s, who repented, made his abjuration, and was shortly after
elected archdeacon, a dignity disputed with him by Renaudie, who was to
be used by the Reformation for the execution of the plot of Amboise.

The _Psychopannychia_, the first controversial work of Calvin, is a
pamphlet directed against the sect of Anabaptists, whom the bloody day
of Frankenhausen had conquered, but not subdued. The spirit of Munzer
lived again in his disciples, who were parading their mystic reveries
through Holland, Flanders, and France. Luther had essayed his powers
against Munzer, imagining that by his fiery language, his Pindaric
wrath, his flames and thunders, he would soon overwhelm the chief of the
miners, as he had defeated, it is said, those theological dwarfs who
were unable to stand before him. From the summit of the mountain he had
appeared to Munzer in the midst of lightnings, but those lightnings did
not alarm his adversary, who was bold enough to face him with unquailing
eye.

Munzer also possessed a fiery tongue, which he used with admirable
skill, to inflame and arouse the peasants; this time victory remained
with the man of the sledge-hammer. And Luther, who wished to terminate
the affair at any cost, was reduced, as is well known, to avail himself
of the sword of one of his electors. The wrecks which escaped from the
funeral obsequies of Thuringia took refuge in a new land. France
received and listened to the prophets of Anabaptism.

These Anabaptists maintained seducing doctrines. They dreamed of a sort
of Jerusalem, very different from the Jewish Jerusalem; a Jerusalem
quite spiritual, without swords, soldiers, or civil magistracy: the true
city of the elect. Their speech was infected with Pelagianism and
Arianism; on several points of dogma they agreed with Catholics--on
predestination, for example, and on the merit of works. Some of them
taught the sleep of the soul till the day of judgment. It was against
these "sleepers" that Calvin determined to measure himself.

The _Commentary on Seneca_ is a philological work, a book of the
revival, a rhetorical declamation, in which Calvin is evidently aspiring
to a place among the humanists, and making his court, in sufficiently
fine Latin, to all the Ciceronians of the age: this was bringing himself
forward with skill and tact. The Latin language was the idiom of the
Church, of the convents, colleges, universities, and parliaments. The
_Psychopannychia_ is a religious pamphlet