Castellio was a schoolmaster; Theodore Beza was head of College and Academy, or school and university, together; and Calvin himself was a professor of theology. The success of the College was great; the success of the Academy was greater. 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, 1555-66-Calvin died in 1564-it is known that Geneva sent 161 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 the themes ennobled the language, the language was never allowed to degrade the themes. And there was no tongue and no people that he influenced more than the French. Calvin made Bossuet and Massillon possible; as a preacher he found his successor in Bourdaloue; and a literary critic who does not love him has expressed a doubt as to whether Pascal could be more eloquent or was so profound. And the ideal then realised in
