If the reformer had been able to preach with tranquillity in the morning, it was to be otherwise in the evening. The most furious of his adversaries thought that they owed him something, and in their wrath meant to discharge the debt. So long as they had had to do only with the good-natured Farel, matters had gone on pretty well, notwithstanding his lively sallies; but this young man from Noyon was a spirit of a different stamp, and since he came to Geneva everything had changed. He had a methodical intellect and the faculty for organization. Had he not prepared a fundamental law of the Church, to which they had been obliged to take the oath at St. Peter’s? He wanted to regulate everything, and this was not convenient. Since Farel had been attacked, it was not fair to let Calvin escape. An uproar had been made in the morning at St. Gervais; another shall be made in the evening at the church of St. Francis at Rive. It was in that convent that Farel had for the first time appeared in the pulpit, March 1, 1534; and there Calvin was to preach, April 21, 1538. The quarter in which this convent stood was situated in the lower part of the town, not far from the shores of the lake, and it was probably less quiet than the neighborhood of the cathedral. The church was speedily filled, and Calvin arrived. He began his sermon. Knowing that Farel had been treated worse than himself, it is possible that, to leave no ground for reproaching himself, he might think it his duty to put a stronger emphasis on his words, and to lay stress on certain things, in order to make them observed and felt. For the rest, had he spoken like an angel, he would not have escaped the tumult. Men’s minds were irritated; the thought of resisting this inflexible man had seized on many, and made them frantic; they had even taken their swords, and had come to church as to a military parade. Violence often remains at first smouldering, silent, and makes no sign. It appears to have been so in this case; but at some word uttered by the preacher, it revealed itself in a sudden explosion. One would have said that a stormy wind passed over that crowd, and impressed on it a passionate movement. In the church of Rive there were violent speeches and threatening gestures. This was not all. In sight of that orator, whose dignity and power irritated them, the most furious drew their swords, and the flash of steel was seen in the sanctuary of peace. No one, it is true, directed the fatal edge at the throat of the orator. It appears, however, that a struggle took place between the friends and the enemies of the Reformation, and that arms were crossed; for the great magistrate of Geneva in the sixteenth century, Michel Rozet, felt bound to say in his chronicle that the affair passed off _without bloodshed_.[638] The syndic Gautier, too, looks on this fortunate circumstance as _a kind of miracle_. Thus, after having heard the firing of arquebuses, fifty or sixty times in