsieur le grand Vicaire; Sa pastorale, vraiment A tout bon dévot doit plaire, Car il dit à son troupeau: “S’il est du mal sur la terre, _C’est la faute de Voltaire, C’est la faute de Rousseau_.”’