HISTORY
OF THE
PROTESTANTS OF FRANCE.
BOOK I.
FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE REFORMATION IN FRANCE TO THE OPENING OF THE CONFERENCE OF POISSY.
(1521-1561.)
I.
Meaux was the first town in France that heard the doctrines of the Reformation publicly expounded. This was in 1521, four years after Luther had affixed his theses against indulgences upon the doors of his cathedral, and the very year in which he appeared before the diet of Worms.
Two preachers attracted, beyond all others, the attention of the inhabitants of Meaux: Jacques Lefevre and Guillaume Farel; the one aged nearly seventy, but still full of activity in a green old age; the other, young, decided, ardent, and, according to the testimony of his contemporaries, making the public places and the temples resound with a voice of thunder.
Jacques Lefevre was born at Etaples, a small town of Picardy. Endowed with an expansive and inquiring mind, he had embraced all things in his studies,—the ancient tongues, belles lettres, history, mathematics, philosophy, theology; and in the course of his long travels, he had acquired everything that could be learned at the end of the fifteenth century. On his return to France, he was nominated to a professorship in the university of Paris, and gathered round his chair a numerous body of scholars. The doctors of the Sorbonne, distrustful of his learning, and jealous of his reputation, watched him with a hostile eye. Yet he displayed great devotion, being one of the most assiduous at mass, and at processions, passing whole hours at the foot of the images of Mary, and delighting in adorning them with flowers.