214 PROF. F. F. ROGET, ON FREDERIC GODET_, SWISS DIVINE, 



difficulties coincided witli Godet's engagement to be married to 

 Mademoiselle Caroline Vautravers, it was easy for him to 

 suggest that he should give up his post on that account, and his 

 employers might have followed him upon such an opportune 

 bypath. But they would not part with him on any other issue 

 than his actual marriage and this was postponed for a year so as 

 to meet the Eoyal pleasure. 



Asked by a fellow-theologian, of the same Evangelical 

 convictions as himself, to be unrelenting in declining joint action 

 with Eationalistic clergymen, he wrote that, on the contrary, 

 the more he should fight them to the quick on the point of 

 dogma, the more also should he seize suitable opportunities in 

 which to join with them in works of Christian charity. This 

 would not be a surrender, but a confining of opposition to the 

 useful point. 



Godet was married on 16th October, 1844, on the estate of 

 Madame von Scharnhorst, in whose house his bride had been a 

 governess. He left the Eoyal Household with every evidence 

 of his having been a trusted servant : a pension for life, and, for 

 life also, the title of Eoyal Chaplain at Neuchatel, with a good 

 salary, much more than the traditions of economy prevailing in 

 the HohenzoUern mSnctf/e seemed to justify. Augusta, Princess 

 of Prussia, mother of his pupil, later first Empress of Germany 

 in the HohenzoUern line, never foro'ot the obligations of heart 

 and soul she had contracted towards the educator of her son. 

 Godet describes her as a woman endowed with a faith that 

 shunned words, whose religion was visible in her life, whose 

 eloquence lay in her actions, and, for the remainder, veiled in 

 wonianl}^ reserve. 



"From the first to the last day of my sojourn with the 

 Princes of Prussia," wrote Godet enq)hatically, when he felt he 

 must leave on this point a testimony for posterity, " I experi- 

 enced from them every possible mark of affection and esteem, 

 and received from all those personages, who have so often been 

 represented as haughty and thankless, none but proofs of 

 natural benevolence. 1 was till the end an object of their most 

 delicate attentions." 



This testimony may be the more readily believed as Godet 

 was a strong man and incapable of any complaisance. 



During the period of his tutorship he naturally had but 

 rarely occasion to write to the prince. But it was a different 

 matter when he returned to Neuchatel, where his life work 

 detained him practically without intermission for 56 years 

 (1844-1900). Letters passed then regularly and frequently 



