She took pleasure in founding schools. Roussel, her chaplain, would visit the humble room in which the children of the people were learning to read and write, and going up to them would say: 'My dear children ... the death of Christ is a real atonement. There is no sin so small as not to need it, or so great that it cannot be blotted out by it.[57] Praying to God,' he would add, 'is not muttering with the lips: prayer is an ardent and serious converse with the Lord.'[58] [Sidenote: CALVIN AND ROUSSEL.] There was one feature, however, in this awakening in the south which, in Calvin's eyes, rendered it imperfect and transitory, unless some remedy were applied to it. There was in it a certain halting between truth and error. The pious but weak Roussel manifested a lamentable spirit of compromise in his teaching. Wearied with the struggles he had gone through, he sheltered himself under the cloak of the Catholic Church. He did not pray to the Virgin, he administered the Holy Sacrament in two kinds; but he celebrated a kind of mass—a mournful and yet touching instance of that mixed Christianity which aimed at preserving evangelical life under catholic forms. Calvin at Angoulême was not far from Nérac, and his eyes were often turned to that city. He longed to see Lefèvre before the old man was taken from the world, and was uneasy about Roussel, whom he feared to see yielding to the seductions of greatness. One of the christian thoughts that had laid the strongest hold on his mind, was the conviction that the wisdom from on high ought to reject every compromise suggested by ambition or hypocrisy.[59] Ought he not to try and bring back Roussel into the right path from which he appeared to be wandering? Calvin left Du Tillet's house probably about the end of February, and called upon Roussel as soon as he arrived at Nérac. The most decided and the most moderate of the theologians of the sixteenth century were now face to face. Calvin, naturally timid and hesitating, 'would never have had the boldness so much as to open his mouth (to use his own words); but faith in Christ begot such a strong assurance in his heart, that he could not remain silent.' He, therefore, gave his opinion with decision: 'There is no good left in Catholicism,' he said. 'We must re-establish the Church in its ancient purity.'[60]—'What is that you say?' answered the astonished Roussel; 'God's house ought to be purified, no doubt, but not destroyed.'[61]—'Impossible,' said the young reformer; 'the edifice is so bad that it cannot be repaired. We must pull it down entirely, and build another in its place.'[62]—Roussel exclaimed with alarm: 'We must cleanse the Church, but not by setting it on fire. If we take upon ourselves to pull it down, we shall be crushed under the ruins.'[63]