The hour had come when this spiritual worship was to be really celebrated in Geneva: the Feast of Pentecost had arrived. On that day a large crowd had assembled in the Great Auditory. It was not only such as Vandel, Chautemps, Roset, Levet, with their wives and friends, who resorted thither, but new hearers were added to the old ones. Farel preached with fervor. He was accustomed to say that ‘God sends rain upon one city when he pleases, while another city has not a single drop;’ and therefore he conjured ‘all hearts thirsting with desire for the preaching of the Gospel’[545] to pray that the Spirit might be given them. We have not his Whitsunday sermon, he preached extempore; but we know that he ended it by giving glory _to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the only true God_, and that his discourse bore good fruit. Several circumstances had prepared his audience. The plot of the bishop and the duke which God had frustrated, the nomination of the huguenot syndics, the rupture with Friburg, Maisonneuve’s imprisonment—all these events had stirred their hearts, had cleft them as the ploughshare cleaves the earth, and opened them to the seed from heaven. What now shone before the eyes of those who filled the Grand Auditory ‘were not the petty flames of human candles, but Christ, the great sun of righteousness, as if at noonday.’[546] While the priests were chanting words that sounded only in the air, the voice of the reformer had penetrated to the very bottom of men’s hearts. The proof was soon visible. [Sidenote: Bernard’s CONVERSION.]