[27] Beza, Vie de Calvin et Histoire des Eglises Réformées, i. p. 67.

[28] 'Quam liberaliter paratus fueris te mihi officiaque tua impendere.'—Calv. in 2ᵃᵐ Ep. ad Cor.

[29] 'Præ cæteris discipulis diligere ac magnifacere eum cœpit.'—Flor. Rémond, Hist. de l'Hérésie, liv. vii. ch. ix.

CHAPTER XIV.
CALVIN TAUGHT AT ORLEANS OF GOD AND MAN;
BEGINS TO DEFEND AND PROPAGATE THE FAITH.
(1528.)

CALVIN was to receive something more from Wolmar; he was about to begin, under his guidance, the work of all his life—to learn and to teach Christ. The knowledge which he acquired at the university of Orleans, philosophy, law, and even Greek, could not suffice him. The moral faculty is the first in man, and ought to be the first in the university also. The object of the Reformation was to found, not an intellectual, but a moral empire; it was to restore holiness to the Church. This empire had begun in Calvin; his conscience had been stirred; he had sought salvation and found it; but he had need of knowledge, of increase in grace, of practice in life, and these he was about to strive after.

=WOLMAR AND CALVIN STUDY THE EPISTLES.=

Melchior, like Melanchthon, had set himself to study the Holy Scriptures in the original languages, and in them had found light and peace. Calvin, on his side, 'having acquired some taste for true piety,' as he informs us, 'was burning with a great desire to advance.'[30] The most intimate confidence and the freest communication were established between the professor and the scholar. Melchior spoke to Calvin of Germany and the Reformation; he read the Greek Testament with him, set before him the riches of Christ announced therein, and, when studying the Epistles of St. Paul, explained to him the doctrine of imputed righteousness which forms the essence of their teaching. Calvin, seated in his master's study, listened in silence, and respectfully embraced that mystery so strange and yet so profoundly in harmony with the righteousness of God!... 'By faith,' said Wolmar, 'man is united to Christ and Christ to him, so that it is no longer man whom God sees in the sinner, but his dearly beloved Son himself; and the act by virtue of which God makes the sinner an inheritor of heaven, is not an arbitrary one. The doctrine of justification,' added Wolmar, 'is in Luther's opinion the capital doctrine, articulus stantis vel cadentis Ecclesiæ.'[31]

But Calvin's chief teacher was God. At Orleans he had more of those struggles, which are often prolonged in strong natures. Some take him simply for a metaphysical thinker, a learned and subtle theologian; on the contrary, no other doctor has had more experience of those tempests that stir up the heart to its lowest deeps. 'I feel myself pricked and stung to the quick by the judgment of God. I am in a continual battle; I am assaulted and shaken, as when an armed man is forced by a violent blow to stagger a few steps backwards.' The light which had rejoiced him so much when he was in college at Paris, seemed almost to have faded away. 'I am like a wretched man shut up in a deep dungeon, who receives the light of day obliquely and in part, only through a high and narrow loop-hole.' He persevered, however; he fixed his eyes on Jesus, and was soon able to say: 'If I have not the full and free sight of the sun, I distinguish however his light afar, and enjoy its brightness.'[32]

People at Orleans soon found out that there was something new and strange in this young man. It was in this city, in the year 1022, that the revival of modern times, if we may so speak, had begun among the heads of a school of theology at that time very celebrated. Priests and canons had told the people who listened to them, both in Orleans and in the neighbouring towns, 'that they ought to be filled with the gift of the Holy Spirit; that this Spirit would reveal to them all the depths and all the dignity of the Scriptures;[33] that they would be fed with heavenly food and refreshed by an inward fulness.'[34]