At the time when treason was expelled from the city in the person of Cartelier, the Gospel entered it in that of an honest Helvetian, one of the Bernese and Friburg deputies who went there in 1527 about the affairs of the alliance concluded in 1526. Friburg would not have permitted a heretic preacher to accompany the deputation; even Berne would not have desired it just yet; but one of the Bernese ambassadors, a pious layman, who was coming to give a valuable support to national independence, was to call the Genevese to spiritual liberty. The lay members of the Church occupied in the time of the apostles, as is well known, a marked station in the religious community;[712] but by degrees the dominion of the clergy had been substituted for evangelical liberty. One of the principal causes of this revolution was the inferiority of the laity; for many centuries ecclesiastics were the only educated men. But if this state of things should change, if the laity should attain to more knowledge and more energy than the clergy, a new revolution would be effected in an opposite direction. And this is really what happened in the sixteenth century. The christian layman who then arrived at Geneva was Thomas ab Hofen, a friend of Zwingle, whom we have already mentioned.[713] In the year 1524 he had declared at Berne in favour of the Reformation. The Zurich doctor, hearing of his departure for the shores of Lake Leman, was rejoiced, for the piercing eye of his faith had fancied it could perceive a ray of evangelical light breaking over those distant hills. He desired that the Genevans, now united to Switzerland, should find in her not only liberty but truth. 'Undoubtedly,' wrote Zwingle to the excellent Bernese, 'undoubtedly this mission may be of extraordinary advantage to the citizens of Geneva, who have been so recently received into alliance with the cantons.'[714]