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

then paling the Alps, without the customary hymn
to the Virgin. The parents of the youth, as he
himself informs us, believed all that the priests told
them; and he, in his turn, believed all that his
parents told him.
Thus he grew up till he was about the age of
twenty -- the grandeurs of nature in his eye all
hours of the day, but the darkness of superstition
deepening year by year in his soul. The two -- the
glory of the Alps and the glory of the Church --
seemed to blend and become one in his mind. It
would have been as hard for him to believe that
Rome with her Pope and holy priests, with her rites
and ceremonies, was the mere creation of
superstition, as to believe that the great mountains
around him, with their snows and their pine-forests,
were a mere illusion, a painting on the sky, which
but mocked the senses, and would one day dissolve
like an unsubstantial though gorgeous exhalation.
"I would gnash my teeth like a furious wolf," said
he, speaking of his blind devotion to Rome at this
period of his life, "when I heard any one speaking
against the Pope."
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