by several modern critics,
but is attested by local monuments and tradition, and has some support
in contemporary documents.[406]

[Sidenote: Revisits France.]

[Sidenote: Is recognized while passing through Geneva.]

[Sidenote: Farel compels him to remain.]

Once more in Basle, Calvin resolved, after a final visit to the home of
his childhood, to seek out some quiet spot in Germany, there to give
himself up to those scholarly labors which he fancied would be more
profitable to France than the most active enterprises he might engage in
as a preacher of the Gospel. He had accomplished the first part of his
design, had disposed of his property in Noyon, and was returning with
his brother and sister, when the prevalence of war in the Duchy of
Lorraine led him to diverge from his most direct route, so as to
traverse the dominions of the Duke of Savoy and the territories of the
confederate cantons of Switzerland. Under these circumstances, for the
first time, he entered the city of Geneva, then but recently delivered
from the yoke of its bishop and of the Roman Church. He had intended to
spend there only a single night.[407] He was accidentally recognized by
an old friend, a Frenchman, who at the time professed the reformed
faith, but subsequently returned to the communion of the Church of
Rome.[408] Du Tillet was the only person in Geneva that detected in the
traveller, Charles d'Espeville, the John Calvin who had written the
"Institutes." He confided the secret to Farel, and the intrepid reformer
whose office it had hitherto been to demolish, by unsparing and
persistent blows, the popular structure of superstition, at once
concluded that, in answer to his prayers, a man had been sent him by God
capable of laying, amid the ruins, the foundations of a new and more
perfect fabric. Farel sought Calvin out, and laid before him the urgent
necessities of a church founded in a city where, under priestly rule,
disorder and corruption had long been rampant. At first his words made
no impression. Calvin had traced out for himself a very different
course, and was little inclined to exchange a life of study for the
perpetual struggles to which he was so unexpectedly summoned. But when
he met Farel's request with a positive refusal, pleading inexperience,
fondness for literary pursuits, and aversion to scenes of tumult and
confusion, the Genevese reformer assumed a more decided tone. Acting
under an impulse for which he could scarce