ions,
that at length the writer may be able to extricate himself from the deep
mire in which he finds no firm foundation to stand upon.[207]

Such was the unhappy state of mind to which many good, but irresolute
men were reduced, who, in view of the persecution certain to follow an
open avowal of their reformatory sentiments, endeavored to persuade
themselves that it was permissible to conceal them under a thin veil of
external conformity to the rites of the Roman church.

[Sidenote: Fortunes of Gerard Roussel.]

Gerard Roussel, the most distinguished representative of this class of
mystics, was appointed by the Queen of Navarre to be her preacher and
confessor, and promoted successively to be Abbot of Clairac and Bishop
of Oleron. Yet he remained, to his death, a sincere friend of the
Reformation. Occasionally, at least, he preached its doctrines with
tolerable distinctness; as, for instance, in the Lenten discourses
delivered by him, in conjunction with Courault and Bertault, before the
French court in the Louvre (1532). In his writings he was still more
outspoken. Some of them might have been written not only by a reformer,
but by a disciple of Calvin, so sharply drawn were the doctrinal
expositions.[208] Meanwhile, in his own diocese he set forth the example
of a faithful pastor. Even so bitter an enemy of Protestantism as
Florimond de Raemond, contrasting Roussel's piety with the worldliness
of the sporting French bishops of the period, is forced to admit that
his pack of hounds was the crowd of poor men and women whom he daily
fed, his horses and attendants a host of children whom he caused to be
instructed in letters.[209]

And yet, Gerard Roussel's half measures, while failing to conciliate the
adherents of the Roman church, alienated from him the sympathies of the
reformers; for they saw in his conduct a weakness little short of entire
apostasy. More modern Roman Catholic writers, for similar reasons, deny
that Roussel was ever at heart a friend of the Reformation.[210] Not so,
however, thought the fanatics of his own time. While the Bishop of
Oleron was one day declaiming, in a church of his diocese, against the
excessive multiplication of feasts, the pulpit in which he stood was
suddenly overturned, and the preacher hurled with violence to the
ground. The catastrophe was the premeditated act of a religious zealot,
who had brought with him into the sacred place an axe concealed under
his cloak. The fall pr