BOST, AMI-ISAAC-DAVID. - Protestant writer, b. in Geneva in 1780, d. at Laforce in 1874. At the age of twenty-four, he was ordained to the Calvinist ministry. Influenced by the so-called “theology of awakening” promoted by Neander and Tholuck, B. was an evangelist and minister of various independent communities, because he had incurred the hostility of the Genevan consistory by reproaching the national Church, in one of his publications, for violating the “Ecclesiastical Ordinances” in force within II.
An artistic spirit, he composed sacred hymns still used today in Reformed worship; he produced works of ecclesiastical history and himself wrote an Histoire des Frères de Bohème et de Moravie (Geneva 1834) and Mémoires pouvant servir à l'histoire religieuse des Eglises prot. de la Suisse et de la France (2 vols., ibid. 1854-56).
He died at Laforce—a small village in the Dordogne—at the home of his son John (1817-89), who had founded there, with the heart of a Cottolengo, the celebrated “Asylums of Laforce” for orphaned idiots and epileptics, still flourishing today.