Louis Auguste Sabatier was born at Vallon in 1839 and educated at Montpellier and Montauban. Later he studied at Basle, Tübingen and Heidelberg. His first appointment was as agent of the Société centrale protestante d'évangelisation at Aubenas, Ardèche, but in 1870 he became professor of dogmatics in the Protestant faculty at Strasbourg. On the outbreak in the same year of the Franco-Prussian War he helped to organize a Protestant ambulance service and after France's defeat refused to continue academic work under a German government. Indeed he so antagonized the German authorities in the city that he was obliged to leave. Settling in Paris as secretary of the École libre des sciences religieuses—he had declined the offer of a university post at Lausanne—he devoted much of his time for economic reasons to journalism. When, however, in 1877 the Protestant faculty was transferred from Strasbourg to Paris—and the establishment of such a faculty in the capital he had himself repeatedly urged—he at last was able to resume his former career. He was subsequently appointed associate director of the section for the history of religion at the Ecole des hautes etudes and finally, in 1895, dean of the faculty. His numerous publications include, besides the well-known Esquisse d'une philosophie de la religion (1897), a history of the canon of the New Testament (1877), an address, De l'esprit théologique, to the Paris Société de Théologie (1878), a study of the Apocalypse of St John (1888), a notable volume on St Paul—L' Apôtre Paul.