He happened to be on his way to Strassburg when the outbreak of a war between Charles V and Francis I forced him to make a detour through western Switzerland. In Geneva he was welcomed by Guillaume Farel, one of the stormy petrels of the French Reformation, fugitive extraordinary from all ecclesiastical and inquisitorial dungeons. Farel welcomed him with open arms, spoke to him of the wondrous things that might be accomplished in this little Swiss principality and bade him stay. Calvin asked time to consider. Then he stayed.
In this way did the chances of war decree that the New Zion should be built at the foot of the Alps.
It is a strange world.
Columbus sets forth to discover the Indies and stumbles upon a new continent.
Calvin, in search of a quiet spot where he may spend the rest of his days in study and holy meditation, wanders into a third-rate Swiss town and makes it the spiritual capital of those who soon afterwards turn the domains of their most Catholic Majesties into a gigantic Protestant empire.
Why should any one ever read fiction when history serves all purposes?
I do not know whether the family Bible of Calvin has been preserved. But if it still exists, the volume will show considerable wear on that particular page which contains the sixth chapter of the book of Daniel. The French reformer was a modest man, but often he must have found consolation in the story of that other steadfast servant of the living God who also had been cast into a den of lions and whose innocence had saved him from a gruesome and untimely death.
Geneva was no Babylon. It was a respectable little city inhabited by respectable Swiss cloth makers. They took life seriously, but not quite so seriously as that new master who was now holding forth in the pulpit of their Saint Peter.
And furthermore, there was a Nebuchadnezzar in the form of a Duke of Savoy. It was during one of their interminable quarrels with the house of Savoy that the descendants of Caesar’s Allobroges had decided to make common cause with the other Swiss cantons and join the Reformation. The alliance therefore between Geneva and Wittenberg was a marriage of convenience, an engagement based upon common interests rather than common affection.