The closing pages of Jean Morély's Traicté de la discipline & police chretienne, published in Lyons amidst the first civil war in 1562, contained an interesting suggestion. He completed his critique of the newly agreed French Protestant discipline by proposing that, in each province of the French churches, ‘a grave, wise and learned person’ should be selected ‘who should be entrusted to compile its Ecclesiastical history’. By means of this public record of each Protestant congregation's trials and tribulations the community at large in France would have an ‘eternal witness’ from which it might draw strength and direction for its future. Morély deliberately avoided saying that it would be written by a pastor; in his view, the active embodiments of the congregation were more likely to come from the laity. The suggestion was one part of a book which placed a pétard under the chassis of the freshly framed Discipline of the French Protestant churches. The propositions it contained would be anxiously debated at the fourth National Synod, meeting in Morély's native Lyons in August 1563. A bitter controversy ensued, echoing through the colloquies and synods of French Protestantism during the following decade. But his proposal for ecclesiastical histories, appropriately tamed by the Genevan pastorate, was generally welcomed. The decision was taken: ‘que les églises seront adverties de faire un recueil fidèle de tout ce qui est arrivé de plus remarquable par la Providence diuine aux lieux de leur ressort et d'en enuoyer les relations à nos révérends frères de Genève, avec toute la diligence possible’.