Conscious himself, through natural endowment and added learning, of superiority to all about him, Calvin had little or no sympathy with the liberty the Genevese were so proud of having achieved. A despotism was his ideal of civil government; and his proclaimed purpose from the first in settling at Geneva was to make the city a stronghold of the Gospel, its people subjects of the Lord, and their faith and morals a model of all that had been proposed by the Reformation in the sense in which he understood it. And how much he differed in this from Luther, and Zwingli, need not be said. The Wer liebt nicht Weiber, Wein und Gesang Ein Narr ist er und bleibts sein Lebenslang[68] of him of the Wartburg, must have sounded as simple profanity to Calvin. That Calvin’s heavy hand was borne with by the Genevese for two years, in the first instance, with no small amount of discontent, indeed, but with no outbreak of rebellion, must be set down, we imagine, to the credit of human nature, which endures for a season the irksome and even the ill, in hope of the good to follow; but when the pressure is crushing, and there is no prospect of alleviation, resistance, inevitably, follows in the end. Calvin and the special Court he had inaugurated under the title of the Consistory, had been anxious to impose some new and still more stringent ordinance on the city, but the Council, whose sanction was required before any of the consistorial edicts could have way, refused assent, and the citizens, emboldened by this, forthwith appeared in open rebellion against what they rightly construed as the tyranny and self-assertion of the clergy. So unpopular in fact did the whole clerical party become at this time, that its leader and his colleague Farel were formally banished from the city, and the subordinate ministers had to shrink into something like obscurity if they would escape the necessity of accompanying them. In sore displeasure with the ungrateful conduct of the people, as he regarded it, Calvin sought shelter first in Basle and then in Strasburg, where he was welcomed by his brother Reformers, and by and by provided with honourable means of subsistence, by an appointment as Professor of Theology in the University. But he was not destined long to enjoy the leisure of the Professor’s chair. Before two years had elapsed, the more moderate, orderly, and pious party had come again into power in Geneva, and he was waited on by a deputation, headed by Amied Perrin, a man of the highest influence among his fellow citizens, and entreated to return and save them from themselves; orderly existence, not otherwise attainable as it seemed, being seen after all to be not too dearly bought even by heavy payments in the shape of subserviency to theocratic rule.