The Pastors. 'We will only do what God commands us.'
The Burgesses. 'Set Courault at liberty. We will give bail for him.'
The Syndics. 'It is not the custom, seeing that he is imprisoned for contempt of justice.'
A Burgess. 'You have imprisoned him on the testimony of false witnesses; there are traitors here, and I know very well which they are.'
They separated, the magistrates surprised and provoked, the pastors and their friends more than ever resolved upon resistance. That same evening the magistrates sent a messenger to ask Calvin and Farel: 'Will you preach to-morrow, Easter Sunday, and administer the Communion according to the tenor of the letters from Berne?' Calvin was alone, and he refused to give any answer: 'Then,' said the messenger, 'on the part of the magistrates I forbid you to preach to-morrow; they will find some one else.'
After having taken counsel together during the evening, Calvin and Farel resolved to preach on the morrow, not in order that they might administer the Lord's Supper, but in order to reproach their enemies, magistrates and citizens, with their conduct towards the defenders of the Reformation. The report spread rapidly that the pastors intended to preach in spite of the prohibition of the Council. Early on the morrow a dense crowd, friends and enemies, filled the churches of St. Peter and St. Gervais. Farel entered the pulpit at St. Gervais: 'I shall not administer the Sacrament,' said he, 'but I tell you that it is not from dislike to the Bernese rite, it is because your own dispositions render all communion with Jesus Christ impossible. There must be faith in order to hold communion with him, but you revile the Gospel! There must be charity, but you are here with swords and with sticks! There must be repentance; how have you spent the night that is past?' and he launched into a description of excesses which were familiar enough to the Libertines. Angry exclamations were heard on all sides; swords were drawn at no great distance from Farel; his friends surrounded him; he descended from the pulpit, and left the church walking slowly, his head thrown back, fiercely threatened but not attacked. Similar scenes took place around Calvin in St. Peter's church. On the following day [Footnote 76] the Council resolved to adopt the Bernese rite definitely, and to depose the preachers who showed such contempt for the law, 'allowing them to remain in Geneva until others had been found to take their places.' The next day these two resolutions were confirmed by the general assembly, convened for that purpose, and an order to Farel and Calvin was added to 'leave the town in three days.'
[Footnote 76: April 22, 1538.]
The Genevese populace was undoubtedly hostile to the two reformers, to the supremacy of their faith, and the severity of their discipline and morality; their hostility was not without a confused sense of the right to liberty in matters of belief, although it also arose from vulgar antipathy to the moral results of the Christian faith and law.
Bonnivard, an old and valued friend of Geneva, often imprisoned and persecuted for the Genevese cause, and at that time living at Berne, had predicted this revolutionary violence: 'You hated the priests,' he said to the Genevese, 'for being a great deal too much like yourselves; you will hate the preachers for being a great deal too unlike yourselves; you will not have had them two years before you will wish them with the priests, and you will send them off with no other wages for their work than good blows with a cudgel. The same thing will happen in Geneva which happens among any people who have groaned for a long time beneath a hard and tyrannical power; delighted to feel themselves free, their love of liberty is changed to a love of licence; every man will be his own master and will live as he pleases.'