Devay went out of the prison weakened and broken down, but ever pious and anxious to consecrate his days to the service of Him who is the truth and the life. A Hungarian magnate, the Count Nadasdy, a rich and learned man, who openly and actively protected the Reformation, and who had at great expense founded a school with a view to promote the cultivation of literature,[563] one of the Maecenases of the sixteenth century, thought that the reformer, after his trials and his two harsh imprisonments, stood in need of repose and quiet occupation rather than a hand-to-hand fight with his adversaries. In his castle of Sarvar, Nadasdy had a very fine library. He invited Devay to take up his abode there, and to turn to account the studies in which he might engage for the propagation of evangelical knowledge. The reformer accepted this noble hospitality; and Sarvar became for him what the house of Du Tillet at Angoulême had been to Calvin, after his escape from the criminal lieutenant of Paris, and what the Wartburg had been to Luther. There was, however, this difference, that Devay had already endured several years of rigorous confinement, which was not the case with either Luther or Calvin. He set to work immediately, and studied and composed several polemical pieces. He had escaped from soldiers and jailers only to contend with adversaries of another kind. The whole life of an evangelist is one continual struggle; and what more glorious conflict is there than that of truth with error? A champion worthy of Rome appeared to reply to Devay. Gregory Szegedy, doctor of the Sorbonne, and provincial of the Franciscan order in Hungary, having become acquainted with the first manuscript works of Devay, had declared that he undertook to refute them. He kept his word, and published at Vienna a treatise in which he controverted the theses on _the rudiments of salvation_.[564] This was the first work published by a Hungarian against the Reformation. Devay applied himself to the task of answering it, and his work was finished in the course of 1536. During this period, towns, boroughs, entire parishes, and even some members of the higher clergy embraced the evangelical doctrine. But at the same time Szalahazy, bishop of Eger, caused Anthony, pastor of Eperies, and Bartholomew, chaplain to the chapter, to be thrown into prison; and King Ferdinand commanded the evangelical church of Bartfeld to abolish all innovations, upon pain of confiscation and of death.[565] [Sidenote: Devay At Wittenberg.]