Another move against him was a resolution taken by the Council to deprive the Refugees of the arms with which they, like the native population, had been entrusted at an earlier period for the common defence. This was taken greatly to heart by Calvin, who stigmatised it as a ‘barbarous and brutal act, perpetrated by enemies of the Gospel against exiles for Christ’s sake.’ But the Council did not stop here in showing its hostile mood. The priests, in the olden time, had been privileged like the rest of the Community to be present at the deliberations of the Council, and the Ministers, their successors, had never been challenged in their title to show themselves as auditors in the same way. They were now, however, by a resolution of the Council, declared incompetent to appear at its sittings without special permission given. Of no great moment in itself or politically considered, this interdict pointed with even needless significance to mislike and mistrust of the clergy as a body, and of their distinguished head in particular--the Council would neither have him nor his followers immediately informed of all the business they had in hand. How keenly all these proceedings were felt by Calvin is apparent from the tone of the letters he wrote to more than one of his friends at this time. To his friend Sulzer, of Basle, he says that for the last two years they pass their lives at Geneva as if they were living amid the declared enemies of the Gospel! and he complains bitterly of the interference he suffers in the exercise of his multifarious functions. Among the particular incidents that tended to widen the breach between Calvin with the ecclesiastical party behind him, and the civil authorities backed by the more liberally disposed of the citizens, was the case of Philibert Berthelier, one of the Councillors, a man of note, respected and much looked up to by the Genevese; for he was the son of that Philibert Berthelier who had nobly striven for the liberties of the city, in former years, and gone to his death on the scaffold in their assertion. Berthelier, some eighteen months or so before, for an offence against one or other of the arbitrary ordinances of the Consistory--for having gone to a ball with his wife and daughter, we think, they having further exceeded in the matter of dress--had fallen under the interdict of the Ministers, and been forbidden to present himself at the celebration of the Lord’s supper, until he had made submission and promised amendment.