BRIÇONNET AND FENELON—LEFEVRE ACCUSED.
The fall of Briçonnet is perhaps the most memorable in the history of the Reformation. Nowhere else do we find a man so sincerely pious and so deeply engaged in the reform turning round so suddenly against it: yet we must clearly understand his character and his fall. Briçonnet was, as regards Rome, what Lefevre was with respect to the Reformation. They were both persons of half-measures, properly belonging to neither party. The doctor of Etaples inclined towards the Word, while the Bishop of Meaux leaned to the hierarchy; and when these two men who touch each other were called upon to decide, the one ranged himself under the banner of Rome, and the other of Jesus Christ. We cannot, however, be sure that Briçonnet was wholly untrue to the convictions of his faith; at no period after his recantation did the Romish doctors place entire confidence in him. But he acted, perhaps, as the Archbishop of Cambray afterwards did, and whom he resembled in many points; he thought he might submit outwardly to the pope, while remaining inwardly subject to his old convictions. Such weakness is incompatible with the principles of the Reformation. Briçonnet was one of the chiefs of the mystic or quietist school in France, and we know that one of its leading maxims has ever been to accommodate itself to the church in which it exists, whatever that church may be.
Briçonnet's guilty fall went to the hearts of his old friends, and was the sad forerunner of those lamentable apostacies which the spirit of the world so often obtained in France in another age. The man who seemed to hold the reins of the Reformation in his hand was suddenly thrown from his seat; and the Reformation was thenceforward destined to pursue its course in France, without a human leader, without a chief, in humility and in obscurity. But the disciples of the Gospel raised their heads, and from that time looked with a firmer faith towards that heavenly Guide, whose faithfulness they knew could not be shaken.
CONDEMNATION AND FLIGHT.
The Sorbonne triumphed; this was a great stride towards the destruction of the Reform in France; and it was important to achieve another victory without delay. Lefevre stood next after Briçonnet. Accordingly Beda had immediately turned the attack against him, by publishing a book against this illustrious doctor, full of such gross calumnies, that Erasmus says, "even smiths and cobblers could have pointed them out." His fury was particularly excited by the doctrine of justification through faith, which Lefevre was the first to preach to Christendom in the sixteenth century. To this point Beda continually recurred, as an article which, according to him, overturned the Church. "What!" said he, "Lefevre affirms that whoever places his salvation in himself will surely perish; while the man that lays aside all strength of his own, and throws himself entirely into the arms of Jesus Christ, will be saved!......Oh, what heresy! to teach the inefficacy of meritorious works!......What a hellish error! what a deceitful snare of the devil! Let us oppose it with all our might!"[1054]
That engine of persecution which produces either retractation or death, was immediately turned against the doctor of Etaples; and hopes were already entertained of seeing Lefevre share the fate of the poor wool-comber or of the illustrious Briçonnet. His accusation was soon drawn up; and a decree of the parliament (dated 28th August 1525) condemned nine propositions extracted from his commentaries on the Gospels, and placed his translation of the Scriptures in the list of prohibited books.[1055]
This was only the prelude; and that the learned doctor knew. Upon the first symptoms of persecution, he had felt that, in the absence of Francis I., he must fall under the assault of his enemies, and that the moment was now come to obey the Lord's commandment: When they persecute you in one city, flee ye into another.[1056] Lefevre quitted Meaux, where, after the bishop's apostacy, he had drunk nothing but the cup of bitterness, and saw all his activity paralyzed; and as he withdrew from his persecutors, he shook the dust from off his feet against them, "not to call down evil upon them, but as a sign of the evils that were in store for them; for (says he in one place) just as this dust is shaken from off our feet, are they cast off from the face of the Lord."[1057]
The persecutors had missed their victim; but they consoled themselves with the thought that France was at least delivered from the father of the heretics.
LEFEVRE AT STRASBURG—FAREL AND LEFEVRE MEET.
The fugitive Lefevre arrived at Strasburg under a borrowed name; there he immediately united with the friends of the Reformation; and what must have been his joy at hearing that Gospel publicly taught which he had been the first to bring forward in the Church! Lo, there was his faith! this was exactly what he had intended to teach! He seemed to have been born a second time to the christian life. Gerard Roussel, one of those evangelical men who, like the doctor of Etaples, did not attain complete emancipation, had also been compelled to quit France. Together they followed the teaching of Capito and Bueer;[1058] they had frequent private conversations with these faithful doctors,[1059] and a report was circulated that they had even been commissioned to do so by Margaret, the king's sister.[1060] But Lefevre was more occupied in contemplating the ways of God than with polemics. Casting his eyes over Christendom, filled with astonishment on beholding the great events that were taking place, moved with thankfulness, and his heart full of anticipation, he fell on his knees and prayed the Lord "to perfect that which he saw then beginning."[1061]