In fact, two of the syndics, and several councillors, with other laymen of the catholic party and some priests, went into the city, and endeavoured to persuade all they met to enter into the plot formed against the Gospel. They told them that there was nothing to be expected from the council. 'If the faith of our fathers is to stand, by our own hands it must be supported,' they said. 'Hold yourselves in readiness to march against the Lutherans.' [Sidenote: AGITATION AGAINST THE LUTHERANS.] The _Lutherans_, they said. It was indeed the Reformation that was then stirring up all the wrath of the clerical party. Some of its members, no doubt, hated liberty as much as the Gospel; but most of the catholics would have tolerated the ancient franchises of the people. The point on which they were all agreed was an unquenchable opposition to that new doctrine which they called _Lutheranism_, Luther being in their opinion its great apostle. This Lutheranism was fundamentally what was afterwards named Calvinism, for Luther and Calvin were one in the great evangelical principles. All the reformers preached in the sixteenth century, in Europe, and particularly at Geneva, that the pure grace of God was the only power of eternal salvation, and that the Church was composed of all those who possessed true faith, and not of those who slavishly adhered to a dominating hierarchy. The doctrines of Lutheranism and of the Reform[645] might differ, in regard to certain abstract questions, as touching the finite and the infinite, for instance: Lutheranism might put in bolder relief the _immanence_ of God, while the Reform inclined towards his _transcendance_, to use the language of philosophers and theologians; but they were and they are agreed in all that is essential; and it was these living doctrines that a powerful party was endeavouring to expel from Geneva. [Sidenote: SECRET PLOTS.]