y of it repeats Luther's exposition of the beatitudes and
his distinction between law and gospel, with the involved doctrines of
grace and faith. Yet "_Ave gratia plena_" is retained in the exordium;
and at the end the peace-makers are praised, who follow the example of
Christ and contend not with the sword, but with the word of truth.

This address enables us to seize Calvin in the very act and article of
change; he has come under a double influence. Erasmus has compelled him
to compare the ideal of Christ with the church of his own day; and
Luther has given him a notion of grace which has convinced his reason
and taken possession of his imagination. He has thus ceased to be a
humanist and a papist, but has not yet become a reformer. And a reformer
was precisely what his conscience, his country, and his reason compelled
him to become. Francis was flagrantly immoral, but a fanatic in
religion; and mercy was not a virtue congenial to either church or
state. Calvin had seen the Protestants from within; he knew their
honesty, their honor, the purity of their motives, and the integrity of
their lives; and he judged, as a jurist would, that a man who had all
the virtues of citizenship ought not to be oppressed and treated as
unfit for civil office or even as a criminal by the state. This is no
conjecture, for it is confirmed by the testimony he bears to the
influence exercised over him by the martyred Etienne de la Forge. He
thus saw that a changed mind meant a changed religion, and a changed
religion a change of abode. Cop had to flee from Paris, and so had
Calvin.

In the May of 1534 he went to Noyon, laid down his offices, was
imprisoned, liberated, and while there he seems to have finally
renounced Catholicism. But he feared the forces of disorder which lurked
in Protestantism, and which seemed embodied in the Anabaptists. Hence at
Orleans he composed a treatise against one of their favorite beliefs,
the sleep of the soul between death and judgment. Conscious personal
being was in itself too precious, and in the sight of God too sacred, to
be allowed to suffer even a temporary lapse. But to serve the cause he
loved was impossible with the stake waiting for him, its fires scorching
his face, and kindly friends endangered by his presence. And so, in the
winter of 1534, he retired from France and settled at Basel.

Now a city where Protestantism reigned, where learning flourished, and
where men so unlike as Erasmus and Fa