The French educational system of the sixteenth century was well able to take care of such a child and make the best of his many gifts. At the age of nineteen, John was allowed to preach. His future as a duly established deacon seemed assured.
But there were five sons and two daughters. Advancement in the Church was slow. The law offered better opportunities. Besides, it was a time of great religious excitement and the future was uncertain. A distant relative, a certain Pierre Olivétan, had just translated the Bible into French. John, while in Paris, had spent much time with his cousin. It would never do to have two heretics in one family. John was packed off to Orleans and was apprenticed to an old lawyer that he might learn the business of pleading and arguing and drawing up briefs.
Here the same thing happened as in Paris. Before the end of the year, the pupil had turned teacher and was coaching his less industrious fellow-students in the principles of jurisprudence. And soon he knew all there was to know and was ready to start upon that course which, so his father fondly hoped, would some day make him the rival of those famous avocats who got a hundred gold pieces for a single opinion and who drove in a coach and four when they were called upon to see the king in distant Compiègne.
But nothing came of these dreams. John Calvin never practiced law.
Instead, he returned to his first love, sold his digests and his pandects, devoted the proceeds to a collection of theological works and started in all seriousness upon that task which was to make him one of the most important historical figures of the last twenty centuries.
The years, however, which he had spent studying the principles of Roman law put their stamp upon all his further activities. It was impossible for him to approach a problem by way of his emotions. He felt things and he felt them deeply. Read his letters to those of his followers who had fallen into the hands of Catholics and who had been condemned to be roasted to death over slow burning coal fires. In their helpless agony they are as fine a bit of writing as anything of which we have a record. And they show such a delicate understanding of human psychology that the poor victims went to their death blessing the name of the man whose teaching had brought them into their predicament.
No, Calvin was not, as so many of his enemies have said, a man without a heart. But life to him was a sacred duty.
And he tried so desperately hard to be honest with himself and with his God that he must first reduce every question to certain fundamental principles of faith and doctrine before he dared to expose it to the touchstone of human sentiment.
When Pope Pius IV heard of his death, he remarked, “The power of that heretic lay in the fact that he was indifferent to money.” If His Holiness meant to pay his enemy the compliment of absolute personal disinterestedness, he was right. Calvin lived and died a poor man and refused to accept his last quarterly salary because “illness had made it impossible for him to earn that money as he should have done.”