History of the Reformation, vol. 3

Chapter 3

Farel and the Saints—The University—Farel’s Conversion—Farel and Luther—Other Disciples—Date of the Reform in France—Spontaneous Rise of the different Reforms—Which was the first?—Lefevre’s Place

Thus taught Lefevre. Farel listened, trembling with emotion; he received all, and rushed suddenly into the new path that was opening before him. There was, however, one point of his ancient faith which he could not as yet entirely renounce; this was the invocation of saints. The best spirits often have these relics of darkness, which they cling to after their illumination. Farel was astonished as he heard the illustrious doctor declare that Christ alone should be invoked. “Religion has but one foundation,” said Lefevre, “one object, one Head, Jesus Christ, blessed for evermore: alone hath He trodden the wine-press. Let us not then call ourselves after St. Paul, or Apollos, or St. Peter. The cross of Christ alone openeth the gates of heaven, and shutteth the gates of hell.” When he heard these words, a fierce conflict took place in Farel’s soul. On the one hand, he beheld the multitude of saints with the Church; on the other, Jesus Christ alone with his master. Now he inclined to one side, now to another; it was his last error and his last battle. He hesitated, he still clung to those venerable men and women at whose feet Rome falls in adoration. At length the decisive blow was struck from above. The scales fell from his eyes. Jesus alone appeared deserving of his worship. “Then,” said he, “popery was utterly overthrown; I began to detest it as devilish, and the holy Word of God had the chief place in my heart.” HRSCV3 440.1

Public events accelerated the course of Farel and his friends. Thomas de Vio, who afterwards contended with Luther at Augsburg and at Leipsic, having advanced in one of his works that the pope was the absolute monarch of the Church, Louis XII laid the book before the university in the month of February 1512. James Allmain, one of the youngest doctors, a man of profound genius and indefatigable application, read before the faculty of theology a refutation of the cardinal’s assertions, which was received with the greatest applause. HRSCV3 440.2

What impression must not such discourses have produced on the minds of Lefevre’s young disciples! Could they hesitate when the university seemed impatient under the papal yoke? If the main body itself was in motion, ought not they to rush forward as skirmishers and clear the way? “It was necessary,” said Farel, “that popery should have fallen little by little from my heart; for it did not tumble down at the first shock.” He contemplated the abyss of superstitions in which he had been plunged. Standing on the brink, he once more surveyed its depth with an anxious eye, and shrunk back with a feeling of terror. “Oh! what horror do I feel at myself and my sins, when I think of these things!” exclaimed he. “O Lord,” he continued, “would that my soul had served thee with a living faith, as thy obedient servants have done; would that it had prayed to and honored thee as much as I have given my heart to the mass and to serve that enchanted wafer, giving it all honor!” In such terms did the youthful Dauphinese deplore his past life, and repeat in tears, as St. Augustine had done before: “I have known Thee too late; too late have I loved Thee!” HRSCV3 440.3

Farel had found Jesus Christ; and having reached the port, he was delighted to find repose after such terrible storms. “Now,” said he, “every thing appears to me under a fresh aspect. Scripture is cleared up; prophecy is opened; the apostles shed a strong light upon my soul. A voice, till now unknown, the voice of Christ, my Shepherd, my Master, my Teacher, speaks to me with power.” He was so changed that, “instead of the murderous heart of a ravening wolf, he came back,” he tells us, “quietly, like a meek and harmless lamb, having his heart entirely withdrawn from the pope, and given to Jesus Christ.” HRSCV3 440.4

Having escaped from so great an evil, he turned towards the Bible, and began to study Greek and Hebrew with much earnestness. He read the Scriptures constantly, with ever increasing affection, and God enlightened him from day to day. He still continued to attend the churches of the established worship; but what found he there? loud voices, interminable chantings, and words spoken without understanding. Accordingly, when standing in the midst of a crowd that was passing near an image or an altar, he would exclaim, “Thou alone art God! thou alone art wise! thou alone art good! Nothing must be taken away from thy holy law, and nothing added. For thou alone art the Lord, and thou alone wilt and must command.” HRSCV3 440.5

Thus fell in his eyes all men and all teachers from the height to which his imagination had raised them, and he now saw nothing in the world but God and his Word. The other doctors of Paris, by their persecutions of Lefevre, had already fallen in his esteem; but erelong Lefevre himself, his beloved guide, was no more than a man like himself. He loved and venerated him still; but God alone became his master. HRSCV3 440.6

Of all the reformers, Farel and Luther are perhaps those whose early spiritual developments are best known to us, and who had to pass through the greatest struggles. Quick and ardent, men of conflict and strife, they underwent the severest trials before attaining peace. Farel is the pioneer of the Reformation in France and Switzerland; he rushes into the wood, and hews down the aged giants of the forest with his axe. Calvin came after, like Melancthon, from whom he differs indeed in character, but whom he resembles in his part as theologian and organizer. These two men, who have something in common with the legislators of antiquity,—the one in its graceful, the other in its severe style,—built up, settled, and gave laws to the territory conquered by the first two reformers. If, however, Luther and Farel approximate in some of their features, we must acknowledge that the latter resembles the Saxon reformer in one aspect only. Besides his superior genius, Luther had, in all that concerned the Church, a moderation and wisdom, an acquaintance with the past, a comprehensive judgment, and even an organizing faculty, that did not exist to the same degree in the Dauphinese reformer. HRSCV3 441.1

Farel was not the only young Frenchman into whose mind the new light then beamed. The doctrines that fell from the lips of the illustrious doctor of Etaples fermented among the crowd who listened to his lectures, and in his school were trained the daring soldiers who, in the hour of battle, were to contend even to the foot of the scaffold. They listened, compared, discussed, and keenly argued on both sides. It is probable that among the small number of scholars who defended the truth was young Peter Robert Olivetan, born at Noyon about the close of the fifteenth century, who afterwards translated the Bible into French from Lefevre’s version, and who seems to have been the first to draw the attention of a youth of his family, also a native of Noyon, to the Gospel, and who became the most illustrious chief of the Reformation. HRSCV3 441.2

Thus in 1512, at a time when Luther had made no impression on the world, and was going to Rome on some trifling monkish business,—at an epoch when Zwingle had not yet begun to apply himself earnestly to sacred learning, and was crossing the Alps with the confederates to fight for the pope,—Paris and France were listening to the teaching of those vital truths from which the Reformation was ordained to issue; and souls prepared to disseminate them were drinking them in with holy thirst. Hence Theodore Beza, speaking of Lefevre, hails him as the man “who boldly began the revival of the pure religion of Jesus Christ;” and remarks that, “as in ancient times the school of Isocrates sent forth the best orators, so from the lecture-room of the doctor of Etaples issued many of the best men of the age and of the Church.” HRSCV3 441.3

The Reformation was not, therefore, in France a foreign importation. It was born on French soil; it germinated in Paris; it put forth its first shoots in the university itself, that second authority in Romish Christendom. God planted the seeds of this work in the simple hearts of a Picard and a Dauphinese, before they had begun to bud forth in any other country upon earth. The Swiss Reformation, as we have seen, was independent of the German Reformation; and in its turn the Reformation in France was independent of that of Switzerland and of Germany. The work commenced at the same time in different countries, without any communication one with the other; as in a battle all the divisions begin to move at the same moment, although one has not told the other to march, but because one and the same command, issuing from a higher power, has been heard by all. The time had come, the nations were prepared, and God was everywhere beginning the revival of his Church at the same time. Such facts demonstrate that the great revolution of the sixteenth century was a work of God. HRSCV3 441.4

If we look only to dates, we must acknowledge that neither to Switzerland nor to Germany belongs the honor of having begun this work, although, hitherto, these two countries alone have contended for it. This honor belongs to France. This is a truth, a fact that we are anxious to establish, because until now it may possibly have been overlooked. Without dwelling on the influence that Lefevre exercised directly or indirectly on many individuals, and in particular on Calvin himself, as we conjecture, let us reflect on that which he had on one only of his disciples,—on Farel, and on the energetic activity which this servant of God manifested ever afterwards. Can we, after that, resist the conviction, that if Zwingle and Luther had never appeared, there would still have been a reforming movement in France? It is impossible, no doubt, to calculate what might have been its extent; we must even acknowledge that the report of what was taking place on the other side of the Rhine and the Jura afterwards animated and accelerated the progress of the French reformers. But they were the first awakened by the trumpet that sounded from heaven in the sixteenth century, and they were the first on foot and under arms upon the field of battle. HRSCV3 441.5

Nevertheless Luther is the great workman of the sixteenth century, and in the fullest sense the first reformer. Lefevre is not so complete as Calvin, Farel, and Luther. He is of Wittenberg and Geneva, but there is still a tinge of the Sorbonne; he is the first catholic in the reform movement, and the last of the reformers in the catholic movement. He is to the end a sort of go-between, a mediator not altogether free from mystery, destined to remind us of the connection between the old things and the new, which seemed for ever separated by an impassable gulf. Though rejected and persecuted by Rome, he still clings to Rome by a slender thread which he has no desire to break. Lefevre of Etaples has a station apart in the theology of the sixteenth century: he is the link connecting the ancient times with the modern, and the man in whom the transition is made from the theology of the middle ages to the theology of the Reformation. HRSCV3 442.1