The refugees as a rule, and almost as a matter of necessity, were entirely devoted to the Reformer; and having been most liberally met by the Genevese at first, and put on a footing of all but perfect political equality, they made themselves felt, through their numbers, in the frequently recurring elections that formed elements in the Genevese Republican system. Favoured in all by Calvin, the strangers, as they increased in numbers, came at length to be ever more and more disliked and distrusted by the native population; so that Calvin may be found using language such as this, when, speaking in the same breath of the fugitives, his friends, and of the people who sheltered both him and them within their walls:--‘They (the Genevese) are dissatisfied with you (the Refugees), because you run not riot with them in their disorderly and barren lives.’ The native population, in a word, found themselves, ere long, controlled and overcrowed by a host of aliens, led by a bigoted and intolerant ecclesiastic--a state of things never to be patiently endured, but to be ended at the first favourable moment; and it is to the culminating dissatisfaction of the Genevese with clerical rule in 1553, much akin to that of the year 1538, when Calvin had been forced to quit the field, that Beza refers in the passage quoted above. So unpopular had Calvin again become in the year 1553, that, in writing to one of his friends, he speaks of discontent and distrust as universally prevalent, especially among the more youthful of the population. ‘The accumulated rancour of their hearts,’ he says, ‘breaks out from time to time; so that when I show myself in the street, the curs are hounded on me: hiss! hiss! is shouted to them; and they snap at my legs and tear my clothes.’ Calvin must in truth have had a trying time of it during most of the years he lived among the Genevese; his own bed could as little have been of roses without thorns, as he suffered the beds of the citizens to be of down; for, save during brief lulls, he and they seem to have passed their lives in a state of covert, when it was not one of open, warfare. One of the earlier hostile moves of the civil Council in the present crisis against the Reformer was the exclusion, from the Greater Council of the State, of some members of the Minor Council, known to be among the number of his adherents. More than this, his enemies having come to outnumber his friends in the lately elected Council, he found himself frequently outvoted in directions in which he had been used to think of his wish or his will as already the law. Among those who had now obtained a seat in the Supreme Council, was one whom he had put under the consistorial ban for some infringement of discipline, and forbidden, until he showed signs of amendment, to present his child for baptism. To choose Councillors from among persons such as this, however, was, in Calvin’s eyes, to fly in the face not only of all authority, but of the Almighty himself.