At Pluzenet there lived a blacksmith, his wife, with their son and daughter.
They were known all over the country for their bad character and evil lives. Their Sundays were, alas, often spent in drunkenness and fighting. One day someone told the son that the priest had said in the church that there was absolution for every sin that might be committed except one, and that was possessing or reading the Bible.
The young man at once said that if there was one sin he had not committed he would go at once and do it. So he went and bought a Bible and began to read it. The Sunday after he bought the Bible he could be found nowhere.
The next Sunday the same thing occurred, and the father who went to seek him found him up in the granary reading the Bible.
He said to his son, “Is this the book that has made such a change in you?” The son replied, “Yes, father.” “Well, then,” the father answered, “bring it down and read it to us, for we all need it.”
He came down and read the Word of God to his father, and mother, and sister. The father was soon converted, and some months after the mother and daughter were also converted. Now a gospel service is regularly held in their cottage.
When the father died, hundreds of people went to the funeral, and after Pasteur Lecoat had concluded the service and his address, the Mayor of the place, who had stood by, came up to Pasteur Lecoat and said: “I am a Free-Thinker, but there must be something in your religion, for I and my colleagues have frequently consulted together to see how we could get rid of that family out of the parish. The people used to call the house Hell,’ but lately they have called it ‘Paradise.’”
And so dear Pasteur’s work went on, and it is going on today, and although God has called His servant home, yet as long as the world remains the work he has been permitted to do for God in Brittany in putting the Bible into the hands of the people in their own language will never die.
One could speak of hundreds of incidents showing the value of his work for God, but that must be reserved for another time, or times.