course of his
studies he found himself compelled to take the position that the "Song
of Solomon" was an ancient love poem, and that the traditional
interpretation of it as a revelation of the true relation between
Christ and the Church was a strained and unnatural interpretation. He
also felt that as a scholar he could not with intellectual honesty
agree with the statement in the Catechism that "Christ descended into
Hell." Calvin challenged both these positions of Castellio, but his
opposition to him was clearly far deeper than a difference of opinion
on these two points. Calvin instinctively felt that the bold and
independent spirit of this young scholar, his qualities of leadership,
and his literary genius marked him out as a man who could not long be
an easy-minded and supple subordinate. A letter which Calvin wrote at
this time to his friend Viret shows where the real tension lay.
"Castellio has got it into his head," he writes, "that I want to rule!"
The great Reformer may not have been conscious yet of such a purpose,
but there can be no question that Castellio read the signs correctly,
and he was to be the first, as Buisson has said, to discover that "to
resist Calvin was in the mind of the latter, to resist the Holy
Ghost."[4] Calvin successfully opposed his ordination, and made it
impossible for him to continue in Geneva his work as an honest scholar.
To remain meant that he must surrender his right of independent
judgment, he must cease to follow the line of emancipated scholarship,
he must adjust his conscience to fit the ideas that were coming to be
counted orthodox in the circle of the Reformed faith. _That_ surrender
he could no more make than Luther could surrender to the demands of his
opponents at Worms. He quietly closed up his work in the College of
Geneva and went into voluntary exile, to seek a sphere of life where he
might think and speak as {92} he saw the truth and where he could keep
his conscience a pure virgin.

He settled in Basle, where Erasmus had found a refuge, and where, two
years before, the exiled and hunted Sebastian Franck, the spiritual
forerunner of Castellio, had died in peace. For ten years (1545-1555)
he lived with his large family in pitiable poverty. He read proof for
the Humanist printer Oporin, he fished with a boat-hook for drift-wood
along the shores of the Rhine,--"rude labour no doubt," he says, "but
honest, and I do not blush for having done it,"--and he did