One day, therefore, the modest doctor appeared in the midst of the Prior of Bouteville's guests; one idea had absorbed him on the road to Gérac. He thought that 'truth is not a common thing; that it rises far above the capacity of the human understanding, and that we ought to purchase it at any price.' At last when he joined his friends, after mutual greetings had been exchanged, he spoke to them of the subject that filled his heart. He opened the Bible, placed his hand on it, and said, 'Let us find the truth!'[43] ... 'The whole conference,' says Florimond Rémond, a staunch Catholic, 'had no other object but the investigation of truth, a phrase which he had generally in his mouth.' Calvin, however, did not set himself up as an oracle: addressing the conscience, he showed that Christ answered all the wants of the soul; the conversation soon became animated, his friends bringing forward objections. He never was at a loss; 'having a marvellous facility,' they said, 'in penetrating suddenly the greatest difficulties and clearing them up.' The visitors of Gérac departed joyfully to their homes.
After these conferences, Calvin returned quietly to his retreat, and prayed for those to whom he had spoken and for others besides. 'If sometimes we are cold in prayer,' he said, 'let us at once remember how many of our brethren are sinking under heavy burdens and grievous troubles; how many are oppressed by great anguish in their hearts and in all extremity of evils.... We must have hearts of iron or steel, if such sluggishness in prayer cannot then be expelled from our bosoms.'[44]
Calvin felt the necessity of giving a solid foundation to the faith of his friends. 'A tree that is not deeply rooted,' he said, 'is easily torn up by the first blast of the storm.' He then committed to paper, as we have said, the first ideas of his Christian Institutes. One day, as he was starting for Gérac, he took his notes with him, and read what he had just written to the circle assembled in the castle.[45] He did this several times afterwards; but the notes served merely as a text on which he commented with much eloquence. 'No one can equal him,' they said, 'in loftiness of language, conciseness of arrangement, and majesty of style.' He was not content with stating this doctrine or that: His fine understanding grasped the organic unity of the Christian truths, and he was able to present them as a divine whole.[46] It was no doubt the cry of his conscience which had led him to seek salvation in the Holy Scriptures; but he had not been able to study, compare, and fathom them without his understanding becoming enlightened, developed, and sanctified. The moral faculty is that which is first aroused in the Christian; but it immediately provokes the exercise of the intellectual faculties. The citizens of the kingdom of God are not those who know, but those who believe; not the learned, but the regenerated. A church in which the intellectual faculty is above the moral faculty, does not bear the stamp of the Protestant and Christian principle; but every church in which the divine faculty of the understanding is neglected, and where learning is viewed with distrust, will easily fall into deplorable error.
Calvin's explanations, so deep and yet so clear, were not without their use. Du Tillet, Chaillou, De la Place, Torsac, and others mutually expressed their admiration and joy after the young doctor had retired; then, at their homes and apart from the world, they meditated on the consoling truths they had heard. Many of the most notable men of the district were won over to evangelical convictions.[47] The Prior of Bouteville, in particular, showed from that time so much faith and zeal—he was, after Calvin's departure, so much the father and guide of those who had received the seed of truth, that he was called throughout the province: 'The Lutherans' Pope.'[48]
Calvin's sphere widened gradually: he wrote to those to whom he could not speak;[49] and ere long his friends asked why they should keep for themselves alone the bread of life on which they fed?... One of them giving utterance to this thought to the young doctor added: 'But you can only reach the people in the churches.' It was scarcely possible that Calvin, a fugitive from Paris, could visit the churches of the Angoumois as an evangelical missionary. 'Compose some short Christian exhortations for us,' said his friends to him, 'and we will give them to well-disposed parish priests to read to their congregations.'[50] He did so, and humble clerks read these evangelical appeals from their pulpits, as well as they could. Thus Calvin preached through the mouths of priests to poor villagers, as he had addressed the imposing Sorbonne by the mouth of the rector.
=CALVIN PROVIDES SERMONS.=
This encouraged certain church dignitaries, especially the prior, who were at once his disciples and his patrons. If Calvin could not preach in French, why should he not teach in Latin? They surrounded the young doctor, representing to him that Latin, the language of the Roman Church, could not occasion any scandal, and asked him to deliver some Latin orations before the clergy. Calvin, firmly convinced that the reform ought to begin with the teaching of the priest, preached several Latin sermons in St. Peter's Church.[51] In this way he inaugurated his career as a reformer. All this could not be done without giving rise to murmurs. The faithful followers of Rome complained of him, of the prior, of all his friends, and this opposition might become dangerous. 'Fatal instrument,' says a Romanist with reference to Calvin's stay in the Angoumois, 'which was destined to reduce France to greater extremities than the Saracens, the Germans, the English, and the house of Austria had done.'[52] He was not, however, the only one who was assisting in this excellent work.
[36] Calvin, Psaumes, ch. civ.
[37] Drelincourt, Défense du Calvinisme, p. 40; Crottet, Chron. protest. p. 96.
[38] Perroniana.