n obscure questions of belief.
"Before God," he writes in his _Defensio_, a work of the year 1562, to
those who wish to hunt him off the face of the earth, "and from the
bottom of my heart, I call you to the spirit of love." "By the bowels
of Christ, I ask and implore you to leave me in peace, to stop
persecuting me. Let me have the liberty of my faith as you have of
yours. At the heart of religion I am one with you. It is in reality
the same religion; only on certain points of interpretation I see
differently from you. But however we differ in opinion, why cannot we
love one another?"

He was, however, never to have the peace for which he pleaded, and he
was never to experience the love and brotherly kindness for which he
longed. Whole sheaves of fiery arrows were shot at him, and in tract
after tract he had to see himself called "monster," "wretch," "dog,"
"pest," "fog-bank," and finally to see himself proclaimed to the world
as a petty thief "who was supporting himself by stealing wood from his
neighbours"! With beautiful dignity Castellio tells the story of how
he fished for public drift-wood on the shores of the Rhine, and how he
kept his family alive by honest toil, when he was living in pitiable
poverty, "to which," he says to Calvin, "everybody knows that thy
attacks had brought me." "I cannot conceive how thou of all persons,
thou who knowest me, can have believed a tale of theft about me, and in
any case have told it to others."[9]

Compelled, as he was, to see the Reformation take what seemed to him
the false course--the course of defending itself by persecution, of
buttressing itself on election, of elevating, through a new
scholasticism, doctrine above life,--he turned more and more, as time
went on, toward interior religion, the cultivation of an inner
sanctuary, the deepening of the mystical roots of his life, and the
perfection of a religion of inner and spiritual life. "I have never
taken holy things lightly," {98} he once wrote, and in the later years
of what proved to be his brief as well as stormy life, he drew nearer
to Christ as the Life of his life, and laboured with deepening passion
to practise and present a religion of veracity, of reality and of
transforming power. "It is certain," he says in his _Contra libellum
Calvini_, "that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and there is
furthermore no doubt about the worth of love--love to God and love to
man. There is no doubt, again, of