A few days after the edict of Berne, some Savoyard ambassadors, on their way to the diet of Berne, delivered the emperor’s letter to the council of Lausanne. That body having laid on the table side by side the epistle of his Catholic majesty and the edict of the lords of Berne, found themselves, to their great dismay, placed between the anvil and the hammer. Pressed thus by the two conflicting parties, they foresaw nothing but calamity whether they resisted the one or the other. The imperial document was read to the general council July 23. Its members, the majority of whom were attached to the Romish Church, thought that the wisest plan was to obey the most powerful, and therefore, sheltering themselves under the order of the great potentate, they enacted that the parties should live peaceably together, but that no innovation should be made until after the decision of the council. At the same time a deputation set out for Berne in order to prevent the disputation. But all was useless. Berne was stronger than the Emperor Charles V. That prince was in Italy, and the absent are in the wrong. CHAPTER II. THE DISPUTATION AT LAUSANNE. (OCTOBER, 1536.) [Sidenote: THE DISPUTATION AT LAUSANNE.] The disputation of Lausanne inaugurates with a certain grandeur the Reformation of the Vaudois. Some look upon it as merely a Bernese project. But that imposing assembly, among whose speakers were all or nearly all the reformers of western Switzerland; at which the great evangelical questions were discussed; and by means of which some of those who were present were converted; is evidence that the Reform was truly the work of God. The Reformation had begun in that country, obscurely and modestly, in some districts on the banks of the Rhone, on the shores of the lake of Neuchâtel, and in others besides. It now announced itself with power, and the mass of the people were going to embrace it. Men discourse much in books about the beautiful. We find true beauty, Christian beauty, evangelical, inward, more veiled perhaps than that of the world, but more pure and more solid, in the doctrine then proclaimed at Lausanne, and often in the manner in which it was set forth, although we have to make allowance for the time. We find it in the Farels, the Calvins, the Virets and other heroic men of that epoch, who lived with God, who were unwearied in their work, and were always ready to give their lives for the truth which they proclaimed. That synod was a beautiful portico erected to lead men into a temple of divine beauty. [Sidenote: PREPARATIONS AT LAUSANNE.]