ABSTRACT
According to Jean Crespin’s History of the Martyrs, the Reformed church in Paris first came into being for the sake of a baptism. Under the reign of Henri II, in the 1550s, the Sieur de La Ferrière fled from Maine to Paris in search of greater religious tolerance. In 1557, La Ferrière found himself in Paris and the father of a newborn child, with no Reformed church in which to baptise the infant.1 In search of a solution, he called together the group with whom he gathered to pray and read the Bible. In Crespin’s words, La Ferrière did not want ‘the child whom God had given him to be baptised according to the superstitions and ceremonies of the Roman Church’. He begged his colleagues not to ‘allow the infant that God had given him to be deprived of the baptism by which the children of Christians should be consecrated to God’. In order to prevent this, he asked them to elect a minister from among themselves who could perform the child’s baptism. Informal gatherings sufficed for prayer and study, but the sacrament of baptism required a minister and the preaching of the Word. When La Ferrière’s fellow adherents of the Reform hesitated, he responded that he could not, in good conscience, consent to the corruptions of a Roman Catholic baptism, but that it was impossible to take the child all the way to Geneva for a proper Reformed ceremony. ‘If the child died without this mark’, he said, he would call them all before God’s judgement for having refused such a just request. Finally persuaded, the group elected one of their members, Jean le Maçon, as minister and thus, Crespin reported, the Reformed church in Paris had its beginnings.2
