Bonnivard, an old and valued friend of Geneva, often imprisoned and persecuted for the Genevese cause, and at that time living at Berne, had predicted this revolutionary violence: 'You hated the priests,' he said to the Genevese, 'for being a great deal too much like yourselves; you will hate the preachers for being a great deal too unlike yourselves; you will not have had them two years before you will wish them with the priests, and you will send them off with no other wages for their work than good blows with a cudgel. The same thing will happen in Geneva which happens among any people who have groaned for a long time beneath a hard and tyrannical power; delighted to feel themselves free, their love of liberty is changed to a love of licence; every man will be his own master and will live as he pleases.' {231} When Calvin received, the order to leave Geneva within three days: 'Well,' said he, 'so be it; if we had served man this would be a bad return, but we serve a great master who will reward us.' Calvin was not presumptuous, but he was proud, and he distrusted men almost as much as he trusted God; he left Geneva dejected and sad, and yet with a feeling of relief: 'Whenever I think how wretched I was in Geneva,' he wrote a little later, 'I tremble throughout my whole being; when I had to administer the sacrament, I was tortured by anxiety for the state of the souls of those for whom I should one day have to render an account before God; there were many whose faith seemed to me uncertain, nay doubtful, and yet they all thronged to the table of the Lord without distinction. I cannot tell you with what torments my conscience was beset, day and night.' [Footnote 77] [Footnote 77: Stähelin, 1860, vol. i. p. 157.] Calvin did not know that he had sown seeds in Geneva which would soon spring up and bear fruit. {232} Chapter X. Calvin's Polemics. For four months Calvin wandered in Switzerland, visiting the different centres of the Reformation, Berne, Zurich, Lausanne, and Basle; sometimes doing his best to prove the lawfulness of his actions at Geneva and of their motives, at others acquiescing, although without hope of success, in the attempts of some of his friends to bring about a reconciliation with the Genevese. It was at Strasburg that he finally resolved to establish himself: about fifteen hundred Frenchmen, who had adopted the reformed faith and were fugitives like himself, had found an asylum there; two celebrated reformers, who were already his friends, Bucer and Capito, lived there and possessed great influence; they pressed him to join them: 'It was,' says Calvin, 'a similar appeal to that of Farel, which had formerly touched me so deeply: I yielded, like Jonah, [Footnote 78] to the warning which called me to another work.' [Footnote 78: Jonah, chap. i.]