I am inclined to think that his father's will was not the only, and possibly not even the principal, guiding motive in Calvin's resolution. From the age of fourteen, when he began his studies in the college of La Marche, at Paris, he had been a pupil of the learned professor Mathurin Cordier, or Corderius, who was afterwards placed by him at the head of the College of Geneva. Robert Olivétan, afterwards one of the translators of the Bible, was a fellow-countryman and relative of whom he saw much when he was at Noyon. These two men were well acquainted with the labours of Luther, and were themselves following the current of the new ideas; and, doubtless, if they had not attracted Calvin towards these ideas, they had at least prepared him to receive them. Be that, however, as it may, in accordance with his father's wish and his own inclination, he abandoned the Church in 1529, and went first to Orleans and then to Bourges to study law. At these two universities there were celebrated professors who taught, not only jurisprudence, but the various branches of history, philosophy and philology, which are cognate to that science. {158} Calvin met there Pierre de l'Estoile, Petrus Stella, a learned and subtle jurist, who was afterwards President of the Court of Inquiries in the 'Parlement' of Paris; Alciati of Milan, who had been appointed by Francis I. as the most learned doctor of the time in Roman law, and also as one of the most elegant scholars in ancient literature; and Melchior Wolmar, the German, a learned Greek scholar, who read Homer and Demosthenes with his pupils, and who also read with them--but not quite so openly--the Bible. From the earliest times the French jurists had been adversaries, rather than partisans, of the Romish Church, and after the revival of pagan literature the more learned among them frequently prided themselves upon displaying great independence and freedom of thought. The three professors of Orleans and Bourges became the revered masters of Calvin, and Calvin was the favourite pupil of his masters. But he was not long a pupil. 'He profited so greatly in so short a time,' says Beza, 'that he was not considered as a student, but as one of the learned doctors,' and he was often called upon to take the place of his masters in the professorial chair. But neither law nor learning, nor any of the sciences taught by these professors, could satisfy Calvin's soul or his intellect. In speaking of himself at this time, he says:--'My conscience was very far from being in a condition of certain peace. Every time that I looked down into myself or lifted my heart up to God, such a supreme horror took possession of me that there was no purification or expiation which could have cured me; and the more closely I considered my own nature, so much the more was my conscience goaded with fierce stings, so that there remained no other comfort except to deceive myself by forgetting myself. {159}