to the reformers.’[599] We confess that this explanation appears to us very probable. [Sidenote: DISTURBANCES AT GENEVA.] This decision was despotic, and in that very quality was in accordance with the order which the councils intended to establish at Geneva, that of _Césaropapia_, in which the prince and the magistrate, taking the place of the pope, settle everything in the Church. The inflexibility of the council on the one side and the firmness of the reformers on the other came into collision, and the result was a shock to the people which troubled their everyday life and could not, but lead to a conflict. Those who formed the lowest section of the opposition, excited and agitated, began to cry out against the resistance of the ministers, and they thought that if the latter would not obey with a good grace, they must be compelled to yield by terror and by force. If the people were to express their will with energy, if they took up arms, and filled the streets and massed themselves like roaring waves in front of the houses of Farel, Calvin, and Courault, those men, no matter what their strength might be, would have no choice but to give way before that impetuous torrent. ‘Thereupon,’ says the chronicler Rozet, ‘great excesses and blasphemies were committed. Dissolute men went about the town by night in dozens, armed with arquebuses, which they discharged in front of the ministers’ houses. They shouted, _The Word of God!_ and after that, _The word of Andrew!_ They threatened to throw them into the Rhone if they did not come to some agreement with the magistrates respecting the ceremonies in question; and these proceedings, all open and notorious, went unpunished.’[600] It is not easy to ascertain what the cry, _The word of Andrew_, meant.[601] The cry, _To the Rhone!_ was invariably heard at Geneva when popular risings took place. Froment was greeted with it when he began to preach the Gospel there; and some women would have thrown him _over the bridge_ (_du pont en bas_) if a party of men had not rescued him. They did not, indeed, fling every one into the Rhone whom they threatened; but these cries could not but seem to Farel and Calvin a mournful return for their great and severe labors. [Sidenote: INDIGNATION OF COURAULT.]