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SOMETIME in the tenth century, when the Papacy was at its lowest point of deg radation, when Christendom was only just recovering from the shock of the Magyar invasion, and when the light of learning had dwindled to a spark, there lived at Ravenna a certain scholar, named Vitgard. He was, we are told, one of those Italians who cultivated the art of grammar with more zeal than discretion. Accordingly, he became a person very open to the temptations of the Devil, who sent him one night three emissaries, in the shapes of Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal. They assured the astonished scholar that he was destined to be the herald of their immortal glory; they persuaded him that his name should be associated with their own; they admonished him to proclaim to the world that it had been blinded and deceived, that Christianity was a cheat and a snare, and that the only true gods were themselves. Deceived by their assurances, the unhappy Vitgard began, at first secretly, to teach these pernicious doctrines, and drew a small circle of disciples around him. Then he taught the same thing openly, and, the heresy beginning to attract attention, he was arrested by the authorities, and punished in the usual fashion, that is, he was burned. On further investigation, it was found that there were many others, " especially in Sardinia," who held and taught similar doctrines.

look back on the brief record of the un

lucky Ravenna scholar, and are touched with pity. We can picture him, earnest and studious, drinking in the philosophy of Horace, the virtuous wrath of Juvenal, and the music of Virgil, not yet the enchanter. The things he reads are wiser than those taught in the schools or in

the churches. And see - he knows nothing about dates - there is not a word of Christ from beginning to end; not one word of the Apostles, nor of the Pope, nor of the Church. Bewildered and agitated, he thinks there can be but one solution. The divine teachers of the

world, they are these three; to them we
must look for guidance; they alone can

teach mankind to live and die. Present-
ly the possession of this grand secret be-
comes too much for him; he reveals it,
bit by bit, to clerks and students; final-
ly, he preaches it in the streets. Then
authority interposes such authority as
remains in anarchic Italy -- and con-
sumes him, with his heresy, in the flames.
The centuries roll on; strange here-
sies rise and are crushed-
this of Ravenna- until we find ourselves
in the full Renaissance. It is on the eve

none like

of the greatest struggle the world has ever seen, between the old, strong in veneration, union, fear, and custom, and the new, weak, torn by internal dissension, and strong only in being a step nearer to the truth. And now history repeats herself, and the obscure old heresy rises from the dead.

In the first thirty years of the sixteenth century the world is slowly resolvReading this queer old story by the ing itself into two camps. No bugle light of common sense, we can very well note has yet sounded to summon the solunderstand how, when the Bible was an diers to their colours, nor do they even unknown book, some stray scholar, get- suspect the approach of the inevitable ing hold of the Latin authors, and finding battle. In France, with which we have the wisdom that was there but nowhere to do, the people are reading the Scripelse might set up their authority above tures in the vernacular, in spite of priestthat of the religion he professed. We ly prohibition; scholars are bringing to Stras- bear upon the Church the artillery of the new learning; Erasmus has his Encomium Moriæ; Ulrich von Hutten has his Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum; Louis de Berquin boldly picks out passages from the works of the zealous Beda himself, most orthodox of the Sorbonne, and

(1) Gerard Roussel. Par C. SCHMIDT. bourg: 1865.

(2) Brantôme, Vies des Dames Illustres. (3) Etienne Dolet, Les Œuvres de.

(4) Michelet, La Renaissance.

(5) Bonaventure des Périers, Les Euvres de. (6) Rabelais, Œuvres de.

(7) Clement Marot, Life of, by PROFESSOR HENRY MORLEY.

:

in twelve propositions accuses him of heresy, whereat the world of Paris shrieks and the Reformation is begun. Things look fairer in France than in Germany; we are to have reforms in doctrine, with perfect freedom of inquiry and discussion, and we are to abolish all monks. A fair beginning, a goodly show of blossom: where, after fifty years, was the fruit?

The story of the failure of all this glorious promise is too wide a subject to occupy us here. But apart from the main streams of political influences, Court intrigues, national profligacy, priestly craft, there are certain undercurrents in the history of the time, which, certainly not less than the forces known and visible to all, contributed from the very first to render the cause of the French Reformation a hopeless one. For the day of St. Bartholomew, we maintain, did not kill French Protestantism. Massacres cannot crush a creed, so long as it has any vital power, unless, which is next to impossible, they are thorough and complete. That these malign influences were a kind of subtle poison that attacked the cause at the very beginning, we intend to show by the consideration of two or three men of the time, little known.

Remark first that very early in the century, when Caivin and Farel the fiery first lifted up their voices, they were not alone. Side by side with them, роμúxо, stood others scholars, prelates, great and learned men. After ten years look again. These men have left them. Some are in the enemy's camp, silent, ashamed, cowed; some are on neutral ground, scoffing, sneering, laughing.

ness, reading the Bible, and praying that truth may prevail. Round her gather the best men of the day — not, unfortunately the strongest - but those who are tinged with some of her Christlike love for others, men of sweet and holy thoughts. While her fate is dark and gloomy, while she is sacrificed first to one husband and then to another, while her brother — the idol of her life-breaks her heart but still exacts more sacrifice, while her little boy - her darling is taken from her, she becomes more and more zealous in her schemes for a better faith, and daily more absorbed in that mystic rapture of religion which makes her at times almost transformed.

Read, first, these lines of hers, of which
we give a translation
Christian dost thou wish to be?

Like thy Master's shape thy days;
Worldly wealth renounce, and flee

Vain ambition's crooked ways.
Leave thy mistress fair and sweet;
Joys forego that once were dear;
Honours tread beneath thy feet,
Art thou strong, the cross to bear?
Conquer death; for with his dart
He is kind and fair to see;
Love him with as good a heart

As thy life is dear to thee.
Find in sadness all thy mirth;

Find thy gain in every loss;
Love the grave above the earth, —

Canst thou

canst thou - bear the cross?

Read, too, her" Miroir de l'Ame Pécheresse," that work of pure and exalted devotion, and remember the fact that in the Heptameron the Lady Oisille spends part of each day in reading the Bible, The former are the men of Queen Mar- while every story in the collection is garet's Court- the personal friends of made somehow to point to the same that woman whose character, so sweet moral, and inculcate the same teaching. and lovely, stands out in such strong re- She was a Protestant in the sense that lief amid the blackness of her surround- she held what we call distinctively Protings. In a selfish - an abnormally self- estant opinions; but she remained all ish time — her whole life is spent in sacri- her life in the Church, and neither wished fice for others. In an impure time, she to leave it herself, nor to see her friends alone, the daughter of a vile woman, the leave it. For her whole heart lay in the sister of a profligate man, is pure. Amid design of a great Gallican Church like all the babble of tongues and confusion that of England, of which her brother, of disputants, she sits, with her calm, in whom she never quite lost faith, should beautiful face weighed down with sad-be the supreme head. It was to be a

den there, only for the pure of heart to discover by the aid of faith and prayer. He poured out his soul in contemplations and mystical treatises. He held that nothing was to be enforced which could not be found in the Bible; he urged the necessity of personal holiness and purity; but he rejected nothing in the Roman Church, wherein he had been brought up. He would not leave the Church of his childhood, though she would have burned him improba mater - had she been

church where pure doctrine was to be taught, but all in due form and order. The people were to be educated, but not to dispute on points of faith. Their duty was to live "the life," and read the Bible. There were to be no monks, no friars, no vicarious piety, no pilgrimages, no belief in masses, saints, nor any of the accumulated rubbish of the Roman Church. Had her circle of friends been men of coarser grain-of more courageous heart she would have had her wish. But about all of them there was able. And a Catholic he died, after a life something feminine. They caught her tone, but they did not impart their own. They wished and hoped when they should have acted; prayed when it was time to fight; conceded when the time for concession had passed away.

of more than ninety years.

Another of Margaret's friends was Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, one of the most zealous of Lefevre's disciples. He was the first who dared to use his own cathedral church for the promulgation of Foremost among them was Jacques the new doctrines. Meaux, about twenLefevre d'Etaples, the eldest and per- ty-five miles from Paris, was then a flourhaps the best of the French Reformers. ishing manufacturing town; and the He was already fifty years of age when quiet weavers, disposed to think and disthe bells rang in the newly-born six- cuss, like all persons whose sedentary teenth century. He learned Greek in occupation gives them opportunity for Italy, such Greek as one could then thought, eagerly embraced a teaching learn. His long life, protracted far be- which gave the individual man a dignity yond the allotted threescore years and and importance previously unknown to ten, was spent in labours almost Hercu- him. The Bishop got Farel, Roussel, lean. Among his works are commen- and the aged Lefevre himself, to preach taries and editions of Aristotle, in whose in his church-the same which years society he passed his first half century; afterwards echoed back the silvery tones books on arithmetic; geometry, including an edition of Euclid; and, during the last forty years of his life, a mass of theological works, the mere contemplation of whose titles makes the ordinary brain stagger and reel. But among all his labours now forgotten, though they bore good fruit in their day, and were the hon-weavers went unshaken to the flames. est work of a great man, there is one for Henceforth he took care to make no which France owes him an everlasting noise, being a watched and marked man. debt of gratitude; for he it was who first Only he continued his correspondence presented his country with a complete with Margaret, finding in mysticism some translation of the Bible, "La Sainte Bible consolation for the reproaches of his en Françoys, traduite selon la pure et conscience. A good and holy man, but entière traduction de S. Hiérome." It too soft for the work which he tried to came thirty years after the first German undertake. translation, and, though full of faults, is yet a wonderful work for one man unaided to accomplish. Lefevre was of a retiring meditative disposition. He loved to search in the Scriptures for that secret meaning which, he taught, lies hid

of Bossuet. "See to yourselves!" cried Briçonnet from his pulpit, strong in the resolution of enthusiasm and hope, “see to yourselves! and if I change my doctrines, look that you stand firm." Alas! when persecution came, it was the Bishop that bent before the storm, while his poor

But by far the sweetest character among Margaret's friends is that of Gerard Roussel, whom she made Bishop of Oleron when she married Henry of Navarre. He is the ideal reformer, according to Margaret. Pure and blame