The scholar of Noyon could not, therefore, receive from him any evangelical knowledge; on the contrary, the Spaniard, delighted at seeing his pupil ‘obstinately given to the superstitions of popery,’[559] hoped that the young man would be a shining light in the Church. Calvin, full of admiration for the poets, orators, and philosophers of antiquity, studied them eagerly and enriched his mind with their treasures; in his writings we often meet with quotations from Seneca, Virgil, and Cicero. He soon left all his comrades far behind. The professor, who looked on him with surprise, promoted him to the class of philosophy, although he had not attained the required age.[560] Then a new world, the world of thought, opened before his fine understanding; he traversed it with indefatigable ardour. Logic, dialectics, and philosophy possessed for him an indescribable charm.[561] Calvin made many friends among his fellow-collegians; yet he soared high above them all by the morality of his character. There was no pedantry, no affectation about him; but when he was walking in the courts of the college, or in the halls where the pupils assembled, he could not witness their quarrels, their follies, their levity of manner, and not reprove them faithfully. ‘He finds fault with everything,’ complained a scholar of equivocal conduct. ‘Profit rather by the advice of so young and conscientious a censor,’ answered the wiser ones.[562] ‘Roman catholics whose testimony was beyond reproach,’ says Theodore Beza, ‘told me of this many years after, when his name had become famous.’[563] ‘It is not the act alone,’ said Calvin subsequently, ‘but the look, and even the secret longing, which make men guilty.’--‘No man,’ says one of his adversaries, ‘ever felt so great a hatred of adultery.’[564] In his opinion, chastity was the crown of youth, and the centre of every virtue. The heads of Montaigu College were enthusiastic supporters of popery. Beda, so notorious for his violent declamations against the Reformation, for his factious intrigues, and for his tyrannical authority, was principal.[565] He watched with satisfaction young Calvin, who, a strict observer of the practices of the Church, never missed a fast, a retreat, a mass, or a procession. ‘It is a long time,’ it was said, ‘since Sorbonne or Montaigu had so pious a seminarist.’ As long as Luther, Calvin, and Farel were in the Papal Church, they belonged to its strictest sect. The austere exercises of a devotee’s life were the schoolmaster that brought them to Christ. ‘I was at that time so obstinately given to the superstitions of popery,’ said Calvin, ‘that it seemed impossible that I should ever be pulled out of the deep mire.’