Calvin, full of admiration for the poets, orators, and philosophers of antiquity, studied them eagerly and enriched his mind with their treasures; in his writings we often meet with quotations from Seneca, Virgil, and Cicero. He soon left all his comrades far behind. The professor, who looked on him with surprise, promoted him to the class of philosophy, although he had not attained the required age.[560] Then a new world, the world of thought, opened before his fine understanding; he traversed it with indefatigable ardour. Logic, dialectics, and philosophy possessed for him an indescribable charm.[561]
Calvin made many friends among his fellow-collegians; yet he soared high above them all by the morality of his character. There was no pedantry, no affectation about him; but when he was walking in the courts of the college, or in the halls where the pupils assembled, he could not witness their quarrels, their follies, their levity of manner, and not reprove them faithfully. ‘He finds fault with everything,’ complained a scholar of equivocal conduct. ‘Profit rather by the advice of so young and conscientious a censor,’ answered the wiser ones.[562] ‘Roman catholics whose testimony was beyond reproach,’ says Theodore Beza, ‘told me of this many years after, when his name had become famous.’[563] ‘It is not the act alone,’ said Calvin subsequently, ‘but the look, and even the secret longing, which make men guilty.’—‘No man,’ says one of his adversaries, ‘ever felt so great a hatred of adultery.’[564] In his opinion, chastity was the crown of youth, and the centre of every virtue.
The heads of Montaigu College were enthusiastic supporters of popery. Beda, so notorious for his violent declamations against the Reformation, for his factious intrigues, and for his tyrannical authority, was principal.[565] He watched with satisfaction young Calvin, who, a strict observer of the practices of the Church, never missed a fast, a retreat, a mass, or a procession. ‘It is a long time,’ it was said, ‘since Sorbonne or Montaigu had so pious a seminarist.’ As long as Luther, Calvin, and Farel were in the Papal Church, they belonged to its strictest sect. The austere exercises of a devotee’s life were the schoolmaster that brought them to Christ. ‘I was at that time so obstinately given to the superstitions of popery,’ said Calvin, ‘that it seemed impossible that I should ever be pulled out of the deep mire.’
He surprised his tutors no less by his application to study. Absorbed in his books, he often forgot the hours for his meals and even for sleep. The people who lived in the neighbourhood used to show each other, as they returned home in the evening, a tiny and solitary gleam, a window lit up nearly all the night through: they long talked of it in that quarter. John Calvin outstripped his companions in philosophy, as he had done in grammar. He then applied to the study of theology, and, strange to say, was enraptured with Scotus, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas. The last-mentioned writer had especial charms for him. If Calvin had not been a reformer, he would have become a Thomist. Scholastics appeared to him the queen of sciences; but he was the impassioned lover at first, only that he might be afterwards its terrible adversary.
His father, secretary to the diocese of Noyon, always entertained the hope of making his son a dignitary of the Church. With this object he cultivated the favour of the bishop, and spoke humbly to the canons. John had been for some years chaplain of La Gesine, but this did not satisfy the father; and, accordingly, when the living of St. Martin of Marteville became vacant, Gerard Cauvin solicited and, to his great delight, obtained that church for the student of Montaigu, who, as yet, had only received the tonsure. This was in the year 1527. Calvin, taking advantage probably of vacation time, went to see his family and his new parish. It has been supposed that he preached there. ‘Although he had not yet taken orders,’ says Beda, ‘he delivered several sermons before the people.’ Did he really go into the pulpits of his native country at the time when his inward struggles were beginning? To have heard him would have been a great satisfaction to his father, and his age was no obstacle to his preaching; some great preachers have begun still earlier. But it seems to us, after examining the passage, that he did not speak in his own church until later, when the Gospel had completely triumphed in his heart. But, however that may be, Calvin had a parish at eighteen: he was not, however, in holy orders.
A new light, which had but little resemblance to the false radiance of scholasticism, began to shine around him. At that time there was a breath of the Gospel in the air, and that reviving breeze reached the scholar within the walls of his college, and the monk in the recesses of his convent; no one was protected against its influence. Calvin heard people talking of the Holy Scriptures, of Lefèvre, of Luther, of Melanchthon, and of what was passing in Germany. When the rays of the sun rise in the Alps, it is the highest peaks that catch them first; in like manner, the most eminent minds were enlightened first. But what some accepted, others rejected. In the colleges there were sharp and frequent altercations, and Calvin was at first in the number of the most inflexible adversaries of the Reformation.
A young man of Noyon, his cousin, and a little older than him, often went to see him at college. Pierre Robert Olivétan, without possessing the transcendant genius of his young relation, was gifted with a solid mind, great perseverance in the discharge of his duties, unshaken fidelity to his convictions, and a holy boldness when it became necessary to combat error. This he showed at Geneva, where his was one of the first voices raised in favour of the Gospel. When Calvin discovered that the friend of his childhood was tainted with heresy, he felt the keenest sorrow. What a pity! he thought; for Olivétan was acquainted not only with Latin, but with Greek and even Hebrew. He read the Old and New Testaments in their original languages, and was familiar with the Septuagint. The study of the Holy Scriptures, of which Picardy seems to have been the birthplace in France (Lefèvre, Olivétan, and Calvin were all three Picardins), had increased considerably since Lefèvre’s translation was published. It is true that most of those who engaged in it ‘looked at the Scriptures in a cursory manner,’ says Calvin; ‘but others dug deep for the treasure that lay hidden there.’ Of this number was Olivétan, and he it was who one day gave to the people speaking the French tongue a translation of the Scriptures that became famous in the history of the Bible.
The chronology of Calvin’s life during the period of his studies is less easily settled than that of Luther. We have been able to point out almost the very days when the most striking transformations of his faith were completed in the reformer of Germany. It is not so with the reformer of Geneva. The exact moment when this struggle, this defeat, or that victory took place in Calvin’s soul, cannot be determined. Must we therefore suppress the history of his spiritual combats? To pass them over in silence would be to fail in the first duty of an historian.[566]
Olivétan, who was then in all the fervour of proselytism, felt great interest in his catholic cousin, while the latter would have wished at any cost to bring back his friend into the bosom of the Church. The two youthful Picardins had many long and animated conversations together, in which each strove to convert the other.[567] ‘There are many false religions,’ said Olivétan, ‘and only one true.’ Calvin assented. ‘The false are those which men have invented, according to which we are saved by our own works; the true is that which comes from God, according to which salvation is given freely from on high.... Choose the true.’[568] Calvin made a sign of dissent. ‘True religion,’ continued Olivétan, ‘is not that infinite mass of ceremonies and observances which the Church imposes upon its followers, and which separate souls from Christ. O my dear friend! leave off shouting out with the papists: “The fathers! the doctors! the Church!” and listen instead to the prophets and apostles. Study the Scriptures.’[569] ‘I will have none of your doctrines,’ answered Calvin; ‘their novelty offends me. I cannot listen to you. Do you imagine that I have been trained all my life in error?... No! I will strenuously resist your attacks.’[570] In after years Calvin said: ‘My heart, hardened by superstition, remained insensible to all these appeals.’ The two cousins parted, little satisfied with each other. Calvin, terrified at his friend’s innovations, fell on his knees in the chapels, and prayed the saints to intercede for this misguided soul.[571] Olivétan shut himself up in his chamber and prayed to Christ.
Yet Calvin, whose mind was essentially one of observation, could not be present in the midst of the great movement going on in the world without reflecting on truth, on error, and on himself. Oftentimes when alone, and when the voices of men had ceased to be heard, a more powerful voice spoke to his soul, and his chamber became the theatre of struggles as fierce as those in the cell at Erfurth. Through the same tempests both these great reformers reached the same haven. Calvin arrived at faith by the same practical way which had led Farel and Augustine, Luther and St. Paul.