He must hold death beautiful, And over it in triumph sing; Love it with a warmer heart Than he loveth mortal thing. In the pain that wrings the flesh Find a pleasure, and in sadness; Love death as he loveth life, With a more than mortal gladness:-- But, alas! to few ’tis given Thus to tread the path to heaven![539] Would Margaret succeed? A queen with all the splendours of her station is not a good reformer; the work needs poor and humble men. There is always danger when princes turn missionaries; some of the persons around them easily become hypocrites. Margaret attracted men to the Gospel; but the greater part of those who were called by her did not go far; their christianity remained superficial. There were, indeed, many enlightened understandings in the upper ranks of French society, but there were few consciences smitten by the Word of God. Many--and this is a common error in every age--could see nothing but intellectual truths in the doctrine of Jesus Christ: a fatal error that may decompose the religious life of a Church and destroy the national life of a people. No tendency is more opposed to evangelical protestantism, which depends not upon the intellectual, but upon the moral faculty. When Luther experienced those terrible struggles in the convent at Erfurth, it was because his troubled conscience sought for peace; and we may say of the Reformation, that it always began with the awakening of the conscience. Conscience is the palladium of protestantism, far more than the statue of Pallas was the pledge of the preservation of Troy. If the nobility compromised the Reformation in France, it was because their consciences had not been powerfully awakened. Farel would have been the man fitted for this work. He was one of those whose simple, serious, earnest tones carry away the masses. His voice of thunder made his hearers tremble. The strength of his convictions created faith in their souls, the fervour of his prayers raised them to heaven. When they listened to him, ‘they felt,’ as Calvin says, ‘not merely a few light pricks and stings, but were wounded and pierced to the heart; and hypocrisy was dragged from those wonderful and _more than tortuous_ hiding-places which lie deep in the heart of man.’ He pulled down and built up with equal energy. Even his life--an apostle-ship full of self-sacrifice, danger, and triumph--was as effectual as his sermons. He was not only a minister of the Word; he was a bishop also. He was able to discern the young men fitted to wield the weapons of the Gospel, and to direct them in the great war of the age. Farel never attacked a place, however difficult of access, which he did not take. Such was the man then called into France, and who seemed destined to be its reformer. The letters of Roussel and Toussaint inviting Farel were conveyed to Strasburg, and arrived there in the month of December 1526.