ter. Men came
from all quarters--English, Italians, Spanish, Germans, Russians,
ministers, jurists, old men, young men, all with the passion to learn in
their blood--to jostle each other among the thousand hearers who met to
listen to the great reformer. But France was the main feeder of the
academy; Frenchmen filled its chairs, occupied its benches, learned in
it the courage to live and the will to die. From Geneva books poured
into France; and the French church was ever appealing for ministers, yet
never appealed in vain.

Within eleven years, 1555-1566--Calvin died in 1564--it is known that
Geneva sent one hundred sixty-one pastors into France; how many more may
have gone unrecorded we cannot tell. And they were learned men,
strenuous, fearless, praised by a French bishop as modest, grave,
saintly, with the name of Jesus Christ ever on their lips. Charles IX
implored the magistrates of Geneva to stop the supply and withdraw the
men already sent; but the magistrates replied that the preachers had
been sent not by them, but by their ministers, who believed that the
sovereign duty of all princes and kings was to do homage to Him who had
given to them their dominion. It was small wonder that the Venetian
Suriano should describe Geneva as "the mine whence came the ore of
heresy"; or that the Protestants should gather courage as they heard the
men from Geneva sing psalms in the face of torture and death.

It was indeed a very different France which the eyes of the dying Calvin
saw from that which the young man had seen thirty years before.
Religious hate was even more bitter and vindictive; war had come and
made persecution more ferocious; but the Huguenots had grown numerous,
potent, respected, feared, and disputed with Catholicism the supremacy
of the kingdom. And Calvin had done it, not by arms nor by threats, nor
by encouragement of sedition or insurrection--to such action he was ever
resolutely opposed--but by the agency of the men whom he formed in
Geneva, and by their persuasive speech. The reformed minister was
essentially a preacher, intellectual, exegetical, argumentative,
seriously concerned with the subjects that most appealed to the
serious-minded.

Modern oratory may be said to begin with him, and indeed to be his
creation. He helped to make the vernacular tongues of Western Europe
literary. He accustomed the people to hear the gravest and most sacred
themes discussed in the language which they knew; and t