Melchior, like Melanchthon, had set himself to study the Holy Scriptures in the original languages, and in them had found light and peace. Calvin, on his side, 'having acquired some taste for true piety,' as he informs us, 'was burning with a great desire to advance.'[30] The most intimate confidence and the freest communication were established between the professor and the scholar. Melchior spoke to Calvin of Germany and the Reformation; he read the Greek Testament with him, set before him the riches of Christ announced therein, and, when studying the Epistles of St. Paul, explained to him the doctrine of imputed righteousness which forms the essence of their teaching. Calvin, seated in his master's study, listened in silence, and respectfully embraced that mystery so strange and yet so profoundly in harmony with the righteousness of God!... 'By faith,' said Wolmar, 'man is united to Christ and Christ to him, so that it is no longer man whom God sees in the sinner, but his dearly beloved Son himself; and the act by virtue of which God makes the sinner an inheritor of heaven, is not an arbitrary one. The doctrine of justification,' added Wolmar, 'is in Luther's opinion the capital doctrine, _articulus stantis vel cadentis Ecclesiæ._'[31] But Calvin's chief teacher was God. At Orleans he had more of those struggles, which are often prolonged in strong natures. Some take him simply for a metaphysical thinker, a learned and subtle theologian; on the contrary, no other doctor has had more experience of those tempests that stir up the heart to its lowest deeps. 'I feel myself pricked and stung to the quick by the judgment of God. I am in a continual battle; I am assaulted and shaken, as when an armed man is forced by a violent blow to stagger a few steps backwards.' The light which had rejoiced him so much when he was in college at Paris, seemed almost to have faded away. 'I am like a wretched man shut up in a deep dungeon, who receives the light of day obliquely and in part, only through a high and narrow loop-hole.' He persevered, however; he fixed his eyes on Jesus, and was soon able to say: 'If I have not the full and free sight of the sun, I distinguish however his light afar, and enjoy its brightness.'[32]