Educated for the Protestant ministry, he was ordained in 1819, when already teacher of the French language and literature in the gymnasium at Basel; and throughout his life he was as much a critic as a theologian.

His literary criticism brought him into contact with Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, for whom he obtained an invitation to lecture at Lausanne, which led to his famous work on Port-Royal.

[1] Vinet's Chrestomathie française (1829), his Études sur la littérature française au XIXme siècle (1840–51), and his Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIIme siècle, together with his Études sur Pascal, Études sur les moralistes aux XVIme et XVIIme siècles, Histoire de la prédication parmi les Réformés de France and other related works, gave evidence of a wide knowledge of literature, acute literary judgment and a distinguished faculty of appreciation.

[1] Accordingly, when in 1845 the civil power in the canton of Vaud interfered with the church's autonomy, he led a secession which took the name of L'Église libre.

But already from 1831, when he published his Discours sur quelques sujets religieux (Nouveaux discours, 1841), he had begun to exert a liberalizing and deepening influence on religious thought far beyond his own canton, by bringing traditional doctrine to the test of a living personal experience (see also the philosophy of Gaston Frommel).