J. H. Merle D'Aubigné - History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin (Vol. 1-8)

Farel would have been the man fitted for this work. He was one of those whose simple, serious, earnest tones carry away the masses. His voice of thunder made his hearers tremble. The strength of his convictions created faith in their souls, the fervour of his prayers raised them to heaven. When they listened to him, ‘they felt,’ as Calvin says, ‘not merely a few light pricks and stings, but were wounded and pierced to the heart; and hypocrisy was dragged from those wonderful and more than tortuous hiding-places which lie deep in the heart of man.’ He pulled down and built up with equal energy. Even his life—an apostle-ship full of self-sacrifice, danger, and triumph—was as effectual as his sermons. He was not only a minister of the Word; he was a bishop also. He was able to discern the young men fitted to wield the weapons of the Gospel, and to direct them in the great war of the age. Farel never attacked a place, however difficult of access, which he did not take. Such was the man then called into France, and who seemed destined to be its reformer. The letters of Roussel and Toussaint inviting Farel were conveyed to Strasburg, and arrived there in the month of December 1526.

Farel, who had remained alone in that city after the departure of his friends, kept, as we have already mentioned, his eyes turned towards France. He waited and waited still, hesitating to go to Switzerland, whither he was invited; but those gates of France, from which he could not turn away his eyes, still remained closed. He reflected; he asked himself what place God had reserved for him. His piercing glance would have desired to penetrate the future.... Should he not return into Dauphiny? At Gap and Manosque he had relatives favourable to the Gospel: his brother Walter, clerk of the episcopal court; his brother Jean-Jacques, who expounded the Bible with as much boldness as himself; Antoine Aloat, the notary, who had married one of his nieces; his brother-in-law, the noble Honorat Riquetti, ‘one of the ancestors of Mirabeau,’ as the record-keeper of the Hautes Alpes informs us. 540There are certainly few names we might be more surprised at seeing brought together than those of Farel and Mirabeau; and yet between these two Frenchmen there are at least two points of contact: the power of their eloquence, and the boldness of their reforms.

Farel did not return to Gap; had he done so, we may suppose how he would have been received, from the reception given to him some years later the particulars of which an archæologist has discovered in the ‘Annals of the Capuchins’ of Gap. Farel, already an old man, wishing to preach the Gospel in his native country before God summoned him from the world, went and took up his quarters in a corn-mill at the gates of his native town, where he ‘dogmatised’ the peasants from a French Bible, which he explained ‘in his fashion’—to use the words of the Roman-catholic author. Erelong he began to preach in the very heart of the town, in a chapel dedicated to St. Colomba. The magistrate forbade his speaking, and the parliament of Grenoble desired ‘to have him burnt,’ say the Capuchins. Farel replied by a formal refusal of obedience; upon which the vice-bailiff, Benedict Olier, a zealous catholic, escorted by several sergeants and police officers, proceeded to the chapel where Farel was preaching. The door was shut; they knocked, but nobody answered; they broke in, and found a considerable throng; no one turned his head, all were listening greedily to the reformer’s words. The officers of justice went straight to the pulpit; Farel was seized, and with ‘the crime’ (the Bible) in his hand, according to the forcible expression of the Capuchins, was led through the crowd and shut up in prison. But the followers of the new doctrine were already to be found in every class—in the workman’s garret, in the tradesman’s shop, in the fortified mansion of the noble, and sometimes even in the bishop’s palace. During the night the reformers, either by force or stratagem, took the brave old man out of prison, carried him to the ramparts, and let him down into the fields in a basket. ‘Accomplices’ were waiting for him, and the preacher escaped along with them. 541Now let us return to the year 1526.

Berthold Haller, the reformer of Berne, invited Farel to Switzerland. The Bernese possessed certain districts in Roman Switzerland where a missionary speaking the French language was necessary. The invitations of the pious Haller were repeated. If France is shut, Switzerland is opening; Farel can hesitate no longer; God removes him from one of these countries and calls him to the other; he will obey.

Farel, sadly grieved at the thought that his native country rejected him, modestly departed from Strasburg, on foot, one day in the month of December 1526; and, journeying up the Rhine, directed his steps towards those Alpine districts of which he became one of the greatest reformers. 542He was on the road when the messenger of Toussaint and Roussel arrived at Strasburg.... It was too late. His friends, knowing that he was going to Berne, sent the letters after him, and it was at Aigle, where Farel had set up as a schoolmaster, that he received the invitation of the lords of La Marche. What shall he do? He might return. Shall he put aside the call of God and of the lords of Berne to follow that which the princes have sent him? There was a fierce struggle in his soul. Was not France his birthplace? It was; but ... it is too late! God has spoken, he said to himself; and though invited by princes, Farel remained at the humble desk in his little school in the small town of Aigle, situated between the majestic Dent du Midi and the rugged glaciers of the Diablerets. Thus the reformer whom many christians thought of for France was lost to her.

France was not, however, without resources; she still possessed Berquin, whom some called her Luther ; but while the exiles and the prisoners had heard the hour of their deliverance strike, Berquin, though treated with more consideration, was still deprived of his liberty. Margaret was unwearied in her petitions to the king. She even attempted to soften Montmorency; but the Romish theologians made every attempt to counteract her influence. Friends and enemies were equally of opinion that if Berquin were free, he would deal many a hard blow at the hierarchy. At length, after an eight months’ struggle, Margaret triumphed; Berquin left his prison in November 1526, just at the time when Farel was leaving France.

The Duchess of Alençon’s gratitude immediately burst forth. Calling Montmorency by a tenderer name than usual, she said: ‘I thank you, my son, for the pleasure you have done me in the cause of poor Berquin. You may say that you have taken me from prison, for I value it as a favour done to myself.’ 543... ‘My lord,’ she wrote to the king, ‘my desire to obey your commands was already very great, but you have doubled it by the charity you have been pleased to show towards poor Berquin. He for whom he suffered will take pleasure in the mercy you have shown his servant and yours for your honour; and the confusion of those who have forgotten God will not be less than the perpetual glory which God will give you.’ 544

As soon as Berquin was free he began to meditate on his great work, which was to destroy the power of error. His liberation was not in his eyes a simple deliverance from prison—it was a call. He cared little (as Erasmus entreated him) to indulge in sweet repose on the banks of the Somme; his earnest desire was to fight. He held that the life of a christian man should be a continual warfare. No truce with Satan! Now, to him, Satan was the Sorbonne, and he had no more doubts about the victory than if the war were ended already. Berquin was universally known, loved, and respected. To Farel’s decision and zeal he added a knowledge of the world, which was then most necessary. Margaret clung to him at least as much as to Roussel. It was generally thought among christians that God had brought him forth from prison in order to set him at the head of the Reform in France: Berquin himself thought so. The friends of the Reformation rejoiced, and an important circumstance increased their hopes.