Pantagruel living in
affectionate and respectful intimacy with his father Gargantua, who, as
he sees him off on his travels, gives him these last words of advice:
Science without conscience is nought but ruin to the soul; it behooves
thee to serve, love, and fear God. Have thou in suspicion the abuses of
the world; set not thine heart on vanity, for this life is transitory,
but the word of God abideth forever. Reverence thy teachers; flee the
company of those whom thou wouldest not resemble. . . . And when thou
feelest sure that thou hast acquired all that is to be learned yonder,
return to me that I may see thee and give thee my blessing ere I die.'"

After what was said above about the personal habits and the works of
Rabelais, these are certainly not the ideas, sentiments, and language one
would expect to find at the end and as the conclusion of his life and his
book. And it is precisely on account of this contrast that more space
has been accorded in this history to the man and his book than would in
the natural course of things have been due to them. At bottom and,
beyond their mere appearances the life and the book of Rabelais are a
true and vivid reflection of the moral and social ferment characteristic
of his time. A time of innovation and of obstruction, of corruption and
of regeneration, of decay and of renaissance, all at once. A deeply
serious crisis in a strong and complicated social system, which had been
hitherto exposed to the buffets and the risks of brute force, but was
intellectually full of life and aspiration, was in travail of a double
yearning for reforming itself and setting itself in order, and did
indeed, in the sixteenth century, attempt at one and the same time a
religious and a political reformation, the object whereof, missed as it
was at that period, is still at the bottom of all true Frenchmen's trials
and struggles. This great movement of the sixteenth century we are now
about to approach, and will attempt to fix its character with precision
and mark the imprint of its earliest steps.

CHAPTER XXX.----FRANCIS I. AND THE REFORMATION.

Nearly half a century before the Reformation made any noise in France it
had burst out with great force and had established its footing in
Germany, Switzerland, and England. John Huss and Jerome of Prague, both
born in Bohemia, one in 1373 and the other in 1378, had been condemned as
heretics and burned at Constance, one in 1415 and the o