But the Catholic spirit of
this work, based on the Vulgate, was distasteful to the evangelicals.
Farel asked Olivetan, an excellent philologist, to make a new version,
which was completed by February 1535. Calvin wrote the preface for it.
It was dedicated to "the poor little church of God." In doctrine it
was thoroughly evangelical, replacing the old "eveques" and "pretres"
by "surveillants" and "anciens," and omitting some of the Apocrypha.

Encouraged by their own growth the Protestants became bolder in their
attacks on the Catholics. The situation verged more and more towards
violence; {197} neither side, not even the weaker, thought of tolerance
for both. On the night of October 17-18 some placards, written by
Anthony de Marcourt, were posted up in Paris, Orleans, Rouen, Tours and
Blois and on the doors of the king's chamber at Amboise. They
excoriated the sacrifice of the mass as a horrible and intolerable
abuse invented by infernal theology and directly counter to the true
Supper of our Lord. The government was alarmed and took strong steps.
Processions were instituted to appease God for the sacrilege. Within a
month two hundred persons were arrested, twenty of whom were sent to
the scaffold and the rest banished after confiscation of their goods.

But the government could not afford to continue an uninterruptedly
rigorous policy. The Protestants found their opportunity in the
exigencies of the foreign situation. In 1535 Francis was forced by the
increasing menace of the Hapsburgs to make alliance not only with the
infidel but with the Schmalkaldic League. He would have had no
scruples in supporting abroad the heresy he suppressed at home, but he
found the German princes would accept his friendship on no terms save
those of tolerance to French Protestants. Accordingly on July 16,
1535, Francis was obliged to publish an edict ordering persecution to
cease and liberating those who were in prison for conscience's sake.

But the respite did not last long. New rigors were undertaken in April
1538. Marot retracted his errors, and Rabelais, while not
fundamentally changing his doctrine, greatly softened, in the second
edition of his _Pantagruel_, [Sidenote: 1542] the abusive ridicule he
had poured on the Sorbonne. But by this time a new era was
inaugurated. The deaths of Erasmus and Lefevre in 1536 gave the _coup
de grace_ to the party of the Christian {198} Renaissance, and the
publication of Calvin's