worked, not all at once, but none the less effectually, upon those who heard them.  “The end was,” says Farel, “that little by little the papacy slipped from its place in my heart; it did not come down at the first shock.”  At the same time that he thus talked with his pupils, Lefevre of Etaples published a commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul, and then a commentary on the Gospels.  “Christians,” said he, “are those only who love Jesus Christ and His word.  May everything be illumined with His light!  Through it may there be a return of times like those of that primitive church which devoted to Jesus Christ so many martyrs!  May the Lord of the harvest, foreseeing a new harvest, send new and diligent laborers! . . .  My dear William,” he added, turning to Farel and taking his hand, “God will renew the world, and you will see it!”

It was not only professors and pupils, scholars grown old in meditation and young folks eager for truth, liberty, action, and renown, who welcomed passionately those boundless and undefined hopes, those yearnings towards a brilliant and at the same time a vague future, at which they looked forward, according to the expression used by Lefevre of Etaples to Farel, to a “renewal of the world.”  Men holding a social position very different from that of the philosophers, men with minds formed on an acquaintance with facts and in the practice of affairs, took part in this intellectual and religious ferment, and protected and encouraged its fervent adherents.  William Briconnet, Bishop of Meaux, a prelate who had been Louis XII.’s ambassador to Pope Julius II., and one amongst the negotiators of Francis I.’s Concordat with Leo X., opened his diocese to the preachers and writers recommended to him by his friend Lefevre of Staples, and supported them in their labors for the translation and propagation, amongst the people, of the Holy Scriptures.  They had at court, and near the king’s own person, the avowed support of his sister, Princess Marguerite, who was beautiful, sprightly, affable, kind, disposed towards all lofty and humane sentiments as well as all intellectual pleasures, and an object of the sometimes rash attentions of the most eminent and most different men of her time, Charles V., the Constable de Bourbon, Admiral Bonnivet, and Clement Marot.  Marguerite, who was married to the Duke d’Alencon, widowed in 1525, and married a second time, in 1527, to Henry d’Albret, King of Navarre, was all her life at Pau and at Nerac, as well as at Paris, a centre, a focus of social, literary, religious, and political movement.  “The king her brother loved her dearly,” says Brantome, “and always called her his darling. . .  Very often, when he had important business, he left it to her, waiting for her definitive and conclusive decision.

[Illustration:  The Castle of Pau——­183]