[1] Although he had attended Free Evangelical churches (Eglises évangéliques libres), he discovered as a young man that Baptist beliefs better reflected his own convictions.

[2] After studying at the East London Missionary Training Institute in 1873-74, and then joining with Robert W. McAll in his Paris ministry, he was ordained on 18 August 1879.

Saillens also wrote a number of pamphlets, articles, and books, including The Soul of France (1916) and Le Mystère de la foi (1931).

Saillens wrote and translated approximately 250 hymns, including the emblematic “La Cévenole,” sung every year by French Protestants at the ”Assemblée du Désert”(Mas Soubeyran).

[8] Emile-Guillaume Léonard, for many years the dean of the Department of Religious Sciences at the EPHE(Sorbonne), said his generation had been fascinated by “’revivalist’ pastors such as Ruben Saillens, who had so many talents” that “they bore about them a sense of hope, as though they could call fire down from Heaven.”[9]