proceedings against him being
dropped, soon returned to Paris. But desiring both security and solitude
for study he left the city again about New Year of 1534 and became the
guest of Louis du Tillet, a canon of the cathedral, at Angouleme, where
at the request of his host he prepared some short discourses, which were
circulated in the surrounding parishes, and read in public to the
people. Here, too in du Tillet's splendid library, he began the studies
which resulted in his great work, the _Institutes_, and paid a visit to
Nerac, where the venerable Lefevre, whose revised translation of the
Bible into French was published about this time, was spending his last
years under the kindly care of Margaret of Navarre.

Calvin was now nearly twenty-five years of age, and in the ordinary way
would have been ordained to the priesthood. Up till this time his work
for the evangelical cause was not so much that of the public preacher or
reformer as that of the retiring but influential scholar and adviser.
Now, however, he had to decide whether, like Roussel and other of his
friends, he should strive to combine the new doctrines with a position
in the old church, or whether he should definitely break away from Rome.
His mind was made up, and on the 4th of May he resigned his chaplaincy
at Noyon and his rectorship at Pont l'Eveque. Towards the end of the
same month he was arrested and suffered two short terms of imprisonment,
the charges against him being not strong enough to be pressed. He seems
to have gone next to Paris, staying perhaps with Etienne de la Forge, a
Protestant merchant who suffered for his faith in February 1535. To this
time belongs the story of the proposed meeting between Calvin and the
Spanish reformer Servetus. Calvin's movements at this time are difficult
to trace, but he visited both Orleans and Poitiers, and each visit
marked a stage in his development.

The Anabaptists of Germany had spread into France, and were
disseminating many wild and fanatical opinions among those who had
seceded from the Church of Rome. Among other notions which they had
imbibed was that of a sleep of the soul after death. To Calvin this
notion appeared so pernicious that he composed a treatise in refutation
of it, under the title of _Psychopannychia_. The preface to this
treatise is dated Orleans 1534, but it was not printed till 1542. In it
he chiefly dwells upon the evidence from Scripture in favour of the
belief that the soul ret