GAUSSEN, FrançoisSamuel Robert Louis (1790— 1863), a Protestant theological writer of some repute, was born at Geneva on the 25th of August, 1790. His father Georges Marc Gaussen, a member of the council of two hundred, was descended from an old Languedoc family which had been scattered at the time of the religious persecutions in France. At the close of his university career, Louis was ordained in 1816 to the ministry of the Swiss Reformed Church at Satigny near Geneva, where he formed intimate relations with J. E. Cellérier, who had preceded him in the pastorate, and also with the members of the dissenting congregation at Bourg-de-Four (Église du témoignage), which had been formed under the influence of the preaching of the Haldanes in 1817. In 1819 he published in conjunction with Cellérier a French translation of the Second Helvetic Confession, with a preface expounding the views he had reached upon the nature, use, and necessity of confessions of faith; and in 1830, for having discarded the official catechism of his church as being insufficiently explicit on the divinity of Christ, original sin, and the doctrines of grace, he was censured and suspended by his ecclesiastical superiors. In the following year, for having taken part in the formation of a Société Évangélique, which contemplated, among other objects, the establishment of a new theological hall, he was finally deprived of his charge. After some time devoted to travel in Italy and England, he returned to Geneva and ministered to an independent congregation until 1836, when he became professor of systematic theology in the college which he had helped to found. This post he continued to occupy until 1857, when he retired from the active duties of the chair. His death occurred at Les Grottes, ...