Sadolet, he acknowledges to have been, at one time, the highest object of his ambition.
Supposing these to have been Calvin's feelings in 1532, it is certain that they soon underwent a decided change. In a letter written in 1533 to Francis Daniel, an advocate of Orleans, we find him speaking the language of a zealous Reformer; Stigmatising the conduct of the Romish bigots, graphically describing and exulting in a defeat which they had recently sustained, and characterising "their so-called zeal as stolid fury—a zeal with which Elijah never burned, zealous though he was for the Lord of Hosts."
Apparently, as a counterpart to this false zeal, Calvin shortly after adopted the bold resolution of meeting bigotry on its own chosen field. Nicholas Cop being required, as rector of the University of Paris, to deliver a customary address on All Saints Day, applied to Calvin, who, availing himself of the opportunity, furnished him with one in which religion was presented in its renovated form. The offence was one of the last which bigotry would be disposed to forgive. To avoid the combined wrath of the Sorbonne and the Parliament, Cop was obliged to save himself by flight to Basle; and Calvin, though protected for a time by the interposition of the Queen of Navarre, was ultimately unable to continue his residence at Paris, and retired into Saintonge. During his residence here he appears to have composed his second published work, entitled Psychopannychia, in which he refuted the erroneous idea—broached at an early period, and then revived by the Anabaptists—that in the interval between death and the final judgment, the soul exists in a state of sleep. This, however, was not his only labour. At the request of a friend, (apparently Louis du Tillet, canon of Angoulême,) he wrote what Beza calls "Breves Admonitiones Christianas,"—
