Meantime those who had fled, dispersing in the streets and houses, cried out against the scandal, while the parish priest, running off to the hôtel-de-ville, complained to the council. Farel was forbidden to preach again in that church. When the sermon was ended, the catholics returned and the priests sang mass in it with more fervor than ever. The huguenots made no opposition, but they also claimed that no one should oppose their meetings. The two worships were to be free. In fact the very same day at vespers, 'those rascals (canailles),' says Sister Jeanne, 'again took possession of the holy church, and every day afterwards it was the usual custom to preach in it.'[559]
The irritated council summoned Farel before them on the 30th of July. 'Sirs,' said the reformer, 'you have yourselves acknowledged that whatever cannot be proved by Scripture ought to be suppressed; why then do you delay doing so? Were not the defenders of popery vanquished in our debates? And has not almost the whole city recognized the finger of God in this signal defeat of the papacy? Give us orders which we can obey, for fear we should be constrained to answer you with Scripture, that it is better to obey God rather than men. Assemble the Council of Two Hundred and let them decide.' The syndics, knowing that the friends of Reform had a majority in that assembly, refused the demand, and repeated their prohibition to Farel, adding: For good reasons.
Farel thought their reasons bad. In such a matter he knew but one really good: Preach the Gospel to every creature, the Lord had said. He set no bounds either to his desire for the triumph of the truth, or to his expectation of help from God to give him the victory. A holy ambition that would not be straitened, animated him, and according to the words of Elisha, he smote five or six times until the enemy was vanquished. Farel was one of those men whom God raises up for great and salutary revolutions: opposition only served to inflame his courage.
=FAREL AT SAINT-GERVAIS.=
On the 1st of August he went to Saint-Gervais, where the friends of the Reform were numerous. The uneasy syndics sent a guard of fifty men; but Farel went into the pulpit and preached in the old church the ever new Gospel of Jesus Christ. On the 5th of August he became still bolder, and proclaimed the anti-Roman doctrine in the church dedicated to St. Dominic, the father of the Inquisition. This evangelist did not perform his office at his own time only and according to his own convenience: he never spared himself, whatever were the vexations he gathered from his labors. He summoned weary souls to rest at the feet of Christ; he followed up the obstinate; he argued, reproved, entreated, exhorted. He multiplied the inducements to make the dilatory enter upon the way of life, and 'his vehemence was always tempered with meekness.' The hour had arrived when divine truth was to triumph over human errors; he therefore multiplied his attacks. The greatest blow yet remained to be struck. A thunder-clap was about to bring down an abundant rain upon the thirsty earth, and the outpouring of the Holy Ghost which cometh from heaven.[560]
The cathedral of St. Pierre, whose three old towers soar above the city, played a great part in its history, and every Genevan was attached to its stones, though they were now (as it were) broken and scattered, and the divine service was contaminated by mournful profanations. But the greater the desolation, the more did pious men desire to see that august temple purified and the good news proclaimed beneath its vaulted roof. Fourteen canons still belonged to it, established to defend it; but those unhappy clerks, isolated, scared, and conquered before a blow was struck, waited trembling until the tide of Reform, which still kept rising, invaded their sanctuary. They had not long to wait. On Sunday morning, 8th of August, a crowd of reformed Genevans mounted the streets leading to the church, and approached it with the firm intention of replacing the light upon the candlestick. 'When rust has tarnished iron,' said a reformer, 'we endeavor to restore it to its former brightness: must we not, then, cleanse away from the Church of Christ the thick rust which ages of darkness have accumulated on it?'[561] Having entered the noble edifice, the reformers began to ring the great bell to call the people to hear the Gospel. Clémence was tolling the last hour of the Middle Ages, the De Defunctis of images, 'those gods of the priests,' as the huguenots called them. The chapel which contained the arm of St. Anthony, on which men used to swear in serious cases, was to be pulled down; all that mass of waxen hands offered by devotees, and a thousand other relics equally stupid, were to disappear. In that temple, now 'crammed with idols,' God and his Word were henceforward to reign alone.
=FAREL IN THE PULPIT.=
Farel arrived and went into the pulpit. The worship they were about to celebrate was not to be an ordinary service: a religious revolution was about to be accomplished. Ceremonies were the essence of popery. Now Farel was full of the idea that there are no ceremonial laws in Christianity; that an act of worship, discharged according to the rules of the Church, is not on that account pleasing to God and meritorious: that to overburden believers with festivals, bowing of the head, crossing, kneeling before pictures, and ceremonies, is opposed to worship in the spirit; that to fill the churches with images, offerings, relics, and tapers is dealing a blow at justification by faith and the merit of Christ's death which alone save the sinner. He believed with his whole heart that divine worship, according to the New Testament, does not consist in processions, elevations, salutations, bowings, genuflexions before the host, and other superstitious usages; that its essence is faith in the Gospel, the charity which flows from it, patience in bearing the cross, public confession of Jesus Christ, and the living prayer of the heart. At the sight of the statues, the pictures, the votive offerings which surrounded him—at the recollection of the superstitious ceremonies which for centuries had profaned that cathedral, Farel in great emotion was ready to do anything, even at the risk of his life, to establish that religion which is spirit and life. 'Those idols,' he said, pointing from the pulpit to the images around him, 'the mass and the whole body of popery are condemned by the Holy Ghost. The magistrates, ordained by God, ought to pull down everything that is raised in opposition to God's glory.' The images, if they remained, would be in his eyes a sign of the victory of catholicism; but if they fell, their fall would proclaim the victory of the Reformation. This point had been often discussed: the priests and devout people opposed Farel's intentions with all their power, and maintained that such changes required the consent of a general council. The alarmed politicians objected that if they pulled down the images, then for one enemy Geneva would have a hundred—the duke of Savoy, the king of France, the emperor, the pope, the cardinals, and all the bishops in the world.
There were at this time two powers and two systems in the city:—the reformers, whose ideal theories had not yet been modified by reality, said that the State, as well as individuals, ought to become a new creature; that the Gospel would accomplish this work of transformation; that the Church would change the people and would make of the State a kingdom of God upon earth.... Alas! that task is still far from being accomplished, and can it ever be? On the other hand the politicians, without wishing to reject the influence of the Gospel, thought that the State occupied the first place in human society, and that order was not possible without it. They believed that the magistrates, without being the masters of the faith, ought to be the source of regularity in the Church, and accordingly the State undertook to restrain the evangelicals. It was attempted later in Calvin's day; now it was done in Farel's. The council sent for him after the sermon at St. Pierre's and asked him why he had preached in the cathedral. 'I am surprised,' said the reformer, 'that you make a crime of what is in accordance with Scripture.' If, however, he rendered unto God the things that were God's, he was willing to render unto Cæsar the things that were Cæsar's. He therefore expressed a desire that the reformers should be summoned by the legitimate authority, and renewed his demand for the convocation of the Council of Two Hundred.