The vicar of Morges, Drogy, a man more enlightened than the others, and who saw clearly the weakness of the Romish teaching, apologized in the best way he could for his comrades, and made excuse for their defeat. ‘The poor priests are ignorant,’ he said, ‘and they deserve to be pitied. It is no great glory for the ministers to have beaten them. What they want is time given them for study, and a long time too; but instead of that they have been pitilessly bantered.’ ‘Do not take as insults,’ said the amiable Viret, ‘the charitable admonitions which we have given them. So far from wishing them any harm, we are ready to shed our blood for their salvation.’ ‘No doubt,’ added the reformer Marcourt, who had not hitherto spoken, a man of much good sense, but somewhat more severe than Viret, ‘no doubt the poor priests deserve to be pitied, but still more the poor people. No man would intrust a flock of sheep to a shepherd who was blind and dumb; why then are the churches placed under leaders who are blind and unable to explain the Word of God?’[408] [Sidenote: CALVIN AND HILDEBRAND.] Calvin then rose to speak again, and without stopping to argue with the feeble apologists of Rome, who were sufficiently refuted, he selected for his adversary the most illustrious and the most valiant of the champions of the papacy, the man who was indeed its chief founder, Hildebrand, made pope under the name of Gregory VII. These two men were well fitted to contend with equal strength in the lists. It is a pity that five centuries stood in the way of their measuring their forces hand to hand. It was Hildebrand who had launched over Christendom these stupendous assertions, ‘that the name of the pope is sole in the world,--that the Romish Church never did err and never will err,--that the pope may depose the emperor, and that all princes must kiss his feet.’[409] Calvin frequently contended against these presumptuous lies,[410] and he had done so before this time, at least to some extent. On this occasion he made use of a document written by a cardinal, a contemporary of Hildebrand, which relates, among other things, that that pope, wanting for once _to get through his incantations_, took the bread which he affirmed to be God, and threw it into the fire.[411] An occasion for the natural exclamation, ‘Say now that the bread is your God!’ This story, told by a cardinal at the expense of a pope, appears to us to be apocryphal. But it is quite true, as we know from the relations which existed between Gregory VII. and Berenger, that the famous pontiff had doubts about the doctrine of transubstantiation, and that he did not pronounce himself in support of it until he perceived that his enemies would take advantage of his doubts on the subject to strike a blow at his hierarchical rights and supreme authority.