Caroli was not at all inclined to submit to this rule. A fantastic schoolman, he was fond of putting forward strange paradoxes, and of raising discussions which irritated men’s minds and gave him an opportunity of showing off his cleverness. That sort of thing was a remnant of the Middle Ages; but the age of the Reformation demanded a different method. Caroli was an anachronism. His rank as doctor of the Sorbonne ought, in his view, to set him at the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, before which the rude herdsmen of Helvetia must bend. He meant to make a reformation _sui generis_, to advance views peculiar to himself, and to set up doctrines to which no one had before attained. An opportunity soon presented itself. Viret, his young colleague, having gone to pay a visit to his friends at Geneva, Caroli took advantage of his absence, and, ascending the pulpit, read a series of theses tending to prove that prayers ought to be made for the dead. ‘I have no intention,’ he said as he closed, ‘of taking lessons from a young man,’ thus pointing to Viret. It was plain, from his gestures, his voice, his words so arrogant and so full of tartness, that he was over-excited.[496] Viret, being informed by one of his friends, soon returned, and rebuked him for his freak. But Caroli, proud of what he impudently called his discovery, replied--‘I do not believe in purgatory, nor do I suppose that the dead can be comforted by the prayers of the living; those things are mere fictions. But I believe that we ought to ask God to hasten his judgment for the happiness of his saints and of all the members of the Church, the Virgin, the prophets, and the apostles, who will be the first to profit thereby.’[497] Caroli thus pitched his tent between Rome and the Gospel, being neither with the one nor with the other, but being merely himself. That was his wish. Had he only urged the Church to say to the Lord, ‘Come quickly,’ he would have spoken in conformity with Holy Scripture. But his intention was that the prayer should be offered in favor of the dead, a pretence which finds no justification in the Bible. Viret replied to him--‘You know that we ought not to preach any merely private views without having first communicated them to one another. If you have found in Scripture any instruction which is unknown to me, I will freely embrace it; but if you preach some erroneous doctrine, allow me, as your colleague, to make some observations on it.’[498] That was just what Caroli did not want. He answered Viret haughtily, and proudly maintained his doctrine. [Sidenote: CAROLI AT LAUSANNE.]