after finding a temporary shelter in England, apparently at
Salisbury, under the protection of Bishop Shaxton, who was then a
favourer of the reformed opinions, were, like Alesius himself, to find
their ultimate home and special work on the Continent--the one in the
University of Copenhagen, the other in the University of Frankfort on
the Oder. They seem to have gone first to Wittenberg, and while the
others for a time resumed their studies there, Alesius almost
immediately on his return was selected by Melanchthon to accompany him
to the colloquy at Worms, and then to that at Regensburg, which were
attended not only by the Lutheran and the Catholic theologians, but also
by Bucer, Calvin, and other reforming divines of Strassburg. So it came
about that Alesius, who had suffered exile in the cause of the
Reformation in Scotland, and still had striven to promote it, was
probably the first of our countrymen to be brought into contact with
Calvin, who was ultimately to exercise so marked an influence on the
form and mode of that Reformation, and who too was then an exile both
from his native land and from the scene of his earlier labours. To the
last Alesius seems to have been the one of his pupils to whom the gentle
and timid Melanchthon most closely clung, and it was by his
recommendation that in the very year of his return to the Continent he
was promoted to be Professor of Divinity in the University of Frankfort
on the Oder. And it is something of which a Scotchman and a St Andrean
may be proud, that the university of that little principality of
Brandenburg, which has since expanded into the great kingdom of Prussia,
was indebted for two of its first Protestant professors of divinity to
Scotland and to St Andrews.

[Sidenote: Leaves Frankfort for Leipsic.]

His stay at Frankfort, however, was but short, a controversy having
arisen between him and one of his colleagues about the propriety of
attaching civil punishments to adultery and other offences against the
seventh commandment. In 1542, or early in 1543, he resigned his
professorship, and transferred his family to Leipsic. Melanchthon, who,
though concurring in his opinions, blamed his hasty resignation, yet
exerted himself to procure an appointment for him in the great Saxon
university; so also did Ludovicus Fachsius, at once the Burgomaster and
the head of the Faculty of Law, of whose kindness he makes special
mention in the dedication to his sons of his edition o