"Patience, nevertheless, has bounds!" objected the Viscount of Plouernel. "Has not our resignation lasted long enough? Does it not embolden the audacity of our enemies? Would you resort yet again to humble petitions? Very well. Let us pray, let us implore, once more. But if we are answered with a denial of justice, let us, then, resolutely stand up against our persecutors. We are the majority, in several mercantile cities, and several provinces. Let us, then, repel force with force. Our enemies will recoil before our attitude, and will then do justice to our legitimate wishes. I hold that to carry our forbearance any further would be to expose our party to be decimated day by day. Then, when the hour of battle shall have come—it is fatedly bound to come—we shall find ourselves stripped of our best forces. In short, let us make one more peaceful effort to secure the free exercise of our religion. Should our appeal be denied—to arms!"
"Brothers," advised Prince Charles of Gerolstein, "I am a foreigner among you. I come from Germany. I there assisted at the struggles and the triumph of the Reformation preached by the great Luther. In our old Germany we did not appeal and request. We affirmed the right of man to worship his Creator according to his own conscience. Workingmen, seigneurs, bourgeois—all proclaimed in chorus: 'We refuse to bend under the yoke of Rome; whosoever should seek to impose it upon us by the sword will be resisted with the sword.' To-day, the Reformation in Germany defies its enemies. Germany is not France; but men are men everywhere. Everywhere resolution has the name of resolution, nor are its consequences anywhere different. We are bound to uphold our rights by our arms."
"Monsieur Christian Lebrenn, what is your opinion on the grave subject before us?" asked Calvin. The printer replied:
"History teaches us that to request from Popes and Kings a reform of superstition and tyranny is absolutely idle. Never will the Church of Rome voluntarily renounce the idolatries and abuses that are the sources of its wealth and power. Never will a Catholic King—consecrated by the Church and leaning upon it for support, as it leans upon him—voluntarily recognize the Reformation. The Reformation denies the authority of the Pope. To attack the Pope is to attack royal authority. To overthrow the altar is to shatter the throne. All authority is interdependent. What is it that we demand? The peaceful exercise of our creed, while conforming to the laws of the kingdom. But the laws of the kingdom expressly forbid the exercise of all creeds, except that of the Catholic Church. Either we must confess our faith and then expose ourselves to the rigors of the law, or escape them by abjuration; or, yet, resist them, arms in hand. Are we to obtain edicts of tolerance? We should entertain no such hope. But, even granted we obtained them, our security would be under no better safeguard. An edict is revocable. The end of it all is fatedly one of three conclusions—abjuration, martyrdom, or revolt. The blood of martyrs is fruitful, but the blood of soldiers, battling for the most sacred of rights, is also fruitful. We neither should, nor can we, I hold, hope for either the authorization, or tolerance, of our cult. Sooner or later, driven to extremities by persecution, we shall find ourselves compelled to repel violence with violence. Let us boldly face the terrible fact. But, suppose, for the sake of our peace of conscience, we said: 'It still depends upon the Church of Rome and the King of France to put an end to the torture of our brothers, and to prevent the evils of a civil and religious war.' To that end a decree conceived in these terms will suffice: 'Everyone may freely and publicly exercise his religion under the obligation to respect the religion of others.' Such a decree, so just and simple, consecrating, as it does, the most inviolable of rights, is the only equitable and peaceful solution of the religious question. Do you imagine that such a decree would be vouchsafed to our humble petition?"
"Neither King nor Pope, neither bishops, priests nor monks would accept such a decree," was the unanimous answer. Christian continued:
"Nevertheless, in order to place the right on our side, let us draw up one last petition. If it is rejected, let us then run to arms, and exterminate our oppressors. It is ever by insurrection that liberty is won."
"Will Brother Bernard Palissy let us know his views?" asked Calvin when Christian had finished.
With a candor that breathed refinement, the potter replied: "I am but a poor fashioner of earthen pots. Seeing the issue is to shatter them resolutely—according to the opinion of our friend the printer—I shall tell you what happened to me the other day. I was wondering how it came about that the Evangelical religion—benign, charitable, peaceful, full of resignation, asking for naught but for a modest place in the sun of the good God in behalf of its little flock—should have so many inveterate enemies. Being a little versed in alchemy, 'Let's see,' said I to myself, 'when, mixing the varnish, colors and enamel with which I decorate my pottery, I encounter some refractory substance, what do I do? I submit it to the alembic. I decompose it. In that way I ascertain the different substances of which it consists. Well now, let me submit the enemies of the Reformation to the alembic in order to ascertain what there is in their composition to render them so very refractory.' First of all, I submit to my philosophic alembic the brains of a canon. I ask him: 'Why are you such a violent enemy of the Evangelical faith?' 'Why!' the canon makes answer, 'because, your clergymen being men of science as well as preachers, our flocks will also want to hear us preach as men of knowledge. Now, then, I know nothing about preaching, and still less about reading or writing. Since my novitiate I have been accustomed to taking my comfort, to ignorance, to idleness. That's the reason I sustain the Church of Rome, which sustains my ignorance, my delightful comfort and my idleness.' Through with that monk, I experimented with the head of an abbot. It resisted the alembic. It shook itself away, bit, roared with vindictive choler, resisting strenuously to have that which it contained within seen by me. Nevertheless, I succeeded in separating its several parts, to wit: the black and vicious choler, on one side; ambition and pride, on the other; lastly, the silent thoughts of murder that our abbot nourished towards his enemies. That done, I discovered that it was his arrogance, his greed and his vindictiveness that kept him in a refractory temper toward the humility of the Evangelical church. I afterwards experimented upon a counsellor of parliament, the finest Gautier one ever laid eyes upon. Having distilled my gallant in my alembic I found that his bowels contained large chunks of church benefices, which had fattened him so much that he almost burst in his hose. Seeing which I said to him: 'Come, now, be candid, is it not in order to preserve your large chunks of church benefices that you would institute proceedings against the reformers? Isn't it damnable?' 'What is there damnable in that?' he asked me. 'If it were damnable there must be a terrible lot of damned people, seeing that in our sovereign court of parliament, and in all the courts of France, there are very few counsellors or presidents without some slice of an ecclesiastical benefice which helps them to keep up the gilding, the trappings, the banquets and the smaller delights of the household, as well as the grease in the kitchen. Now, then, you devil's limb of a potter' (he was talking to me) 'if the Reformation were to triumph, would not all our benefices run to water, and, along with them, all our small and large pleasures? That's why we burn you up, you pagans!' At hearing which I cried: 'Oh, poor Christians, where are you at? You have against you the courts of parliament and the great seigneurs, all of whom profit from ecclesiastical benefices. So long as they will be fed upon such a soup they will remain your capital enemies.' That is my reason, brothers, for believing we shall be persecuted all our lives. Let us therefore take refuge with our captain and protector Jesus Christ, who one day will wipe out the infliction of the wicked and the wrong that will have been done us.[36] Therefore, let us suffer; let us be resigned, even unto martyrdom; and, according to the judgment of a poor potter, let us not break the pots. Of what use are broken pots?"
"Will our celebrated poet Clement Marot acquaint us with his views?" asked Calvin.
"Brothers," said the man thus called upon, "our friend Bernard Palissy, one of the great artists of these days—and of all future days—spoke to you in his capacity of a potter. I, a poet, shall address you on the profit that can be drawn from my trade for our cause. Why not make one more endeavor to use the methods of persuasion before resorting to the frightful extremity of civil war? Why not endeavor to draw the world over to our side by the charm of the Evangelical word? Listen, the other day a thought flashed through my mind. The women are better than we. This acknowledgment is easily made in the presence of our sister, Mary La Catelle, whom I see here. She is the living illustration of the truth of what I say. None among us, even the foremost, excels her in tenderness or pity for the afflicted, in delicate and touching care for deserted children. I therefore say the women are better than we, are more accessible than we to pure, lofty and celestial sentiments. Furthermore, to them life is summed up in one word—love. From terrestrial love to divine love it is but one aspiration higher. Let us endeavor to elevate the women to that sublime sphere. The common but just saying, Little causes often produce great results, has inspired me with the following thought. I asked myself: 'What do the women usually sing, whether they be bourgeois or workingmen's wives?' Love songs. The impure customs of our times have given these songs generally a coarse, if not obscene turn. As a rule, the mind and the heart become the echo of what the mouth says, of what the ear hears, of what engages our thoughts. Would it not be a useful thing to substitute those licentious songs with chaste ones that attract through love? Hence I have considered the advisability of putting in verse and to music the sacred canticles of the Bible which are so frequently perfumed with an adorable poetic flavor. My hope is that little by little, penetrated by the ineffable influence of those celestial songs, the women who sing them will soon be uttering their sentiments, not with the lips only but from the depth of their hearts. Our aspirations will then be realized."