History of the Reformation, vol. 3

Chapter 2

Louis XII and the Assembly of Tours—Francis and Margaret—Learned Men—Lefevre—His Courses at the University—Meeting between Lefevre and Farel—Farel’s Hesitation and Researches—First Awakening—Lefevre’s Prophecy—Teaches Justification by Faith—Objections—Disorder of the Colleges—Effects on Farel—Election—Sanctification of Life

One day in the year 1510, or shortly after, the young Dauphinese arrived in Paris. The province had made him an ardent follower of the papacy; the capital was to make him something very different. In France the Reformation was not destined to go forth, as in Germany, from a small city. All the movements that agitate the people proceed from the metropolis. A concurrence of providential circumstances made Paris, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a focus whence a spark of life might easily escape. The young man from the neighborhood of Gap, who arrived there humble and ignorant, was to receive that spark in his heart, and many others. HRSCV3 435.7

Louis XII, the father of his people, had just convoked the representatives of the French clergy to meet at Tours. This prince seems to have anticipated the times of the Reformation; so that had this great revolution taken place during his reign, the whole of France might have become protestant. The assembly of Tours had declared that the king possessed the right of waging war on the pope, and of enforcing the decrees of the Council of Basle. These measures were the object of general conversation in the colleges, the city, and the court; and must have made a deep impression on the mind of young Farel. HRSCV3 436.1

Two children were then growing up in the court of Louis XII. One was a prince of tall stature, striking features, who showed little moderation in his character, and followed blindly wherever his passions led him; so that the king was in the habit of saying: “That great boy will spoil all.” This was Francis of Angouleme, duke of Valois, and cousin to the king. Boisy, his tutor, had taught him, however, to honor literature. HRSCV3 436.2

By the side of Francis was his sister Margaret, his senior by two years, “a princess,” says Brantome, “of great mind and ability, both natural and acquired.” Accordingly, Louis had spared no pains in her education, and the most learned men in the kingdom hastened to acknowledge her as their patroness. HRSCV3 436.3

Already, indeed, a group of illustrious men surrounded these two Valois. William Budoeus, a man giving the run to his passions, fond of the chase, living only for his hawks, his horses, and his hounds, on a sudden, at the age of twenty-three, had stopped short, sold his hunting train, and applied himself to study with the zeal he had formerly displayed in scouring the fields and forests with his dogs; the physician Cop, Francis Vatable, whose knowledge of Hebrew was admired by the Jews themselves; James Tusan, a celebrated Hellenist; and many others, encouraged by Stephen Poncher, bishop of Paris, by Louis Ruze, the civil lieutenant, and by Francis de Luynes, and already protected by the two young Valois, resisted the violent attacks of the Sorbonne, who looked upon the study of Greek and Hebrew as the most deadly heresy. At Paris, as in Germany and Switzerland, the restoration of sound doctrine was to be preceded by the revival of letters. But in France the hands that thus prepared the materials were not destined to construct the edifice. HRSCV3 436.4

Among all the doctors who then adorned the capital, was observed a man of very diminutive stature, of mean appearance, and humble origin, whose intellect, learning, and powerful eloquence had an indefinable attraction for all who heard him. His name was Lefevre; and he was born about 1455 at Etaples, a village in Picardy. He had received a rude, or as Theodore Beza calls it, a barbarous education; but his genius had supplied the want of masters; and his piety, learning, and nobility of soul, shone out with so much the brighter lustre. He had travelled much, and it would appear that his desire of acquiring knowledge had led him into Asia and Africa. As early as 1493, Lefevre, then doctor of divinity, was professor in the university of Paris. He immediately occupied a distinguished rank and, in the estimation of Erasmus, was the first. HRSCV3 436.5

Lefevre saw that he had a task to perform. Although attached to the practices of the Romish Church, he resolved to attack the barbarism then prevailing in the university; he began to teach the various branches of philosophy with a clearness hitherto unknown. He endeavoured to revive the study of languages and learned antiquity. He went farther than this; he perceived that, as regards a work of regeneration, philosophy and learning are insufficient. Abandoning, therefore, scholasticism, which for so many ages had reigned supreme in the schools, he returned to the Bible, and revived in Christendom the study of the Holy Scriptures and evangelical learning. He did not devote his time to dry researches, he went to the heart of the Bible. His eloquence, his candor, his amiability, captivated all hearts. Serious and fervent in the pulpit, he indulged in a sweet familiarity with his pupils. “He loves me exceedingly,” wrote Glarean, one of their number, to his friend Zwingle. “Full of candor and kindness, he often sings, prays, disputes, and laughs at the follies of the world with me.” Accordingly, a great number of disciples from every country sat at his feet. HRSCV3 436.6

This man, with all his learning, submitted with the simplicity of a child to every observance of the Church. He passed as much time in the churches as in his study, so that a close union seemed destined to unite the aged doctor of Picardy and the young scholar of Dauphiny. When two natures so similar as these meet together, though it be within the wide circuit of a capital, they tend to draw near each other. In his pious pilgrimages, young Farel soon noticed an aged man, and was struck by his devotion. He prostrated himself before the images, and remained long on his knees, praying with fervor and devoutly repeating his hours. “Never,” said Farel, “never had I seen a chanter of the mass sing it with greater reverence.” HRSCV3 436.7

This man was Lefevre. William Farel immediately desired to become acquainted with him; and could not restrain his joy when he found himself kindly received by this celebrated man. William had gained his object in coming to the capital. From that time his greatest pleasure was to converse with the doctor of Etaples, to listen to him, to hear his admirable lessons, and to kneel with him devoutly before the same shrines. Often might the aged Lefevre and his young disciple be seen adorning an image of the Virgin with flowers; and alone, far from all Paris, far from its scholars and its doctors, they murmured in concert the fervent prayers they offered up to Mary. HRSCV3 437.1

Farel’s attachment to Lefevre was noticed by many. The respect felt towards the old doctor was reflected on his young disciple. This illustrious friendship drew the Dauphinese from his obscurity. He soon acquired a reputation for zeal; and many devout rich persons in Paris intrusted him with various sums of money intended for the support of the poorer students. HRSCV3 437.2

Some time elapsed ere Lefevre and his disciple arrived at a clear perception of the truth. It was not the hope of a rich benefice or a propensity to a dissolute life which bound Farel to the pope; those vulgar ties were not made for souls like his. To him the pope was the visible head of the Church, a sort of deity, by whose commandments souls might be saved. Whenever he heard any one speaking against this highly venerated pontiff, he would gnash his teeth like a furious wolf, and would have called down lightning from heaven “to overwhelm the guilty wretch with utter ruin and confusion.”—“I believe,” said he, “in the cross, in pilgrimages, images, vows, and relics. What the priest holds in his hands, puts into the box, and there shuts it up, eats, and gives others to eat, is my only true God, and to me there is no other, either in heaven or upon earth.”—“Satan,” says he in another place, “had so lodged the pope, the papacy, and all that is his in my heart, that even the pope had not so much of it in himself.” HRSCV3 437.3

Thus, the more Farel appeared to seek God, the more his piety decayed and superstition increased in his soul; everything was going from bad to worse. He has himself described this condition in energetic language: “Alas! how I shudder at myself and at my faults,” said he, “when I think upon it; and how great and wonderful a work of God it is, that man should ever have been dragged from such an abyss!” HRSCV3 437.4

From this abyss he emerged only by degrees. He had at first studied the profane authors; his piety finding no food there, he began to meditate on the lives of the saints; infatuated as he was before, these legends only made him still more so. He then attached himself to several doctors of the age; but as he had gone to them in wretchedness, he left them more wretched still. At last he began to study the ancient philosophers, and expected to learn from Aristotle how to be a Christian; again his hopes were disappointed. Books, images, relics, Aristotle, Mary, and the saints—all proved unavailing. His ardent soul wandered from one human wisdom to another, without finding the means of allaying its burning thirst. HRSCV3 437.5

Meantime the pope, allowing the writings of the Old and New Testaments to be called The Holy Bible, Farel began to read them, as Luther had done in the cloister at Erfurth; he was amazed at seeing that everything upon earth was different from what is taught in the Scriptures. Perhaps he was on the point of reaching the truth, but on a sudden a thicker darkness plunged him into another abyss. “Satan came suddenly upon me,” said he, “that he might not lose his prize, and dealt with me according to his custom.” A terrible struggle between the Word of God and the word of the Church then took place in his heart. If he met with any passages of Scripture opposed to the Romish practices, he cast down his eyes, blushed, and dared not believe what he read. “Alas!” said he, fearing to keep his looks fixed on the Bible, “I do not well understand these things; I must give a very different meaning to the Scriptures from that which they seem to have. I must keep to the interpretation of the Church, and indeed of the pope.” HRSCV3 437.6

One day, as he was reading the Bible, a doctor who happened to come in rebuked him sharply. “No man,” said he, “ought to read the Holy Scriptures before he has learnt philosophy and taken his degree in arts.” This was a preparation the apostles had not required; but Farel believed him. “I was,” says he, “the most wretched of men, shutting my eyes lest I should see.” HRSCV3 437.7

From that time the young Dauphinese had a return to his Romish fervor. The legends of the saints inflamed his imagination. The greater the severity of the monastic rules, the greater was the attraction he felt towards them. In the midst of the woods near Paris, some Carthusians inhabited a group of gloomy cells; he visited them with reverence, and shared in their austerities. “I was wholly employed, day and night, in serving the devil,” said he, “after the fashion of that man of sin, the pope. I had my Pantheon in my heart, and such a troop of mediators, saviours, and gods, that I might well have passed for a papal register.” HRSCV3 437.8

The darkness could not grow deeper; the morning star was soon to arise, and it was destined to appear at Lefevre’s voice. There were already some gleams of light in the doctor of Etaples; an inward conviction told him that the Church could not long remain in its actual position; and often at the very moment of his return from saying mass, or of rising from before some image, the old man would turn towards his youthful disciple, and grasping him by the hand would say in a serious tone of voice: “My dear William, God will renew the world, and you will see it!” Farel did not thoroughly understand these words. Yet Lefevre did not confine himself to this mysterious language; a great change which was then wrought in him was destined to produce a similar effect on his disciple. HRSCV3 438.1

The old doctor was engaged in a laborious task; he was carefully collecting the legends of the saints and martyrs, and arranging them according to the order in which their names are found in the calendar. Two months had already been printed, when one of those beams of light which come from heaven, suddenly illuminated his soul. He could not resist the disgust which such puerile superstitions must ever cause in the heart of a Christian. The sublimity of the Word of God made him perceive the paltry nature of these fables. They now appeared to him no better than “brimstone fit to kindle the fire of idolatry.” He abandoned his work, and throwing these legends aside, turned ardently towards the Holy Scriptures. At the moment when Lefevre, quitting the wondrous tales of the saints, laid his hand on the Word of God, a new era began in France, and is the commencement of the Reformation. HRSCV3 438.2

In effect, Lefevre, weaned from the fables of the Breviary, began to study the Epistles of St. Paul; the light increased rapidly in his heart, and he immediately imparted to his disciples that knowledge of the truth which we find in his commentaries. Strange doctrines were those for the school and for the age, which were then first heard in Paris, and disseminated by the press throughout the christian world. We may easily understand that the young disciples who listened to them were aroused, impressed, and changed by them; and that thus, prior to the year 1512, the dawn of a brighter day was preparing for France. HRSCV3 438.3

The doctrine of justification by faith, which overthrew by a single blow the subtleties of the schoolmen and the observances of popery, was boldly proclaimed in the bosom of the Sorbonne. “It is God alone,” said the doctor, and the vaulted roofs of the university must have been astonished as they re-echoed such strange sounds, “it is God alone, who by his grace, through faith, justifies unto everlasting life. There is a righteousness of works, there is a righteousness of grace; the one cometh from man, the other from God; one is earthly and passeth away, the other is heavenly and eternal; one is the shadow and the sign, the other the light and the truth; one makes sin known to us that we may escape death, the other reveals grace that we may obtain life.” HRSCV3 438.4

“What then!” asked his hearers, as they listened to this teaching, which contradicted that of four centuries; “has any one man been ever justified without works?” “One!” answered Lefevre, “they are innumerable. How many people of disorderly lives, who have ardently prayed for the grace of baptism, possessing faith alone in Christ, and who, if they died the moment after, have entered into the life of the blessed without works!”—“If, therefore, we are not justified by works, it is in vain that we perform them,” replied some. The Paris doctor answered, and the other reformers would not perhaps have altogether approved of this reply: “Certainly not! they are not in vain. If I hold a mirror to the sun, its image is reflected; the more I polish and clear it, the brighter is the reflection; but if we allow it to become tarnished, the splendor of the sun is dimmed. It is the same with justification in those who lead an impure life.” In this passage, Lefevre, like Augustine in many, does not perhaps make a sufficient distinction between sanctification and justification. The doctor of Etaples reminds us strongly of the Bishop of Hippona. Those who lead an unholy life have never received justification, and therefore cannot lose it. But Lefevre may have intended to say that the Christian, when he has fallen into any sin, loses the assurance of salvation, and not salvation itself. If so, there is no objection to be made against his doctrine. HRSCV3 438.5

Thus a new life and a new teaching had penetrated into the university of Paris. The doctrine of faith, formerly preached in Gaul by Pothinus and Irenaeus, was heard there again. From this time there were two parties, two people in this great school of Christendom. Lefevre’s lessons and the zeal of his disciples formed the most striking contrast to the scholastic teaching of the majority of the doctors, and the irregular and frivolous lives of most of the students. In the colleges, they were far more busily engaged in learning their parts in comedies, in masquerading, and in mountebank farces, than in studying the oracles of God. In these plays the honor of the great, of the princes, of the king himself, was frequently attacked. The parliament interfered about this period; and summoning the principals of several colleges before them, forbade those indulgent masters to permit such dramas to be represented in their houses. HRSCV3 438.6

But a more powerful diversion than the decrees of parliament suddenly came to correct these disorders. Jesus Christ was preached. Great was the uproar on the benches of the university, and the students began to occupy themselves almost as much with the evangelical doctrines as with the quibbles of the school or with comedies. Many of those whose lives were the least irreproachable, adhered however to the doctrine of works; and feeling that the doctrine of faith condemned their way of living, they pretended that St. James was opposed to St. Paul. Lefevre, resolving to defend the treasure he had discovered, showed the agreement of these two apostles: “Does not St. James in his first chapter declare that every good and perfect gift cometh down from above? Now, who will deny that justification is the good and perfect gift? If we see a man moving, the respiration that we perceive is to us a sign of life. Thus works are necessary, but only as signs of a living faith, which is accompanied by justification. Do eye-salves or lotions give light to the eye? No! it is the influence of the sun. Well, then, these lotions and these eye-salves are our works. The ray that the sun darts from above is justification itself.” HRSCV3 439.1

Farel listened earnestly to this teaching. These words of salvation by grace had immediately an indescribable charm for him. Every objection fell: every struggle ceased. No sooner had Lefevre put forward this doctrine than Farel embraced it with all the ardor of his soul. He had undergone labor and conflicts enough to be aware that he could not save himself. Accordingly, immediately he saw in the Word that God saves freely, he believed. “Lefevre,” said he, “extricated me from the false opinion of human merits, and taught me that everything came from grace: which I believed as soon as it was spoken.” Thus by a conversion as prompt and decisive as that of St. Paul was Farel led to the faith,—that Farel who (as Theodore Beza says), undismayed by difficulties, threats, abuse, or blows, won over to Jesus Christ Montbelliard, Neufchatel, Lausanne, Aigle, and finally Geneva. HRSCV3 439.2

Meanwhile Lefevre, continuing his lessons, and delighting, as Luther did, in employing contrasts and paradoxes containing weighty truths, extolled the greatness of the mysteries of redemption: “Ineffable exchange,” exclaimed he, “the innocent One is condemned and the criminal acquitted; the Blessing is cursed, and he who was cursed is blessed; the Life dies, and the dead live; the Glory is covered with shame, and He who was put to shame is covered with glory.” The pious doctor, going still deeper, acknowledged that all salvation proceeds from the sovereignty of God’s love. “Those who are saved,” said he, “are saved by election, by grace, by the will of God, not by their own. Our own election, will, and works, are of no avail: the election of God alone is profitable. When we are converted, it is not our conversion that makes us the elect of God, but the grace, will, and election of God which convert us.” HRSCV3 439.3

But Lefevre did not confine himself to doctrines alone: if he gave to God the glory, he required obedience from man, and urged the obligations which proceed from the great privileges of the Christian. “If thou art a member of Christ’s Church, thou art also a member of his body.” said he; “and if thou art a member of Christ’s body, thou art full of the Divinity; for in him dwelleth the fullness of the Godhead bodily. Oh! if men could but understand this privilege, how chastely, purely, and holily would they live, and they would look upon all the glory of this world as disgrace, in comparison with that inner glory which is hidden from the eyes of the flesh.” HRSCV3 439.4

Lefevre perceived that the office of a teacher of the Word is a lofty station; and he exercised it with unshaken fidelity. The corruption of the times, and particularly that of the clergy, excited his indignation, and became the subject of severe rebuke. “How scandalous it is,” said he, “to see a bishop asking persons to drink with him, gambling, rattling the dice, spending his time with hawks and dogs, and in hunting, hallooing after rooks and deer, and frequenting houses of ill-fame! O men deserving a severer punishment than Sardanapalus himself!” HRSCV3 439.5