What joy! the aged Lefèvre, the fervent Roussel, are recalled _with honour_, says Erasmus.[503] The Strasburgers embraced them with tears; the old man felt happy that he was going to die in the country where he was born. He immediately took the road to France in company with Roussel; others followed them; all believed that the new times were come. In their meetings the evangelicals called to mind these words of the prophet: _The ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away_.[504] Lefèvre and Roussel hastened to their protectress. Margaret received them kindly, lodged them in the castle of Angoulême, where she was born, on that smiling hill which she loved so much, near that ‘softly-flowing’ Charente, as she describes it. Lefèvre and Roussel had many precious conversations with her. They loved to speak of their life at Strasburg, of the new views they had found there, and of the brotherly communion they had enjoyed. ‘We were there,’ they said, ‘with William Farel, Michael of Aranda, Francis Lambert, John Vedastes, the Chevalier d’Esch, and many other evangelicals ... scattered members of a torn body, but one in Christ Jesus. We carefully put out of sight all that might interrupt the harmony between brethren; the peace that we tasted, far from being without savour, like that of the world, was perfumed with the sweet odour of God’s service.’ This meeting at Strasburg had borne fruit. The energetic Farel, the learned Lefèvre, the spiritual Roussel, gifted with such opposite natures, had reacted upon each other. Farel had become more gentle, Roussel more strong; contact with iron had given an unusual hardness to a metal by nature inclined to be soft. The sermons they heard, their frequent conversations, the trials of exile, and the consolation of the Spirit of God, had tempered the souls which had been not a little discouraged by persecution. Roussel had taken advantage of his leisure to study Hebrew, and the Word of God had acquired a sovereign importance in his eyes. Struck by the virtues of which the early christians had given an example, he had found that we must seek for the secret of their lives in the history of the primitive Church, in the inspired Scripture of God. ‘The purity of religion will never be restored,’ he used to say, ‘unless we drink at the springs which the Holy Ghost has given us.’[505]