RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Vilatte Villegagnon
that religious worship in the new colonies should be conducted according to the usage of Geneva; and he was also joined by a number of soldiers and adventurers. Sailing from Havre, Villegagnon reached the bay of Rio de Janeiro in Nov., 1555. He built a fort on an island in the bay, but provisions ran low and the soldiers and workmen were hard to control. Desiring to offset them by the more traetable Calvinists, Villegagnon sent letters to Coligny and Calvin, asking for more pious Protestants and also for preachers. Pierre Richer and Guillaume Chartier were commissioned the first Protestant missionaries in America, and they were joined by eleven others. At Paris the company, headed by Philippe de Corguilleray, Sieur du Pont, was increased by many more colonists, including a certain Cointa of the Sorbonne. In Nov., 1556, they embarked at Honfleur, under the command of Villegagnon’s nephew, Bois le Conte, and in Mar., 1557, the three ships arrived, with nearly 300 colonists. But disputes arose over the Lord’s Supper, Cointa and Villegagnon making requirements contrary to Genevan usage, branding Geneva as evil, and finally withdrawing from participation in religious services. A delegation headed by Chartier left for Geneva (June, 1557) to obtain the final decision of Calvin, the administration of the Lord’s Supper meanwhile being discontinued. Then Villegagnon, relieved of the presence of the energetic Chartier, attempted to impose the doctrine of transubstantiation, and finally forbade all religious services. At this juncture, while the Protestants were holding secret meetings, a neutral ship arrived, and a number of colonists declared their intention of leaving. These Villegagnon drove from the island, confiscating all their possessions; and finally they set sailina neutral Breton ship on Jan. 4, 1558. The ship proved unseaworthy, and five of the colonists in a small boat reached a French village on the coast, where Villegagnon happened to be. He received them on condition that they would hold no converse on religion, but later ordered them brought before him, and as they persisted in their religious beliefs, he had them executed as heretics (eb. 10, 1558).
In the mean time, the ship carrying the other colonists, after many disasters, on May 26, 1558, made the Breton harbor of Blavet, where many of the survivers died or were made seriously ill by being fed too generously after semi-starvation. The remainder pushed on a few days later, and scattered at Nantes, the most of them returning to their families. Shortly afterward the Brazilian colony broke up entirely; Villegagnon returned to France; the Portuguese destroyed the fort, put to death as heretics those who remained, and carried the French guns in triumph to Lisbon. Villegagnon finally retired to the estates of the Knights of Malta at Beauvais, where he died loathed by Protestants and suspected by the Roman Catholics. The colony is noteworthy as the first missionary enterprise of the Protestant Church, and as the first attempt of Calvinism to plant a colony in the New World.
(HucEn LacHENMANN.)
Brstioerapuy: A list of the works of Villegagnon may be found in the British Museum Catalogue, under ‘‘ Durand de Villegagnon,” and in Hauck-Herzog, RH, xx. 646,
Vilmar ; Vincent of Beauvais
THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
Hc
Consult J. de Léry, Hist. d’un voyage faict dans le terre du
Brésil, Geneva, 1577, extracts from this in English are
in S. Purchas’ Pilgrimes (numberless reprints and edi-
tions); J. Crespin, Hist. des martyrs, new ed. by D. Benoit,
3 vols., Toulouse, 1885-89; F. Bourquelot, Mémoires de
Claude Haton, Paris, 1857; M. T. Alves Noguoira, Der
Ménchsritter N. D. de Villegaignon, Leipsic, 1887; A
Heulhard, Villegagnon, rot d’ Amérique, Paris, 1897;
T. E. V. Smith, in Papers of the American Society of Church
History, iii (1891), 185-206; Lichtenberger, ESR, xii.
385-387; and literature under Braziu respecting the early
history.
VILMAR, fil/mar, AUGUST FRIEDRICH CHRIS- TIAN: German Lutheran; b. at Solz (near Rotenburg, 78 m. n.e. of Frankfort) Nov. 21, 1800; d. at Marburg July 30, 1868. In 1818-20 he studied
theology at Marburg, only to learn
Religious doubt from rationalism, and from
Struggles. doubt to pass to unbelief. In Dec.,
1823, he was appointed rector of the municipal school at Rotenburg, where he remained until 1827, when he went to Hersfeld as fourth teacher and collaborator at the gymnasium, being promoted third teacher in 1829. During these years he renounced rationalism, and for a year or two professed the opinion that the world is the feeling of God. He made further progress through reading first the Church Fathers, especially Tertullian and Irenzus, and then Tholuck’s Lehre von der Siinde, and arrived at unwavering faith in Christ by his fortieth year, realizing that all he sought was to be found in the Lutheran Church, a process begun by the careful study of the Augsburg Confession and its Apology.
In 1831 Vilmar was elected from Hersfeld to the newly created diet of the electorate of Hesse, and in December of the same year he was appointed a member of the ministeriai committees for religion and instruction. From Oct., 1832, to the end of Apr., 1833, he was assistant reporter in the minis-
try of the interior and nominal second
Services to teacher at the gymnasium of Hanau;
Education. he was director of the gymnasium at
Marburg, 1833-50, being a member of the committee on gymnasial affairs 1836-50; in 1850 he was transferred to the ministry of the interior as consistorial councilor, and from 1851 to 1855 also discharged the duties of the aged superintendent Ernst; in 1855 he became professor of theology at the University of Marburg. In the reports drawn up by Vilmar in the name of his committees for the Hessian Diet in 1831-32 he appealed effectually for the elevation of the national university, for the foundation of new professorships, and for the better equipment of institutions of learning. He also transformed the condition of the public schools, and may truly be termed the reformer of the gymnasia of Hesse. His views on gymnasial instruction are set forth in his twenty-four Schulreden tiber Fragen der Zeit (Marburg, 1846). During this period he published works dealing with Germanic linguistics, among them being Deutsche Alterttimer in Heliand (1845); Vorlesungen tiber die Geschichte der deutschen National-Literatur (1845); Geschichte der deutschen National-Literatur (Marburg, 1846); Handbiichlein fiir Freunde des deutschen Volksliedes (1866); Ueber Goethes Tasso (Frankfort, 1869); Lebensbilder deutscher Dichter (ed. K. W. Piderit, Mar-
burg, 1869), and Lvther, Melanchthon, Zwingli (Frankfort, 1869). Of far greater importance, in the present connection, were his services in the reformation of religious instruction in the gymnasia. Deeming that the gymnasium was designed to train up Christian leaders of the nation, and that religious instruction should assume a distinctively churchly character, Vilmar set forth his views in a series of contributions to Hengstenberg’s Evangelische Kirchenzeitung in 1841 (ed. J. Haussleiter, under the title Ueber den evangelischen Religionsunterricht in den Gymnasien, Marburg, 1888). He also prepared for use in the gymnasia a Kleines evangelisches Gesangbuch (Marburg, 1838); taking part also in the struggle on behalf of the old hymnals, as well as in the preparation of the Deutsches evangelisches Kirchengesangbuch (Stuttgart, 1855).
The Church, Vilmar believed, was about to enter upon a new era, when there would be full recognition of the absolute unity of the visible and the invisible church, and of the communion of saints with one body on earth, foreshadowing the church of the Apocalypse, the New Jerusalem. With such a conviction, Vilmar found before him two tasks: The
first of these concerned the creed of Services to the church of Hesse, Vilmar maintainthe Church. ing that its future depended on its absolute fidelity to the confessions of the Church from the Apostles’ Creed to the unaltered Augsburg Confession. To prove that the creed of the so-called Reformed church of Lower Hesse was this unaltered Augsburg Confession cost Vilmar immense toil. The second task was Vilmar’s decided advocacy of the freedom of the Church from the State. In 1839 Vilmar took part in the Hessian confessional controversy, in which the attempt was made to discard the Augsburg Confession. Against such an endeavor Vilmar wrote his Verhdltnis der evangelischen Kirche in Kurhessen zu ihren neuesten Gegnern (Marburg, 1839). In like spirit, after the faculty of Marburg had required the use of the Heidelberg Catechism in the schools and had designated the doctrines set forth in the Hessian Catechism as ““ Reformed ” (1855), Vilmar sought to prove, especially in his Geschichte des Konfessionsstandes der evangelischen Kirche in Hessen (Marburg, 1860), that the church of Lower Hesse was termed “ Reformed ” not because of the doctrines prevailing in it, but because of the form of worship introduced by the Landgrave Maurice in the Verbesserwngspunkte (q.v.) in 1605, although after the middle of the seventeenth century the theology of Hesse- Cassel had adopted the strict predestination of the Reformed. In Die Gegenwart und die Zukunft der niederhessischen Kirche (1867) he urged that the struggle against impending union be begun with the strongest emphasis on Lutheranism; and the failure to follow this counsel of Vilmar proved a fatal error in the conflict between the Hessian churches.
In 1848-50 Vilmar exercised a profound influence on political affairs. Essentially a conservative and devoted to his sovereign, he not only supported his elector manfully, but also made the Hessischer Volksfreund, which he founded in 1848 and edited alone until the middle of 1851, a center for all the