He was unwearied in his exertions to make Geneva an enlightened town. His educational policy adopted by the Councils was stated in a series of famous regulations for the management of the schools and College of the city.[159] He sought out and presented to the Council the most noted scholars he could attract to Geneva. Mathurin Cordier, the ablest preceptor that France had produced in his generation; Beza, its most illustrious Humanist; Castellio and Saunier, were all teachers in the city. The fame of its schools attracted almost as many as persecution drove to take refuge within its walls. The religious instruction of the young was carefully attended to. Calvin's earlier Catechism was revised, and made more suitable for the young; and the children were so well grounded that it became a common saying that a boy of Geneva could give an answer for his faith as ably as a "doctor of the Sorbonne." But what Geneva excelled in was its training for the ministry and other learned professions. Men with the passion of learning in their blood came from all lands--from Italy, Spain, England, Scotland, even from Russia, and, above all, from France. Pastors educated in Geneva, taught by the most distinguished scholars of the day, who had gained the art of ruling others in having learned how to command themselves, went forth from its schools to become the ministers of the struggling Protestants in the Netherlands, in England, in Scotland, in the Rhine Provinces, and, above all, in France. They were wise, indefatigable, fearless, ready to give their lives for their work, extorting praise from unwilling mouths, as modest, saintly, "with the name of Jesus ever on their lips" and His Spirit in their hearts. What they did for France and other countries must be told elsewhere. The once disorderly city, a prey to its own internal factions, became the citadel of the Reformation, defying the threats of Romanist France and Savoy, and opening its gates to the persecuted of all lands. It continued to be so for generations, and the victims of the _dragonnades_ of Louis XIV. received the welcome and protection accorded to the sufferers under the Valois in the sixteenth century. What it did for them may be best told in the words of a refugee: