§ 60. WILLIAM FAREL. 239
but not an organizer of his conquests ; a man of action, not a man of letters; an intrepid preacher, not a theologian. He felt his defects, and handed his work over to the mighty genius of his younger friend Calvin. In the spirit of genuine humility and self-denial, he was willing to decrease that Calvin might increase. This is the finest trait in his character.^
Guillaume Farel, the oldest of seven children of a poor but noble family, was born in the year 1489 (five years after Luther and Zwingli, twenty years before Calvin) at Gap, a small town in the alps of Dauphine in the south-east of France, where the religious views of the Waldenses were once widely spread. He inherited the blind faith of his parents, and doubted nothing. He made with them, as he remembered in his old age, a pilgrimage to a wonder-working cross which was believed to be taken from the cross of our Lord. He shared in the superstitious veneration of jDictures and relics, and bowed before the authority of monks and priests. He was, as he said, more popish than popery.
At the same time he had a great thirst for knowledge, and was sent to school at Paris. Here he studied the ancient languages (even Hebrew), philosophy, and theology. His principal teacher, Jacques Le Fevre d'Etaples (Faber Stapulensis, 1455-1536), the pioneer of the Reformation in France and translator of the Scriptures, introduced him into the knowledge of Paul's Epistles and the doctrine of justification by faith, and prophetically told him, already in 1512: " My son, God will renew the world, and you will witness it." 2 Farel acquired the degree of Master of Arts (January,
1 " L'homme du midi \_Farer\ e'tait fait pour conquerir ; I'homme du nord \_Calvin\ pour conserver et discipliner la conquete. Farel en eut le sentiment si distinct, qu'il s'effa^a spontane'ment devant Calvin le jour ou il le contraignit par les 'tonnerres ' de sa parole de demeurer a Geneve, qui avail besoin de son ge'nie." Philippe Godet, Hist, litte'r. de la Suisse francaise, p. 51.
2 "Man Jils, Dieu renouvellera le monde et tu en seras le te'moin." Herminjard, I. 5, note. Compare the passage there quoted from Le Fevre's work on St. Paul.
240 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
1517), and was appointed teacher at the college of Cardinal Le Moine.
The influence of Le F^vre and the study of the Bible brought him gradually to the conviction that salvation can be found only in Christ, that the word of God is the only rule of faith, and that the Roman traditions and rites are inventions of man. He was amazed that he could find in the New Testament no trace of the pope, of the hierarchy, of indulgences, of purgatory, of the mass, of seven sacraments, of sacerdotal celibacy, of the worship of Mary and the saints. Le Fevre, being charged with heresy by the Sorbonne, retired in 1521 to his friend William Brigonnet, bishop of Meaux, who was convinced of the necessity of a reformation within the Catholic Church, without separation from Rome.^ There he translated the New< Testament into French, which was published in 1523 without his name (almost simultaneously with Luther's German New Testament). Several of his pupils, Farel, Gerard, Roussel, Michel d'Arande, followed him to Meaux, and were authorized by BriQonnet to preach in his diocese. Margaret of Valois, sister of King Francis I. (then Duchess of Alengon, afterwards Queen of Navarre), patronized the reformers and also the freethinkers. But Farel was too radical for the mild bishop, and forbidden to preach, April 12, 1523. He went to Gap and made some converts, including four of his brothers ; but the people found his doctrine " very strange," and drove him away. There was no safety for him anywhere in France, which then began seriously to persecute the Protestants.
Farel fled to Basel, and was hospitably received by CEcolampadius. At his suggestion he held a public disputation in Latin on thirteen theses, in which he asserted the perfec-
1 Herminjard (I. 3) begins his Correspondance des Ref. with a letter of Le Fevre to Bri^onnet, Dec. 15, 1512, in wliich he dedicated to him his Commentary on the Epistles of Paul.