st-day, after Roussel had preached. These "combers, carders, and
other persons of the same stamp, unlettered folk,"[173] brought with
them books containing the Epistles of St. Paul, the Gospels, and the
Psalms, in flagrant disregard of the prohibitions they had heard
respecting the discussion of such topics as faith, the sacraments, the
privileges of Rome, and the use of pictures in the churches. It was made
the occasion of "charitable rebuke" and then of formal complaint against
Roussel by his fellow canons, that he failed to repeat the angelic
salutation, according to the orthodox practice, after the exordium of
his sermon. To the combined exhortations and threats of his accusers
Roussel replied in the chapter that, if he had done wrong, it belonged
to the bishop to reprove him, but that as to himself he esteemed the
repetition of the Lord's Prayer quite as efficacious as the recital of
the Ave Maria.[174]

[Sidenote: Lefevre and Roussel take refuge in Strasbourg.]

[Sidenote: Excessive caution of Roussel.]

At last danger thickened, and Lefevre and Roussel found themselves
forced to leave Meaux (October, 1525), and sought refuge within the
hospitable walls of Strasbourg; for the persecuting measures adopted by
the regent, Louise de Savoie, and the Parliament of Paris, during the
king's captivity, as we shall shortly see, had placed the lives of even
such prudent reformers in peril.[175] In the free city on the banks of
the Rhine, Lefevre met his pupil Farel, and in the midst of cordial
greetings was reminded by him that the day of "renovation" which he had
long since predicted and desired had really come.[176] But the contrast
between the two men had become sharply drawn. The fearless athlete, soon
to measure his strength with no puny antagonists at Neufchatel,
Lausanne, Geneva, and so many other places in French Switzerland, whose
course was to be a succession of rough encounters, discovered that the
master from whom he had received the impulse that shaped his entire
life, shrank from sundering the last link binding him to the Roman
church. And Gerard Roussel was even more timid. The elegant preacher,
with fair prospects of preferment, could not bring himself openly to
espouse the quarrel of oppressed truth. A mysticism investing his entire
belief, and perverting his moral perceptions, led him to imagine that
the heart might be kept pure in the midst of many external corruptions,
and that the enlightened could wor