Felix Neff, while still a proposant, or candidate for the ministry, at Geneva, was sent to Dauphine in response to the appeal of two pastors there for an assistant.  Two years later, at the beginning of 1824, in the twenty-sixth year of his age, he became pastor of the Protestant churches in the Arvieux section of the High Alps.  This was the larger and by far the more arduous of the two parishes into which the department was at that time divided.  In seventeen or eighteen widely-scattered villages Neff found the little groups of “Huguenots” which composed his charge.  His official residence, the presbytery, was at La Chalp, a hamlet above the village of Arvieux and near the border of Italy.  From this point to St. Laurent, the western limit of his parish, is a journey of sixty miles, including the passage of a dangerous gorge and the crossing of a difficult snow-pass.  St. Veran on the east was the least remote of his boundaries, but even this is separated from La Chalp by twelve miles of steep descent and rough climbing.  On the north and the south the extreme points were distant respectively thirty-three and twenty-miles, and the routes are of the same character as in the other directions.

These disadvantages, instead of daunting the young pastor, seemed only to stimulate his ardor.  “I am always dreaming of the High Alps,” he had written in 1823, after visiting them for the first time.  “I had rather be stationed there than in places which are under the beautiful sky of Languedoc.  The country bears a strong resemblance to the Alps of Switzerland.  It has their advantages, and even their beauties.  It has, above all, an energetic race of people—­intelligent, active, hardy and patient under fatigue—­who offer a better soil for the gospel than the wealthy and corrupt inhabitants of the plains of the South.”  The illusions that mingled with these early impressions were doubtless soon dispelled.  He shows later a perfectly clear perception of the degenerate condition of his parishioners, but his eagerness to serve them waxes with his sense of their need.  Neff was in modern times their first regularly-appointed pastor.  A son of Oberlin, whose short but devoted life shows him to have inherited his father’s spirit, had once undertaken the provisional charge of the parish, but only for a few months.  In general, it had had no ministry beyond occasional visits from the pastor of Orpierre, the other section of the department.

The valley of Fressiniere at once attracted Neff’s peculiar regard.  It was the part of his parish most difficult of access and most cut off from any chance of material prosperity.  The climate is such that in unfavorable seasons even rye will not ripen, and the patches of potatoes straggling forlornly among the rocks often fail to reach maturity.  No other grain or vegetable can be raised.  Mould quickly attacks the flour in this mountain-air, and the year’s baking is accordingly done in the autumn as soon as the rye comes back from the mill.