Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/41

26 under foot, a haven where all were welcome. The same spirit breathed upon clergy and populace. With interests already divorced from the material world (celibate and scholarly, underfed and sedentary visionaries), they threw themselves, heart and soul, upon the hope of God. In a few months the mysticism of Meaux was an organic and progressive movement. From the bishop to the lowest journeyman weaver, in every class, men spoke the same strange dreamy words, foretold the same necessary purification, turned with the same energy to the new-discovered scriptures, quoted alike the wonderful commentaries of Lefebvre d'Étaples (1512–1522) which began the great Reformation in Europe.

Guillaume Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, a vague and holy nature, was not without the vanity of the mystic. A man of sincere sympathy, sincere emotions, his lack of precision in feeling and thinking condemned him to play an insincere part. He did not inquire of himself whether he really felt, to the same extent of daring and suffering, the intense faith that stirred the awakened clergy, the miserable populace of Meaux. He sympathised with them; he was their bishop. It seemed right to him to stand in the front of their movement, to be their man of God. So we find grouped below this gentle mediocre bishop, with his incomprehensible flow of mystical garrulity, men of ardent and incisive faith like Lefebvre d'Étaples, and Gérard Roussel, Guillaume Farel, Michel d'Arande, all the heroes of the French Reformation. For a long time Briçonnet de Meaux, who called these great men to helter in his diocese, appeared a holier and wiser man than they.

It was to this Man of God that the Duchess