this time, discussing the terms of the First Helvetic Confession, and twenty-one years later reminded Calvin of their meeting; and Conrad Pellican, who saw the dying Erasmus and heard great things of a certain John Calvin, a Frenchman who had dared to write plain and solid truth to the French King.
Now a city where Protestantism reigned, where learning flourished, and where men so 'unlike as Erasmus and Farel-the fervid preacher of. Reform-could do their work unhindered, was certain to make a deep impression on a fugitive harassed and expatriated on account of religion; and the impression it made can be read in the Christianae Religionis Institutio, and especially in the prefatory Letter to Francis I. The Institutio is Calvin's positivé interpretation of the Christian religion; the Letter is learned, eloquent, elegant, dignified, the address of a subject to his sovereign, yet of a subject who knows that his place in the State is as legal, though not as authoritative, as the sovereign's. It throbs with a noble indignation against injustice, and with a noble enthusiasm for freedom and truth. It is one of the great epistles of the world, a splendid apology for the oppressed and arraignment of the oppressors. It does not implore toleration as a concession, but claims freedom as a right. Its author is a young man of but twenty-six, yet he speaks with the gravity of age. He tells the King that his first duty is to be just; that to punish unheard is but to inflict violence and perpetrate fraud. Those for whom he speaks are, though simple and godly men, yet charged with crimes that, were they true, ought to condemn them to a thousand fires and gibbets. These charges the King is bound to investigate, for he is a minister of God, and if he fails to serve the God whose minister he is then he is a robber and no King. The lowliness of the men has as its counterpart the majesty of their beliefs, for the sake of which "alii nostrum vinculis constringuntur, alii virgis caeduntur, alii in ludibrium circumducuntur, alii proscribuntur, alii saevissime torquentur, alii fuga eldbuntur, omnes rerum angustia pre-mimur, diris eœsecrationibus devovemur, maledictis laceramur, indignissimis modis tractamur." Then he asks, "Who are our accusers?" and he turns on the priests like a new Erasmus, who does not, like the old, delight in satire for its own sake or in a literature which scourges men by holding up the mirror to vice; but who feels the sublimity of virtue so deeply that witticisms at the expense of vice are abhorrent to him. He takes up the charges in detail: it is said that the doctrine is new, doubtful, and uncertain, unconfirmed by miracles, opposed to the Fathers and ancient custom, schismatical and productive of schism, and that its fruits are sects, seditions, licence. On no point is he so emphatic as the repudiation of the personal charges: the people he pleads for have never raised their voice in faction or sought to subvert law and order; they fear God sincerely and worship Him in truth, praying even in exile for the royal person and House.
