brought the young student and
the old scholar together; they liked one another, and soon became
friends. Farel was impressed by his master's devotion as well as
learning; he saw him on his knees at church praying fervently; and,
"Never," said he, "had I seen a chanter of mass who chanted it with
deeper reverence." But this old-fashioned piety did not interfere at all
with the freedom of the professor's ideas and conversations touching
either the abuses or the doctrines of the church. "How shameful it is,"
he would say, "to see a bishop soliciting people to drink with him,
caring for nought but gaming, constantly handling the dice and the
dice-box, constantly hunting, hallooing after birds and game, frequenting
bad houses! . . . Religion has but one foundation, but one end, but
one head, Jesus Christ blessed forever; he alone trod the wine-press.
Let us not, then, call ourselves by the name of St. Paul, or Apollos, or
St. Peter." These free conversations worked, not all at once, but none
the less effectually, upon those who heard them. "The end was," says
Farel, "that little by little the papacy slipped from its place in my
heart; it did not come down at the first shock." At the same time that
he thus talked with his pupils, Lefevre of Etaples published a commentary
on the Epistles of St. Paul, and then a commentary on the Gospels.
"Christians," said he, "are those only who love Jesus Christ and His word.
May everything be illumined with His light! Through it may there be a
return of times like those of that primitive church which devoted to
Jesus Christ so many martyrs! May the Lord of the harvest, foreseeing a
new harvest, send new and diligent laborers! . . . My dear William,"
he added, turning to Farel and taking his hand, "God will renew the
world, and you will see it!"

It was not only professors and pupils, scholars grown old in meditation
and young folks eager for truth, liberty, action, and renown, who
welcomed passionately those boundless and undefined hopes, those
yearnings towards a brilliant and at the same time a vague future, at
which they looked forward, according to the expression used by Lefevre
of Etaples to Farel, to a "renewal of the world." Men holding a social
position very different from that of the philosophers, men with minds
formed on an acquaintance with facts and in the practice of affairs,
took part in this intellectual and religious ferment, and protected and
encouraged it