While they were prosecuting Maisonneuve on the banks of the Rhone and the Saône, the struggle between catholicism and reform became more active on the shores of Lake Leman: an evangelical was threatened with death at Lyons, but Roman-catholicism was on the point of expiring at Geneva. It was crumbling away beneath its own weight: the religious orders, and especially the Franciscans, which had been founded to support it, were now shaking its foundations. Notorious abuses and scandalous disorders were making the protest against monkery and popery more necessary every day. At the very moment when the trial was beginning at Lyons (3d of May), an honorable lady of Geneva, Madam Jaquemette Matonnier, passing near the Franciscan convent, observed a woman noted for her disorderly life stealthily entering the building. ‘It would be better for you,’ she said, ‘to stay with your husband.’ At these words, two monks who were standing at the door rushed violently upon Madame Matonnier and beat her until the blood came. This incident, which soon became known, aroused the whole city. The syndics went to the convent, shut up the two monks in the prison, and took away the key. ‘Men who live in convents,’ said the people, ‘ought not to be stained with such depravity; and yet it is hard to find one monastery out of ten that is not a den of wantonness rather than the home of chastity.’ Sin begat death. The Romish clergy destroyed themselves by the abominable manners of a great number of their members. But better times were beginning; morality was springing, in company with faith, from the tomb in which they had been buried so long, and were spreading through Christendom the potent germs of a new life. A sad spectacle was that presented by the Church at the beginning of the sixteenth century! There were magnificent cathedrals, wealthy pontiffs, sumptuous rites, admirable paintings, and harmonious chants; but in the midst of all these pomps yawned an immense void: faith and life were wanting. Religion was at that time like those winter trees whose frost-covered branches glitter with a certain brightness under the rays of the sun, but are all frozen. A new season was beginning, which, by bringing back the sap into their sterile branches, would cover them with rich foliage and make them produce savory fruit. We do not say, as an eminent Christian has said, that the reaction of morality against formalism is the great fact of the Reformation, its glory and its appropriate title. Such an assertion omits one essential element. The grand title of the Reformation is to have restored to Christendom religion in its entirety, the truth with the life, doctrine with morality. If one had been wanting, the other would not have sufficed, and the Reformation would hot have existed.