And yet, Gérard Roussel's half measures, while failing to conciliate the adherents of the Roman church, alienated from him the sympathies of the reformers; for they saw in his conduct a weakness little short of entire apostasy. More modern Roman Catholic writers, for similar reasons, deny that Roussel was ever at heart a friend of the Reformation.[210] Not so, however, thought the fanatics of his own time. While the Bishop of Oléron was one day declaiming, in a church of his diocese, against the excessive multiplication of feasts, the pulpit in which he stood was suddenly overturned, and the preacher hurled with violence to the ground. The catastrophe was the premeditated act of a religious zealot, who had brought with him into the sacred place an axe concealed under his cloak. The fall proved fatal to Gérard Roussel, who is said to have expressed on his death-bed similar regrets to those which had disturbed the last hours of Lefèvre d'Étaples. As for the murderer, although arrested and tried by the Parliament of Bordeaux, he was in the end acquitted, on the ground that he had performed a meritorious act, or, at most, committed a venial offence, in ridding the world of so dangerous a heretic as the Bishop of Oléron.[211] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 128: Scævolæ Sammarthani Elog. lib. i., i. 3. "Statura fuit supra modum humili," etc.] [Footnote 129: Sc. Sammarthani Elog., _ubi supra_.] [Footnote 130: Lefèvre's scientific works were numerous, and some of them passed through many editions during the early years of the sixteenth century. See Haag, La France protestante, art. Lefèvre. I have before me his edition of the Arithmetic of Boëtius, with introduction and commentary, of the year 1510, and copies of his Astronomical Treatises of 1510 and 1516, the last of these published at Cologne.] [Footnote 131: Sc. Sammarth. Elog., _ubi supra_.] [Footnote 132: Epistre à tons Seigneurs et Peuples (Edit. J. G. Fick), 172.] [Footnote 133: The passage in which Farel describes his former superstition is so characteristic, that I quote a few sentences: "Pour vray la papauté n'estoit et n'est tant papale que mon cœur l'a esté.... Car tellement il avoit aveuglé mes yeux et perverti tout en moy, que s'il y avoit personnage qui fut approuvé selon le pape, il m'estoit comme Dieu; si quelqu'un faisoit ou disoit quelque chose, d'ou le pape et son estat en fut en quelque mespris, j'eusse voulu qu'un tel ... fut du tout abbatu, ruiné et destruit.... Ainsy Satan avoit logé le pape, sa papauté, tout ce qui est de luy en mon cœur, de sorte que _le pape mesme_, comme je croy, _n'en avoit point tant en soy ne [ni] les siens aussy, comme il y en avoit en moy_.... Et ainsy je persevere, ayant mon panteon en mon cœur, et tant d'advocats, tant de sauveurs, tant de dieux que rien plus ... tellement que je pouvoye bien estre tenu pour un registre papal, pour martyrologe," etc. Epistre à tous Seigneurs et Peuples, 164, 167, 169.]