It may be worth while to pause here, and inquire into some of the causes of this rapid spread of the doctrines of the Reformation after the long period of comparative stagnation preceding. One of these was undoubtedly the astonishing progress of letters in France during the last forty years. From being neglected and rough, the French language, during the first half of the sixteenth century, became the most polite of the tongues spoken in Western Europe—thanks to a series of eminent prose writers and poets who graced the royal court. The generation reaching manhood in the latter years of the reign of Henry the Second were far better educated than the contemporaries of Francis the First. The public mind, through the elevating tendencies of schools fostered by royal bounty, was to a considerable degree emancipated from the thraldom of superstition. It repudiated the silly romanese, passing for the lives of the saints, with which the public had formerly been satisfied. It scrutinized minutely every pretended miracle of the papal churches and convents, and exposed the trickery by which a corrupt clergy sought to maintain itself in popular esteem. Thus the growing intelligence and widening information of the people prepared them to appreciate the merits of the great doctrinal controversy now occupying the attention of enlightened minds. Interest in the discussion of the most important themes that can occupy the human contemplation was both stimulated and gratified by a constant influx of religious works from the teeming presses of Strasbourg, Basle, Lausanne, Neufchâtel, and especially Geneva. And the verdict of the great majority of readers and thinkers was favorable to the Swiss and German controversialists.
Calvin's Institutes.
Marot and Beza's Psalms.
Next to the Bible, translated originally by Olivetanus, and in its successive editions rendered more conformable to the Hebrew and Greek texts, the "Christian Institutes" exerted the most powerful influence. The close logic of Calvin's treatises, speaking in a style clear, concise and nervous, and touching a chord of sympathy in each French reader, made its deep impress upon the intellect and heart, while captivating the ear. Calvin's commentaries on the sacred volume rendered its pages luminous and familiar. Other works exerted an influence scarcely inferior. The "Actions and Monuments" of the martyrs, by Jean Crespin, printer and scholar, not only perpetuated the memory of the witnesses for the truth, but stimulated others to copy their fidelity. Marot and Beza's metrical versions of the Psalms, wafted into popularity, even among those who at first little sympathized with the piety of the words, by the novelty and beauty of the music to which they were sung, were powerful auxiliaries to the arguments of the theologian. They entered the house of the peasant and invested its homely scenes with a calm derived from the contemplation of the bliss of a heaven where the fleeting distinctions of the present shall melt away. They nerved the humble artisan to patience and to the cheerful endurance of obloquy and reproach. They attracted to the gathering of persecuted reformers in the by-street, in the retired barn, or on the open heath or mountain side, the youth who preferred their melody and intelligible words to the jargon of a service conducted in a tongue understood only by the learned. In the royal court, or rising in loud chorus from a thousand voices on the crowded Pré-aux-Clercs, they were winged messengers of the truth, where no other messengers could have found utterance with impunity.
Morals and martyrdom.
The blameless purity of life of the men and women whom, for religion's sake, the officers of the law put to death with every species of indignity and with inhuman cruelty, when contrasted with the flagrant corruption of the clergy and the shameless dissoluteness of the court, openly fostered for their own base ends by cardinals themselves accused of every species of immorality and suspected of atheism, deeply affected the minds of the reflecting. One Anne Du Bourg put to death by a Charles of Lorraine made more converts in a day than all the executioners could burn in a year.
Character of the ministers from Geneva.
But, if the rapid spread of Protestant doctrines at this precise date is due to any one cause more than to another, that cause may probably be found in the character and numbers of the religious teachers. Converts from the Papal Church, principally priests and monks, were the first apostles of the Reformation. Few of them had received systematic training of any kind, none had a thorough acquaintance with biblical learning. Many embraced the truth only in part; some professed it from improper motives. The Lenten preachers whose leaning towards "Lutheranism" was sufficiently marked to attract the hatred of the Sorbonne, were generally orators, more solicitous of popularity than jealous for the truth—fickle and inconstant men whose apostasy inflicted deep wounds upon the cause with which they had been identified, and more than neutralized all the good done by their previous exertions. But now a brotherhood of theologians took their place, not less zealous for the faith than disciplined in intellect. Geneva[856] was the nursery from which a vigorous stock was transplanted to French soil. The theological school in which Calvin and Beza taught, moulded the destinies of France. The youths who came from the shores of Lake Leman were no neophytes, nor had they to unlearn the casuistry of the schools or to throw off a monastic indolence which habit had made a second nature. They embraced a vocation to which nothing but a stern sense of duty, or the more powerful attraction of Divine love, could prompt. They entered an arena where poverty, fatigue, and almost inevitable death stared them in the face. But they entered it intelligently and resolutely, with the training of mind and of soul which an athlete might receive from such instructors, and their prayerful, trustful and unselfish endeavor met an ample recompense.[857]
The Huguenots of Valence
seize the church of the Franciscans.