From Rise of Protestantism in France to Publication of the Institutes - James Aitken Wylie

places of the world, amid the ambitions of thrones
and the councils of cabinets. It struggled into birth
in the low places of society, in closets, and the
bosoms of the penitent, amid tears and strong cries
and many groans.
Paris was not one of those cities that were
destined to be glorified by the light of
Protestantism, nevertheless it pleased God, as
narrated in the last chapter, to make it the scene of
a great conversion.[1] Lefevre and Farel were
sighing to enrol among the disciples of the Gospel
a great potentate, Francis I. If, thought they, the
throne can be gained, will not the preponderance of
power on the side of the Gospel infallibly assure its
triumph in France? But God, whose thoughts are
not as man's thoughts, was meanwhile working for
a far greater issue, the conversion even of a palefaced
student in the College of Montaigu, whose
name neither Lefevre nor Farel had ever happened
to hear, and whose very existence was then
unknown to them. They little dreamed what a
conflict was at that very hour going on so near to
them in a small chamber in an obscure quarter of
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