10 of those

Adolphe Monod (1802–1856) was a beloved and courageous French pastor, a major figure in the nineteenth–century Awakening. While he is still well–known among our French–speaking brothers, most English–speaking evangelicals have scarcely heard of him.

In God’s providence Constance Walker ‘stumbled’ upon a dusty, seemingly obscure volume from 1856 containing Monod’s death–bed meditations. She found these meditations to be filled with life and peace and often joy, even as the speaker was suffering from intense, unremitting pain. Beyond that, the messages displayed a beautiful balance between logic and feeling, between appeals to the head and to the heart. Monod set out a lofty standard for the Christian life, while managing to make that standard winsomely appealing.

Monod was called ‘the voice of the Awakening’. His impact was enormous, as he labored to awaken the nominal Christians of his era to a living, vibrant, personal faith in Jesus Christ and as he challenged those who had such faith to live more wholeheartedly for their Savior. The richness of his classic, romantic prose is only matched by the richness of his thought and the depth of his love for his Savior.