Calvin's conscientious conviction of the necessity of submission was so great that he would sometimes say a man ought not to employ force even to effect his escape from prison and to save himself from martyrdom. After all, he said, it was martyrdom which had contributed so powerfully to the triumph of the early Christian Church; and when the cause of God had need of martyrs, it was man's duty to submit. This excessive severity and pious enthusiasm did not, however, prevent him from using all the influence which he possessed, and exerting all his power, both moral and political, in behalf of those reformers who were persecuted, imprisoned, and on the eve of martyrdom. He was not satisfied with doing all that was in his own power, writing, preaching, importuning and harassing the persecutors; he induced all those governments that were favourable to the reformers, and able to exert influence which would be beneficial to them, to intercede on their behalf. He sent agents, legal help, indirect protectors, money and assistance of all kinds. And when he had been unable to succeed in averting persecution or diminishing its severity, when the day of martyrdom arrived, he employed all his Christian zeal in sustaining the courage of the victims, lavishing upon them proofs of his own sympathy, and teaching them to put their trust in God and his Divine justice. The persecuted reformers at Nismes in 1537; the Waldenses, cruelly ill-treated and tortured in Provence and Dauphiné in 1545; the martyrs of Lyons in 1552; the church of Paris and the victims of the attack upon the reformers in the Rue St. Jacques in 1556 and 1557; and in many other places and on many other occasions, the fugitives and martyrs of the French reformation received warm help and fraternal consolation from Calvin. {343} We may say that he changed the words of Dante, and that, when he had been unable to save those for whom he had laboured, he opened the doors of the eternal future, saying to them, 'Do not lose all hope, ye who enter here!'