much trouble in having his Latin commentary printed;
he was in need of funds, and the revenues of his benefice of Pont
l'Eveque were insufficient to defray the expense of printing. How could
he apply to the Mommor family? Moreover, he was in dread that his book
should prove a failure and thereby injure his budding reputation. All
these alarms of a maiden author are set forth in various letters which
he addressed on this subject to the dear friends of his bosom.

"Behold my books of Seneca concerning clemency, printed at my own
expense and labor! They must now be sold, in order that I may again
obtain the money which I have expended. I must also watch that my
reputation does not suffer. You will oblige me, then, by informing me
how the work has been received, whether with favor or indifference." The
whole anxiety of the poor author is to lose nothing by the enterprise;
his purse is empty; it needs replenishing; and he urges the professors
to give circulation to the treatise; he solicits one of his friends at
Bourges, a member of the university, to bring it forward in his
lectures; and appeals to the aid of Daniel, to whom he sent a hundred
copies. Papire Masson was mistaken: the commentary on clemency did not
first appear, as he supposes, under the title of _Lucius Calvinus, civis
Romanus_, but under that of _Calvinus_, a name ever after retained by
the reformer.

This treatise introduced Calvin to the notice of the learned world:
Bucer, Capito, Padius, sent congratulations to the writer; Calvin, in
September, 1532, had sent a copy of his work to Bucer, who was then at
Strasburg. The person commissioned to present it was a poor young man,
suspected of Anabaptism, and a refugee from France. Calvin's letter of
recommendation is replete with tender compassion for the miseries of the
sinner. "My dear Bucer," he writes, "you will not be deaf to my
entreaties, you will not disregard my tears; I implore you, to come to
the aid of the proscribed, be a father to the orphan."

This was sending the sick man to a sad physician. Bucer, by turns
Catholic, Lutheran, Anabaptist, Zwinglian! Besides, why this proselytism
of a moral _cure_? The exile was Anabaptist by the same title as Calvin
was predestinarian, in virtue of a text of Scripture: "Go; whoever shall
believe and be baptized will be saved." The Anabaptist believed in the
inefficacy of baptism without faith manifested by an external act; but
is not Calvin, at this very hour,