ture and criticism.[130] Brilliant attainments in so
many departments were commended yet more to the admiration of beholders
by a modest and unassuming deportment, by morals above reproach, and by
a disinterested nature in which there was no taint of avarice. The
sincerity of his unselfish love of knowledge was said to be attested by
the liberality with which he renounced the entire income of his small
patrimony in favor of his needy relations.[131]

[Sidenote: His pupil, Guillaume Farel.]

Enjoying a reputation for profound and exact learning which had spread
to foreign countries, and admired even by the great humanist Erasmus,
Lefevre had drawn to him a small band of the most promising of the
scholars in attendance upon the university. Prominent among these for
brilliancy and fiery zeal was a student more than thirty years younger
than his teacher, Guillaume Farel, destined to fill an important place
in the annals of the French reformation, and to play a leading role in
the history of Geneva and Neufchatel. Farel was born in 1489, near Gap,
in Dauphiny, and his childhood was spent at the foot of the Alps.
Unlike Lefevre, he belonged to a family of considerable importance in
the provincial nobility. The contrast was still more marked between the
mild and timid professor and the pupil in whose nature courage was so
prominent an element that it often assumed the appearance of imprudent
contempt of danger.

[Sidenote: Devotion of scholar and pupil.]

But, in spite of dissimilarity of character, Lefevre and Farel lived
together in close friendship. Together they frequented the churches, and
united in the pious work, as they regarded it, of decking out with
flowers the pictures of the saints, to whose shrines they made frequent
pilgrimages. Lefevre was scrupulously exact in the performance of his
religious duties, and was especially punctual in attendance on the mass.
In his zeal for the church, he had even undertaken as a meritorious task
to compile the lives of the saints whose names appear on the Roman
calendar, and had actually committed to the press an account of those
whose feast-days fell within the months of January and February.[132] On
the other hand, Farel was so sincere an adherent of the current faith,
that, to employ his own forcible description, he had become "a very
Pantheon, full of intercessors, saviors and gods, of whom his heart
might have passed for a complete register." The papacy had so entrenched