Calvin and Farel, having considered everything, took such a resolution as circumstances demanded; they would not give the supper on the following day, which was Easter Day. Having adopted this resolution, they communicated it to the authorities. ‘Farel and Calvin,’ says Rozet, ‘informed the council that they could not administer the supper _in the midst of these divisions, gangs, and blasphemies, and with profligacies multiplying around them_.’[625] Such was their motive clearly expressed. But they would do more than that. They had been prohibited from preaching. What! on this Easter Day should the doors of the churches be closed and the pulpit be dumb! Moreover, since they had refused to celebrate the supper, they owed to those whom God had confided to their ministry to give them their reasons. That was not for their harm but for their good, and they were bound to do it. Nevertheless, to occupy the pulpit on that day in defiance of the prohibition of the government, which was supported by the majority of the people, would be a grave affair for these two men, both feeble in body, the one in consequence of his labors, and the other by constitution. ‘But,’ said Calvin one day, recalling a saying of David, ‘though _a camp, an army_, that is to say, everything which is terrible and appalling in the world, should rise up against us, though all men should conspire to destroy us, we have no fear of all their might, for the power of God is far greater. We shall not be entirely free from fear; if we were, it would rather be from stupidity than from courage. But we shall hold before us the shield of faith, lest our hearts should faint or fail through the terrors which beset us.’[626] A victory which the court of Turin, with the aid of Spain and of the pope, failed to gain over the senate and people of Geneva, these two feeble men attempt and win. Here was one of the most beautiful triumphs of which the cause of religious liberty engaged in a conflict with the despotism of the state can boast. It was more than that. It was Christian heroism which prefers the fulfilment of the will of God, with exile, to a comfortable abode in one of the fairest countries in the world, with a conscience sacrificed and a slavish submission to Cæsar in things pertaining to God. It was in this character that the two principal witnesses to Calvin’s life regarded it. ‘Thenceforth Calvin,’ says one of them, ‘as he was of a spirit essentially heroic, stoutly and steadily resisted the seditious, together with the aforesaid Farel.’[627]--‘Farel and Calvin,’ says the other, ‘each endowed with a noble and heroic spirit, openly declared that they could not celebrate in a religious manner the Lord’s supper, among citizens who were so miserably at variance with each other, and so opposed to all discipline in the church.’[628] The decay of Christian principle is the only possible explanation of the fact that some should have ventured a judgment on them, contrary to