Schaff - History of the Christian Church Vol. 8 - Media Sabda Org

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of the College of Geneva, where he died at the age of eighty-five in the
same year with Calvin (1564). f395
From the College de la Marche Calvin was transferred to the strictly
ecclesiastical College de Montague, in which philosophy and theology
were taught under the direction of a learned Spaniard. In February, 1528,
Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the order of the Jesuits, entered the same
college and studied under the same teacher. The leaders of the two
opposite currents in the religious movement of the sixteenth century came
very near living under the same roof and sitting at the same table.
Calvin showed during this early period already the prominent traits of his
character: he was conscientious, studious, silent, retired, animated by a
strict sense of duty, and exceedingly religious. f396 An uncertain tradition
says that his fellow-students called him “the Accusative,” on account of his
censoriousness. f397
NOTES. SLANDEROUS REPORTS ON CALVIN’S YOUTH.
Thirteen years after Calvin’s death, Bolsec, his bitter enemy, once a
Romanist, then a Protestant, then a Romanist again, wrote a calumnious
history of his life (Histoire de la vie, moeurs, actes, doctrine, constance, et
mort de Jean Calvin, Lyon, 1577, republished by Louis-François Chastel,
Magistrat, Lyon, 1875, pp. 323, with an introduction of xxxi. pp.). He
represents Calvin as “a man, above all others who lived in the world,
ambitious, impudent, arrogant, cruel, malicious, vindictive, and
ignorant”(!) (p. 12).
Among other incredible stories he reports that Calvin in his youth was
stigmatized (fleur-de-lysé, branded with the national flower of France) at
Noyon in punishment of a heinous crime, and then fled from France in
disgrace. “Calvin,” he says (p. 28 sq.), “pourveu d’une cure et d’une
chapelle, fut surprins ou (et) convaincu Du peché de Sodomie, pour lequel
il fut en danger de mort par feu, comment est la commune peine de tel
peché: mais que l’Evesque de laditte ville [Noyon] par compassion feit
moderer laditte peine en une marque de fleur de lys chaude sur l’espaule.
Iceluy Calvin confuz de telle vergongne et vitupère, se defit de ses deux
bénéfices es mains du curé de Noyon, duquel ayant receu quelque somme
d’argent s’en alla vers Allemaigne et Itallie: cherchant son adventure, et
passa par la ville de Ferrare, ou il receut quelque aumone de Madame la
Duchesse.” Bolsec gives as his authority a Mr. Bertelier, secretary of the