§ 69. CALVIN'S YOUTH AND TRAINING. 301
by councils, were among the crying abuses of the Church. Charles de Hangest, bishop of Noyon, obtained at fifteen years of age a dispensation from the pope " to hold all kinds of offices, compatible and incompatible, secular and regular, etiam tria curata^'' ; and his nephew and successor, Jean de Hangest, was elected bishop at nineteen years of age. Odet de Chatillon, brother of the famous Colign}^, was created cardinal in his sixteenth year. Pope Leo X. received the tonsure as a boy of seven, was made archbishojD in his eighth, and cardinal-deacon in his thirteenth year (with the reservation that he should not put on the insignia of his dignity nor discharge the duties of his office till he was sixteen), besides being canon in three cathedrals, rector in six parishes, prior in three convents, abbot in thirteen additional abbeys, and bishop of Amalfi, deriving revenues from them all !
Calvin resigned the chaplaincy in favor of his younger brother, April 30, 1529. He exchanged the charge of S. Martin for that of the village Pont-l'Ev^que (the birthplace of his father), July 5, 1529, but he resigned it, May 4, 1534, before he left France. In the latter parish he preached sometimes, but never administered the sacraments, not being ordained to the priesthood.^
The income from the chaplaincy enabled him to prosecute his studies at Paris, together with his noble companions. He entered the College de la Marche in August, 1523, in his fourteenth year.^ He studied grammar and rhetoric with
1 Beza says : " Quo loco [Pons Episcopi] constat Calvlnum, antequam Gallia excederet, nullis alioqui pontijiciis ordinibus (unquam) initiatum, aliquot ad populum condones habuisse." Op. XXI. 121. " Unquam" is omitted in the text, but added in the notes. The French biography of Colladon reads : " En laquelle cure il a depuis prescM par fois, avans qu'il se retirast de France." Ibid. 54.
2 This is the date given by Kampschulte (I. 223), Lefranc (p. 14), and others. According to Opera, XXI. 189, Calvin was " Corderii discipulus in Collegia de la Marche Lutetice" in the year 1529 ; but in that year he was a student of the university. There is some confusion in the dates referring to the period of his studies in Paris.
302 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
au experienced and famous teacher, Marthurin Cordier (Cordatus). He learned from him to think and to write Latin, and dedicated to him in grateful memory his Commentary on the First Epistle to the Thessalonians (1550). Cordier became afterwards a Protestant and director of the College of Geneva, where he died at the age of eighty-five in the same year with Calvin (1564) .^
From the College de la Marche Calvin was transferred to the strictly ecclesiastical College de Montague, in which philosophy and theology were taught under the direction of a learned Spaniard. In February, 1528, Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the order of the Jesuits, entered the same college and studied under the same teacher. The leaders of the two opposite currents in the religious movement of the sixteenth century came very near living under the same roof and sitting at the same table.
Calvin showed during this early period alread}^ the prominent traits of his character: he was conscientious, studious, silent, retired, animated by a strict sense of duty, and exceedingly religious.^ An uncertain tradition says that his fellowstudents called him "the Accusative," on account of his censoriousness.^
NOTES. SLANDEROUS REPORTS ON CALVIN'S YOUTH.
Thirteen years after Calvin's death, Bolsec, his bitter enemy, once a Romanist, then a Protestant, then a Romanist again, wrote a calumnious
^ Cordier was called " lingme, morum vitceque magister." He was the RoUin of the sixteenth century. He wrote Kudimenta grammaticcB ; le miroir de la jeunesse ; commetitaritts puerorum, etc. See Lefranc, p. 62, and "Bulletin de la Soc. de I'liist. du Protest. fran9ais," XVII. 449.
2 Beza-CoUadon (XXI. 54) : " Quant ii scs moews, il estoit sur tout fort consciencieu.r, enneini des vices, et fort adonne au seriHce de Dieu qu'on appeloit pour lors : tellement que son caiur tendoit enlierevient a la Theologie, et son pere pretendoit de I'l/ /aire employer." In the Latin Vita, Beza says that he was " tenera cetate mirum in modum religiosus." With this agrees the testimony of the Roman Catholic, Florimond de Raemond, previously quoted, p. 273.
3 Le Vasseur, p. 1158. Beza gives some probability to this report by the notice that Calvin was "severus omnium in suis sodalibus censor."