l for the complete liberation of mind and
conscience. Ten years before the awful deeds of St. Bartholomew's Day,
he issued his little French book with the title _Conseil a la France
desolee_--Counsel {102} to France in her Distress. It is a calm and
penetrating diagnosis of the evils which are destroying the life of
France and working her desolation. It throbs with noble patriotism and
is full of real prophetic insight, though he spoke to deaf ears and
wrote for blind eyes. The woes of France--her torn and distracted
condition--are mainly due to the blind and foolish method of attempting
to force intelligent men to accept a form of religion which in their
hearts they do not believe is true. There can be no united people,
strong and happy, until the blunder of compelling conscience entirely
ceases. He pleads in tenderness and love with both religious parties,
Catholics and Evangelicals, to leave the outgrown legalism of Moses and
go to the Gospels for a religion which leads into truth and freedom.
"O France, France," he cries--as formerly a greater One had said, "O
Jerusalem, Jerusalem"--"my counsel is that thou cease to compel men's
consciences, that thou cease to kill and to persecute, that thou grant
to men who believe in Jesus Christ the privilege of serving God
according to their own innermost faith and not according to some one
else's faith. And you, that are private people, do not be so ready to
follow those who lead you astray and push you to take up arms and kill
your brothers. And Thou, O Lord our Saviour, wilt Thou give to us all
grace to awake and come to our senses before it is forever too late.
I, at least, have now done my duty and spoken my word of truth." St.
Bartholomew's Day was the answer to this searching appeal, and the
land, deaf to the call of its prophet, was to become more "desolate"
still.

Just as the storm of persecution that had been gathering around him for
years was about to burst pitilessly upon him in 1563, he quietly died,
worn out in body, and "passed to where beyond these voices there is
peace." His students in the University of Basle, where, in spite of
the opposition from Geneva, he had been Professor of Greek for ten
years, bore his coffin in honour on their shoulders to his grave, and
his little band of disciples devoted themselves to spreading, in
Holland and wherever {103} they could find soil for it, the precious
seed of his truth, which had in later years a very wide