We name only another of these living springs. It bursts out on the northern coast of France, not far from that sea which divides England from the Continent. It comes later than the others; and when first seen, it is the least considerable of them all. And yet from what fountain have come so copious floods to form the river of the water of life as from that which burst out in the home of CALVIN !

We now turn to France. France, at the opening of the sixteenth century, was the most important country in Europe. It might not unworthily aspire to lead in a great movement of the nations. Placed in the midst of the civilized world, and touching its countries at a great variety of points, whatever movement should here have birth would, one would have thought, be rapidly propagated, as from a centre, all over Christendom. Let a beacon be kindled in France, and far and wide its light will be flashed over England and Germany on the one side; over Switzerland, Italy, and Spain on the other.

The genius of the people of France helped, too, to give a paramount influence to their country. That genius has a singular beauty, and a marvellous adaptability. There is no branch of literature in which it does not qualify them to excel. They have shone with equal brilliancy in the lighter walks of history, of poetry, of the drama, and in the abstruser departments of mathematics and metaphysics. For a brief period, their literary heavens were ablaze with stars. Their roll of illustrious scholars is a long one; alas! that it should have been so suddenly and tragically closed. The genius of France was stifled; but, as shown before disaster overtook it, how lively, penetrating, beautiful! What a ver

Such was the country into which the Reformation now entered. Whatever cause the French people embrace, they embrace with enthusiasm ; and whatever cause they oppose, they oppose with an equal enthusiasm. We should thus expect that the Reformation would find in France de voted friends, and as devoted enemies. And so, in truth, it did. And this it is which has given a tragic grandeur to its history in France. The splendour of heroic suffering here alternates and contrasts with the darkness of gigantic crime.

In all the countries of Europe the Reformation had to encounter a furious bigotry. After so long a dominancy, Superstition could ill brook to abdicate at the summons of the new times. But in France, in addition to a furious bigotry, the Reformation was opposed by two opponents scarcely less formidable,-Infidelity and Immorality. The revival of letters which preceded the Reformation, instead of being what they were in many countries, an aid to the gospel, were in France an obstacle to it. Along with pagan letters came pagan pleasures, which, flowing from the throne-noted even in that age for its licentious gallantry-polluted the nation. Moreover, the inarriage alliance between the royal house and the family of the Medicis came in a little while still further to lower the national morals, by innoculating the royal family of France with Italian lewdness, Italian craft, and with that thirst for blood which, ever since ancient times, has been a characteristic of the Italian race. In this country, then, the Reformation found itself face to face with three great enemies,-Superstition, Infidelity, and Immorality. The gospel offended the first by its truth, and the last two by its purity and holiness.

"These violent enemies," we find D'Aubigné saying, "which the Reformation encountered simultaneously in France, gave it a character altogether peculiar. Nowhere did it so often

Christianity in faith, in charity, and in the number of its martyrs. If, in the countries of which we have hitherto spoken, the Reformation was more glorious by its triumphs, in France it was still more so by its defeats. If elsewhere it could point to thrones and sovereign councils, here it might point to scaffolds and 'hill-side' meetings. Whoever knows what constitutes the true glory of Christianity upon earth, and the features that assimilate it to its Head, will study with a livelier feeling of respect and love the often blood-stained history of the Reformation in France."

The curtain is rising. A great drama is about to begin. Let us introduce ourselves to a few of those who were destined to act a distinguished part in the scenes we now proceed to relate.

It is the year 1489. Luther was just six years old. Calvin was not yet born; and it was some fifteen years till our own Knox should see the light. In this year one of those bloody tempests, which were but too frequent in that age, was sweeping along the foot of the Alps. The Albigenses, the Reformers of their day, inhabited the provinces of Provence and Languedoc, and wherever they dwelt their husbandry made the fields smile like a garden, while the towns were enriched with the benefits of their commerce. Spreading beyond the plains, their colonies filled the valleys of the Alps, and almost touched those yet more famous settlements of the Waldenses, which, on the Italian side of the great mountains, had preserved for so many ages the deposit of divine truth. The many valuable qualities of the Albigenses could not atone for their heresy, and so a mingled tempest of papal anathemas and French soldiery was now sweeping over their dwellings, leaving as its memorials blackened ruins, and fields covered with the corpses of their slaughtered cultivators. Providence often prepares the good at the very moment that man is sending the evil. It was in this year that FAREL was born.

Grenoble to the ancient town of Gap stood the mansion-house of the Farels. Its site is still shown on a terrace on the hill-side about a stone's

throw from the high-road. Here the future Reformer was born. What grandeurs disclosed themselves to the eye of the child as he played beneath the trees that shaded his father's mansion! Immediately behind that mansion a sharp auguille shot up into the sky, and all round were seen the great mountains hanging their snows over dark gorges, where infant rivers have their birth. These sublimities, constantly before the eyes of the young Farel, tended doubtless to expand his soul, and fill it with images of grandeur.

Alas! what debasement is often found lurking in the midst of these physical glories. The soul may be inhabiting a prison while the body is moving about in the most glorious palaces of Nature's rearing. Within the mansion-house of the Farels all was darkness. "My parents," Farel himself tells us, "believed all that the priests told them." And William believed all that his parents told him in turn; and so he grew up, till he was about the age of twenty, with the yoke of the Pope upon his soul and the deep. shadow of Popery around his intellect.

An episode occurred in the youth of Farel, which we must relate. It gives us a glimpse into the religion of those times. When eight years of age, he was taken on pilgrimage to a place of great reputed sanctity, four leagues higher in the Alps, termed the "Holy Cross." Having reached the spot, the pilgrims fell prostrate before the cross, fashioned, it was said, of the very wood on which Christ was crucified. Upon the cross was hung a small crucifix, to which the attention of the pilgrims was specially directed. "When," said the priest who kept the shrine, "the devils send us hail and thunder, this crucifix begins to jerk and start violently, as if it would run at the devils, and all the while emits sparks of fire. Were it not for this crucifix, the tempests that gather on these mountains would come down with such fury that nothing would remain on the plains; the dwellings, the vines, the corn-fields, all would be swept away."

was an ordinary electrical phenomenon, but in | that age it passed of course as a prodigy; and a very competent witness was at hand to attest the miracle-a hideous-looking creature, with white scales covering the pupils of his eyes-" the priests' wizard," as the people called him-and who, on being appealed to, affirmed that it was as the priest said; and that but for this crucifix, which interposed its good offices between the demons of the mountains and the plains below, the world itself would perish.

While the pilgrims were yet wondering at the things which had been told them, a young woman came up carrying a child. There could be no doubt as to the motive which led this devotee to visit the "Holy Cross." But so was it everywhere. The more men abounded in external rites, the more were they estranged from holiness of heart. Dead ordinances were put in the room of a living faith, and a revolting union came to be formed between superstition and immorality.

The time was now come (1510) when the young Farel was to bid adieu to the quiet of his homewhere never did morning dawn but the bead-roll had been duly gone over, and never came evening but Ave Maria had been sung-and set out for Paris. He might have chosen the profession of arms it was his father's fond wish that he would; but he aspired to be a scholar. The debasing effects of superstition upon his mind had been counteracted by the natural sublimities amid which he lived, which kept his sympathies awake and his soul ardent. He thirsted to drink at that renowned well of knowledge, the Sorbonne; and accordingly at these gates he now presents himself, and is enrolled as a student in this university, the fame of which then filled Christendom.

All was new and strange around the young scholar from the Dauphinese Alps. Though secluded, he was not unobservant. Soon his attention was attracted by an aged man, small in stature, and simple in manners and appearance, but of ardent piety, whom Farel, when going his own round of the churches, never failed to see prostrate before the images, and devoutly repeating his hours." Unknown as yet to Farel, this old man was to be his most intimate friend, and was destined to open his eyes to the

The

light of the gospel; and not Farel's eyes only, but the realm of France, in which country he was to be what Wycliffe had been to England— "the morning-star of the Reformation." name of this man was Jacques Lefevre, born at Etaples, a village of Picardy, in the middle of the previous century. He had all his days been a devout Papist; and even to this hour, in his old age, the shadow of Popery was around him, and the eclipse of superstition had not wholly passed off from his soul. But the promise was to be fulfilled in the experience of Lefevre, "at evening time it shall be light." He had long had a presentiment that a new day was rising on the world, and that he should not depart till his eyes had seen its light.

His

We must dwell a little upon the man who was the first to emerge from the darkness that covered his native land. Lefevre was in all points a remarkable man. Nature, which had given him an insatiable thirst for knowledge, had endowed him largely with a capacity for acquiring it. There was scarce a field of study open to those ages which he had not entered, and in which he had not attained great proficiency. The ancient languages, the belles lettres, history, mathematics, philosophy, theology, all he had studied. desire to learn tempted him to try what other lands besides France could teach him. He had visited Asia and Africa, and saw all that the end of the fifteenth century could show him. Returning to France, he was appointed to one of the chairs of the Sorbonne, in which, according to Erasmus, he shone the first in that galaxy of lights; he was withal so meek, so amiable, so candid and sincere, and so full of loving-kindness, that all who knew him loved him. But there were those among his fellow-professors who envied the man who was the object of all this admiration, and insinuated that one who had studied so many and so questionable themes could hardly be sound in the faith.

They watched him intently; but no one of them all was so exemplary and punctual in his devotions. He was never absent from mass, his place was never empty in a procession; and no one remained so long on his knees before the images of the saints. Nay, this, the most famous of all the professors of the Sorbonne, was often