The doctors of the Sorbonne and other priests went out of their houses in crowds; they spread right and left, buzzing in the streets, buzzing in the houses, buzzing in the palaces. ‘These hornets,’ says a chronicler, ‘make their tedious noise heard by all they meet, and urge them on with repeated stings.’ ‘Away with Berquin!’ was their cry.
His friends grew alarmed. ‘Make your escape!’ wrote Erasmus to him. ‘Make your escape!’ repeated the friends of learning and of the Gospel around him.[668] But Berquin thought that by keeping quiet he did all that he ought to do. Flight he would have considered a disgrace, a crime. ‘With God’s help,’ he said, ‘I shall conquer the monks, the university, and the parliament itself.’[669]
Such confidence exasperated the Sorbonne. Beda and his followers stirred university and parliament, city, court, and Church, heaven and earth.... Francis I. was puzzled, staggered, and annoyed. At last, being beset on every side, and hearing it continually repeated that Berquin’s doctrines were the cause of the outrage in the Rue des Rosiers, the king yielded, believing, however, that he yielded but little: he consented only that an inquiry should be opened against Berquin. The wild beast leapt with joy. His prey was not yet given to him; but he already foresaw the hour when he would quench his thirst in blood.
A strange blindness is that of popery! The lessons of history are lost upon it. So long as events are in progress, men mistake both their causes and consequences. The smoke that covers the battle-field, during the struggle, does not permit us to distinguish and appreciate the movements of the different armies. But once the battle ended, the events accomplished, intelligent minds discover the principles of the movements and order of battle. Now, if there is any truth which history proclaims, it is that christianity was established in the world by pouring out the blood of its martyrs. One of the greatest fathers of the West has enunciated this mysterious law.[670] But the Rome of the popes—and in this respect she paid her tribute to human weakness—overlooked this great law. She took no heed of the facts that ought to have enlightened her. She did not understand that the blood of these friends of the Gospel, which she was so eager to spill, would be for modern times, as it had been for ancient times, a seed of transformation. Imprudently resuming the part played by the Rome of the emperors, she put to death, one after another, those who professed the everlasting Truth. But at the very moment when the enemies of the Reform imagined they had crushed it by getting rid of Berquin; at the moment when the irritation of the king allowed the servants of Christ to be dragged on hurdles, and when he authorised torture, imprisonment, and the stake; at the moment when all seemed destined to remain mute and trembling—the true Reformer of France issued unnoticed from a college of priests, and was about to begin, in an important city of the kingdom, that work which we have undertaken to narrate—a work which for three centuries has not ceased, and never will cease, to grow.
We shall attempt to describe the small beginnings of this great work in the next volume.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
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