Rise and Establishment of Protestantism at Geneva - James Aitken Wylie

Chapter 9
Establishment of
Protestantism In Geneva
THERE came discoveries of another kind to
crown with confusion the falling system. In the
Convent of the Cordeliers de la Rive a tablet was
discovered on which St., Francis of Assisi, the
patriarch of the order, was represented under the
figure of a great vine, with numerous boughs
running out from it in the form of Cordeliers, and
having underneath the inscription, "John 15:1: I am
the vine, ye are the branches."[1] This showed a
faculty for exegesis of a very extraordinary kind.
The schoolmen might have relished it as ingenious:
the Genevans, who had begun to love the
simplicity of the Scriptures, condemned it as
blasphemous.
It was not a little curious that at that same hour,
when the Papacy was tottering to its fall in Geneva,
another tablet, also highly suggestive, should have
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