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Louis Auguste Sabatier

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LOUIS AUGUSTE SABATIER (1839-1901), French Protestant theologian, was born at Vallon (Ardeche), in the Cevennes, on the 22nd of October 1839, and was educated at the Protestant theological faculty of Montauban and the universities of Tubingen and Heidelberg. After holding the pastorate at Aubenas in the Ardeche from 1864 to 1868 he was appointed professor of reformed dogmatics in the theological faculty of Strassburg. His markedly French sympathies during the war of 1870 led to his expulsion from Strassburg in 1872. After five years' effort he succeeded in establishing a Protestant theological faculty in Paris, and became professor and then dean. In 1886 he became a teacher in the newly founded religious science department of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne. Among his chief works were The Apostle Paul (3rd ed., 1896); Memoire sur la notion hebraique de l'Esprit (1879); Les Origines litteraires de l'Apocalypse (1888); The Vitality of Christian Dogmas and their Power of Evolution (1890); Religion and Modern Culture (1897); Historical Evolution of the Doctrine of the Atonement (1903); Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion (1897); and his posthumous Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit (1904), to which his colleague Jean Reville prefixed a short memoir. These works show Sabatier as "at once an accomplished dialectician and a mystic in the best sense of the word." He died on the 12th of April 1901.

On his theology see E. Menegoz in Expository Times, xv. 30, and G. B. Stevens in Hibbert Journal (April 1903).

His brother, Paul Sabatier, was born at St Michel de Chabrillanoux in the Cevennes on the 3rd of August 1858, and was educated at the faculty of theology in Paris. In 1885 he became vicar of St Nicolas, Strassburg, and in 1889, declining an offer of preferment which was conditional on his becoming a German subject, he was expelled. For four years he was pastor of St Cierge in the Cevennes and then devoted himself entirely to historical research. He had already produced an edition of the Didache, and in November 1893 published his important Life of St Francis d'Assisi. This book gave a great stimulus to the study of medieval literary and religious documents, especially of such as are connected with the history of the Franciscan Order. In 1908 he delivered the Jowett Lectures on Modernism at the Passmore Edwards Settlement, London.