Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/111

96 for knowledge; the renascent love for art and poetry, no less than for ideas and for science. Under one wing she shelters Janet, Cellini, Marot, Desperriers; under the other, Calvin and Vatable. Full of imagination and keen intelligence, instinct with compassion and liberality, her nature would have been as much revolted by narrow Protestant dogma as by Catholic tyranny. Read the contemporary Lutheran historians, and it is clear that the ignorance and brutal injustice were not entirely upon the side of the Sorbonne. Coarseness and violence were as rife at Geneva as at Paris, and Margaret would not have been happy in Calvin's City of God. She would have pitied Servetus as sorely as she pitied Loys de Berquin. Her rare and modern spirit would ill have understood that hard-and-fast salvation of Geneva, that satisfaction in the damnation of disbelievers. Human life, knowledge, tolerance and freedom, were dearer to her than any code or any creed. In fact, her code and her creed was her belief in these things; her practice of human kindness. Those dying words of hers, so hushed-up, so indignantly refuted, express the principle of her life: "What I have done I did from compassion, not conviction."

At this moment, let us remember, Calvin is still in France, a youth of twenty; his Institutio is not written, Geneva is not yet a Church, Protestantism still is undetermined. Margaret and her court of scholars personify the earlier, vaguer Reformation. Mystical and learned, eager to discover the secrets of heaven and earth, they were more anxious to learn than to proselytize; and the College of France is the Church that they established.

It is important to insist on this eclectic and cultured