I am inclined to think that his father's will was not the only, and possibly not even the principal, guiding motive in Calvin's resolution. From the age of fourteen, when he began his studies in the college of La Marche, at Paris, he had been a pupil of the learned professor Mathurin Cordier, or Corderius, who was afterwards placed by him at the head of the College of Geneva. Robert Olivétan, afterwards one of the translators of the Bible, was a fellow-countryman and relative of whom he saw much when he was at Noyon. These two men were well acquainted with the labours of Luther, and were themselves following the current of the new ideas; and, doubtless, if they had not attracted Calvin towards these ideas, they had at least prepared him to receive them. Be that, however, as it may, in accordance with his father's wish and his own inclination, he abandoned the Church in 1529, and went first to Orleans and then to Bourges to study law. At these two universities there were celebrated professors who taught, not only jurisprudence, but the various branches of history, philosophy and philology, which are cognate to that science. Calvin met there Pierre de l'Estoile, Petrus Stella, a learned and subtle jurist, who was afterwards President of the Court of Inquiries in the 'Parlement' of Paris; Alciati of Milan, who had been appointed by Francis I. as the most learned doctor of the time in Roman law, and also as one of the most elegant scholars in ancient literature; and Melchior Wolmar, the German, a learned Greek scholar, who read Homer and Demosthenes with his pupils, and who also read with them—but not quite so openly—the Bible. From the earliest times the French jurists had been adversaries, rather than partisans, of the Romish Church, and after the revival of pagan literature the more learned among them frequently prided themselves upon displaying great independence and freedom of thought. The three professors of Orleans and Bourges became the revered masters of Calvin, and Calvin was the favourite pupil of his masters. But he was not long a pupil. 'He profited so greatly in so short a time,' says Beza, 'that he was not considered as a student, but as one of the learned doctors,' and he was often called upon to take the place of his masters in the professorial chair. But neither law nor learning, nor any of the sciences taught by these professors, could satisfy Calvin's soul or his intellect. In speaking of himself at this time, he says:—'My conscience was very far from being in a condition of certain peace. Every time that I looked down into myself or lifted my heart up to God, such a supreme horror took possession of me that there was no purification or expiation which could have cured me; and the more closely I considered my own nature, so much the more was my conscience goaded with fierce stings, so that there remained no other comfort except to deceive myself by forgetting myself. But God, who took pity upon me, conquered my heart and subdued it to docility by a sudden conversion. … Having then received some taste and knowledge of true piety, so great a desire was incontinently kindled in me to profit by it, that although I did not entirely renounce all other studies, yet I paid but little attention to them. … Before the year was at an end, all those who were yearning for the true doctrine began to look towards me as a teacher, although I myself had only just begun to learn. … Being of a shy and solitary nature, I have always loved retirement and tranquillity; I began therefore to seek out some hiding-place, and some means of withdrawing myself from my fellows; but, so far from attaining my desire, it seemed, on the contrary, as if every retreat I chose in a remote spot was at once converted into a public school. In short, although it has always been my chief desire to live in private without being known, yet God has led me hither and thither, and turned me in so many directions by different changes, that he never left me at peace in any place, until, in spite of my own desires, he made me come forward, and brought me into public life.'
All uncertainty had disappeared and anxiety for himself had been removed; Calvin recognised his mission and entered on his vocation with great ardour. In 1531 or 1532, after three years of study he gave up the law, as he had given up the Established Church; he left Bourges, returned to Noyon, resigned his curé at Pont-l'Evêque and his chapel of LaGésine in 1534, sold the small property he inherited on the death of his father, and thenceforward devoted himself entirely to the work of religious reform; a reform which was then in its infancy, and was fiercely opposed. No resolve was ever taken more spontaneously, more conscientiously, or involved a more full and free self-sacrifice and such singleness of aim in the desire to serve, at all costs, the cause which he looked upon as the cause of the highest truth and the law of God.
He took up his abode at Paris with Etienne de la Forge, a wealthy merchant, and an ardent partisan of the Reformation, 'whose memory,' says Calvin, 'ought to be venerated by the faithful as that of a martyred saint of Christ.' He was, in fact, burnt at the stake a few years later. At his house the faithful reformers, who were already fiercely persecuted, were in the habit of meeting in secret. Calvin frequently addressed these meetings; he spoke with a confidence which carried conviction to his hearers, and almost always ended his discourses with the words: 'If God be for us, who can be against us?' His indefatigable activity and already wide-spread influence soon attracted the attention of enemies as well as friends. 'In the midst of his books and studies, he was,' says Etienne Pasquier, 'of such a restless nature, that he must still be doing the very utmost to promote the advancement of his sect. Our prisons were sometimes crowded with poor misguided men, whom he exhorted, consoled, and strengthened unceasingly by his letters; he never failed to find messengers to whom the prison doors were open in spite of all the efforts of the jailers to keep them out. This was his method of proceeding at first, and it was by such means that little by little he won over part of our France.'
Nevertheless, Calvin still remembered that not long previously he had himself been a Catholic, and at this time he showed a consideration for the institutions and members of his ancient Church, and a moderation both of judgment and language, which gave way, only too soon, to violence and invective. On the 29th of June, 1531, he wrote from Paris to Francis Daniel, one of his fellow-students at Orleans, as follows:—
'I went to the monastery on Sunday to see the nuns, and, according to your wish, to fix the day on which your sister should take the vows. They informed me that, at a meeting held by the sisters, in accordance with a solemn custom, she and some of her companions had been already authorized to take the vows. I sounded your sister's heart, that I might learn if she accepted this yoke meekly, and if her neck had not been broken rather than bent to it. I exhorted her to confide freely in me all that was passing in her soul. I have never seen any one more ready and resolute, and it would be impossible to accomplish her desire too soon. Every time that she heard her vow spoken of one would have said that she was playing with dolls. It was no part of my mission to try and turn her aside from this feeling, but I urged her in a few words not to go beyond her strength, not to expect anything rashly from herself, but to place her whole trust in God, in whom we live and move and have our being.'
A few years later Calvin would not have undertaken such a mission; or, if he had, he would not have acquitted himself with so much delicacy and reserve. His first published work was an appeal for mercy—or, to use the language of the eighteenth century, for toleration—on behalf of the reformers, who were persecuted, banished, imprisoned, and led to the stake. He put forth his protest humbly, in the shape of a commentary on Seneca's treatise, 'De Clementia' (On Mercy); so humbly that many of his biographers, and among others the new editors of his complete works, have considered that he did not intend to defend the persecuted reformers, and that his commentary on Seneca's treatise was simply the work of a moral philosopher and a philologist. It is true that Calvin does not once speak of the reformers and the hardships which they endured, throughout the work; he does not make a single allusion to them which can be laid hold of. Still, I am not the less convinced that, by this publication, he hoped to serve the cause of his brethren, and that, if reform had been triumphant and powerful, his commentary on Seneca's treatise would never have appeared. The very title of the book, and the circumstances under which it was published, are much stronger proofs in favour of this assertion than the doubts concerning it, which would arise from Calvin's reserve of language. The dedication of the work to Charles de Hangest, the Bishop of Noyon, his former patron, confirms me in this opinion. So long as prudence was possible, Calvin was prudent, and anxious to conciliate the established authorities. Very respectfully he placed a eulogy of clemency under the eyes of a Catholic prelate whom he knew to be well-disposed towards himself, and who would, as he hoped, use his valuable influence on behalf of the proscribed reformers.
The Bishop of Noyon was not the only person of whom Calvin thought and to whom he spoke at this time with an almost affectionate deference. On the 4th of April, 1532, he wrote to Erasmus, to whom he sent his book, and reminded him in the most flattering terms of his own recent labours on the works of Seneca, addressing him as 'the honour and the chief delight of the world of letters.' He did not then foresee that three years later, when his friend Bucer introduced him to Erasmus at Basle, after talking to him for some little time, Erasmus would say to Bucer, in a low tone, 'I see rising up within the Church a great scourge against the Church.'