76. Calvin as a Wandering Evangelist. 1533-1536. (Chapter 9. From France to Switzerland. 1509-1536.) (History of the Christian Church) (Schaff, Philip)

For nearly three years Calvin wandered as a fugitive evangelist under assumed names from place to place in Southern France, Switzerland, Italy, till he reached Geneva as his final destination. It is impossible accurately to determine all the facts and dates in this period.

He resigned his ecclesiastical benefices at Noyon and Pont l'EvEque, May 4, 1534, and thus closed all connection with the Roman Church. That year was remarkable for the founding of the order of the Jesuits at Montmartre (Aug. 15), which took the lead in the Counter-Reformation; by the election of Pope Paul III. (Alexander Farnese, Oct. 13), who confirmed the order, excommunicated Henry VIII., and established the Inquisition in Italy; and by the bloody persecution of the Protestants in Paris, which has been described in the preceding section.

The Roman Counter-Reformation now began in earnest, and called for a consolidation of the Protestant forces.

Calvin spent the greater part of the year 1533 to 1534, under the protection of Queen Marguerite of Navarre, in her native city of Angoul me. This highly gifted lady (1492-1549), the sister of King Francis I., grandmother of Henry IV., and a voluminous writer in verse and prose, was a strange mixture of piety and liberalism, of idealism and sensualism. She patronized both the Reformation and the Renaissance, Calvin and Rabelais; she wrote the Mirror of a Sinful Soul, and also the Heptameron in professed imitation of Boccaccio's Decamerone; yet she was pure, and began and closed the day with religious meditation and devotion. After the death of her royal brother (1547), she retired to a convent as abbess, and declared on her death-bed that, after receiving extreme unction, she had protected the Reformers out of pure compassion, and not from any wish to depart from the faith of her ancestors.

Calvin lived at Angoul me with a weathy friend, Louis du Tillet, who was canon of the cathedral and cure of Claix, and had acquired on his journeys a rare library of three or four thousand volumes. He taught him Greek, and prosecuted his theological studies. He associated with honorable men of letters, and was highly esteemed by them. He began there the preparation of his Institutes. He also aided Olivetan in the revision and completion of the French translation of the Bible, which appeared at Neuch tel in June, 1535, with a preface of Calvin.

From Angoul me Calvin made excursions to Nerac, Poitiers, Orleans, and Paris. At Nerac in Bearn, the little capital of Queen Marguerite, he became personally acquainted with Le FEvre d'Etaples (Faber Stapulensis), the octogenarian patriarch of French Humanism and Protestantism. Le FEvre, with prophetic vision, recognized in the young scholar the future restorer of the Church of France. Perhaps he also suggested to him to take Melanchthon for his model. Roussel, the chaplain and confessor of Marguerite, advised him to purify the house of God, but not to destroy it.

At Poitiers, Calvin gained several eminent persons for the Reformation. According to an uncertain tradition he celebrated with a few friends, for the first time, the Lord's Supper after the Reformed fashion, in a cave (grotte de Croutelles) near the town, which long afterwards was called Calvin's Cave.

Towards the close of the year 1534, he ventured on a visit to Paris. There he met, for the first time, the Spanish physician, Michael Servetus, who had recently published his heretical book On the Errors of the Trinity, and challenged him to a disputation. Calvin accepted the challenge at the risk of his safety, and waited for him in a house in the Rue Saint Antoine; but Servetus did not appear. Twenty years afterwards he reminded Servetus of this interview: You know that at that time I was ready to do every thing for you, and did not even count my life too dear that I might convert you from your errors. Would that he had succeeded at that time, or never seen the unfortunate heretic again.