The service then began. Viret’s gentle eloquence charmed his hearers; the two strangers, however, would gladly have seen themselves outside of the assembly into which they had impudently crept; but all the passages were blocked up: ‘We cannot get out,’ said Advreillon, ‘because of the great crowd of people;’ so they made up their minds to stay till the end. As soon as the sermon was over, the two Savoyards were about to leave, when De la Maisonneuve said aloud: ‘Let no one move, a baptism is going to be celebrated here.’ The baptism took place, and Viret added: ‘It was with pure, fair water that John baptized Jesus Christ; to baptize with oil, salt, and spittle as the hypocrites do, is wrong.’ The two strangers, offended by such language, got away as fast as they could. As many persons had been unable to take part in the service, the huguenots, whose patience was exhausted, resolved to be no longer satisfied with narrow halls, which did not permit all who loved the Word of God to hear it. ‘Jesus Christ commands the Gospel to be preached in all the world,’ said Farel, ‘it must therefore be preached in Geneva;’ whereupon he asked for a church. The Bernese ambassadors undertook to present the petition. ‘Most honored lords,’ they said to the Council, ‘when we and our ministers pass along the streets, people shout after us: “Holla! heretics, you dare not appear in public, you preach your heresies in holes and corners like pigsties.”[489] We have long put up with this, and now we come to ask you for a church. No one will be constrained to hear our preacher; every man will go to the worship he prefers, and thus everybody will be satisfied.’ The syndics, greatly embarrassed, declared they were grieved at the _ignominies_ heaped upon the Bernese, but said it was not in their jurisdiction to assign a pulpit to a Lutheran preacher; that it belonged to the prince-bishop and his vicars. ‘Still,’ they added, ‘if you take of your own accord some edifice in which you can preach your doctrines ... you are strong ... we cannot resist you ... we dare not.’ [Sidenote: Farel And Courtelier.]