theologians who had prohibited Margaret's Mirror of a Sinful Soul. She had complained to the King, and he had intervened. The matter came before the University, and Nicolas Cop, the Rector, had spoken strongly against the arrogant doctors and in defence of the Queen, "mother of all the virtues and of all good learning." Le Clerc, a parish priest, the author of the mischief, defended his performance as a task to which he had been formally appointed, praising the King, the Queen as woman and as author, contrasting her book with "such an obscene production" as Pantagruel, and finally saying that the book had been published without the approval of the faculty and was set aside only as "liable to suspicion."
Two or three days later, on November 1, 1533, came the famous rectorial address which Calvin wrote, and Cop revised and delivered; and which shows how far the humanist had travelled since April 4, 1532, the date of the De dementia. He is now alive to the religious question, though he has not carried it to its logical and practical conclusion. Two fresh influences have evidently come into his life, the New Testament of Erasmus and certain sermons by Luther. The exordium of the address reproduces, almost literally, some sentences from Erasmus' Paradesis, including those which unfold his idea of the philosophia Christiana; while the body of it repeats Luther's exposition of the Beatitudes and his distinction between Law and Gospel, with the involved doctrines of Grace and Faith. Yet "Ave gratia plena" is retained in the exordium; and at the end the peacemakers are praised, who follow the example of Christ and contend not with the sword but with the word of truth.
This address enables us to seize Calvin in the very act and article of change; he has come under a double influence. Erasmus has compelled him to compare the ideal of Christ with the Church of his own day; and Luther has given him a notion of Grace which has convinced his reason and taken possession of his imagination. He has thus ceased to be a humanist and a Papist, but has not yet become a Reformer. And a Reformer was precisely what his conscience, his country, and his reason compelled him to become. Francis was flagrantly immoral, but a fanatic in religion; and mercy was not a virtue congenial to either Church or State. Calvin had seen the Protestants from within; he knew their honesty, their honour, the purity of their motives, and the integrity of their lives; and he judged, as a jurist would, that a man who had all the virtues of citizenship ought not to be oppressed and treated as unfit for civil office or even as a criminal by the State. This is no conjecture, for it is confirmed by the testimony he bears to the influence exercised over him by the martyred Étienne de la Forge. He thus saw that a changed mind meant a changed religion, and a changed religion a change of abode. Cop had to flee from Paris, and so had Calvin.
In the May of 1534 he went to Noyon, laid down his offices, was
