others to copy their fidelity.
Marot and Beza's metrical versions of the Psalms, wafted into
popularity, even among those who at first little sympathized with the
piety of the words, by the novelty and beauty of the music to which they
were sung, were powerful auxiliaries to the arguments of the theologian.
They entered the house of the peasant and invested its homely scenes
with a calm derived from the contemplation of the bliss of a heaven
where the fleeting distinctions of the present shall melt away. They
nerved the humble artisan to patience and to the cheerful endurance of
obloquy and reproach. They attracted to the gathering of persecuted
reformers in the by-street, in the retired barn, or on the open heath or
mountain side, the youth who preferred their melody and intelligible
words to the jargon of a service conducted in a tongue understood only
by the learned. In the royal court, or rising in loud chorus from a
thousand voices on the crowded _Pre-aux-Clercs_, they were winged
messengers of the truth, where no other messengers could have found
utterance with impunity.

[Sidenote: Morals and martyrdom.]

The blameless purity of life of the men and women whom, for religion's
sake, the officers of the law put to death with every species of
indignity and with inhuman cruelty, when contrasted with the flagrant
corruption of the clergy and the shameless dissoluteness of the court,
openly fostered for their own base ends by cardinals themselves accused
of every species of immorality and suspected of atheism, deeply affected
the minds of the reflecting. One Anne Du Bourg put to death by a Charles
of Lorraine made more converts in a day than all the executioners could
burn in a year.

[Sidenote: Character of the ministers from Geneva.]

But, if the rapid spread of Protestant doctrines at this precise date is
due to any one cause more than to another, that cause may probably be
found in the character and numbers of the religious teachers. Converts
from the Papal Church, principally priests and monks, were the first
apostles of the Reformation. Few of them had received systematic
training of any kind, none had a thorough acquaintance with biblical
learning. Many embraced the truth only in part; some professed it from
improper motives. The Lenten preachers whose leaning towards
"Lutheranism" was sufficiently marked to attract the hatred of the
Sorbonne, were generally orators, more solicitous of popularity than
jealou