At this moment Perrin, Goulay, and their friends, attracted perhaps by the noise, entered the cathedral. They saw that the great execution had begun; children were beforehand with them. Passion and impulse carried them away. They knew that it was the province of the government only to work out a reform; but when the government hangs back from its duty, what is to be done? 'We have petitioned the council to pull down the idols,' they said; 'and it has not done so for want of courage. Let us then come to its help and do what God commands.' At once the daring citizens, going farther than the children, penetrated into the choir where the priests were singing, and the latter asked in alarm what these laymen were going to do. 'On a sudden,' says the chronicler, 'Perrin and his companions threw the idols to the ground and broke them.' The children who saw this began to run about and 'jump upon those little gods.' Taking up the pieces, they ran to the door with glee, and called to the people collected in front of the church: 'Here are the gods of the priests, will you have a piece?' At the same time they threw the fragments among the crowd. There was great confusion. The wiser heads ineffectually argued that this work of reform should be left to the council; those huguenots had no doubts as to their duty. If the magistrates were unwilling to have the images destroyed, the Bible commands it. 'The sun is now rising,' they said, 'and scattering throughout Christendom the dense clouds that obscure the religion of Jesus Christ.' The order of things in the middle ages was indeed incompatible with the new wants of society. Later, in the time of Calvin, after the first victory had been gained, it was important to establish Christian doctrine and to constitute Christian society; but now it was the time of Farel. It was necessary to appeal to the spirit of liberty and to the energetic development of the will—this a conservative writer has acknowledged[567]—a necessity in the first ages at the time of the establishment of Christianity; it was no less a necessity in the sixteenth century. The powers that had invaded the Church were so tenacious that the labor necessary to pull them down was a work of revolution and of war. The moral fact was the same at the epoch of these two great dispensations. Whoever applauds the axe which shattered the colossal statue of Serapis at Alexandria,[568] cannot blame that which threw down the images of a corrupt worship in the temples of Geneva. Great was the sorrow felt by the devotees during that execution; they seemed looking at the fall of the papacy itself. Some who had remained in the church contemplated the heart-rending spectacle from afar. Foolish women of the city, says Froment, began to weep and to groan. 'Alas! our good saints, our sacred images (they said) before which we used to kneel!... Whom shall we adore now?'—and they 'cursed those dogs (_cagnes_).'