_The_ Reformer of French Switzerland was not destined to be Farel, however, but John Calvin. Born at Noyon, Picardy, his mother died early and his father, who did not care for children, sent him to the house of an aristocratic friend to be reared. In this environment he acquired the distinguished manners and the hauteur for which he was noted. When John was six years old his father, Gerard, had him appointed to a benefice just as nowadays he might have got him a scholarship. At the age of twelve Gerard's influence procured for his son another of these ecclesiastical livings and two years later this was exchanged for a more lucrative one to enable the boy to go to Paris. Here for some years, at the College of Montaigu, Calvin studied scholastic philosophy and theology under Noel Beda, a medieval logic-chopper and schoolman by temperament. At the university Calvin won from his fellows the sobriquet of "the accusative case," on account of his censorious {162} and fault-finding disposition. At his father's wish John changed from theology to law. For a time he studied at the universities of Orleans and Bourges. At Orleans he came under the influence of two Protestants, Olivetan and the German Melchior Volmar. On the death of his father, in 1531, he began to devote himself to the humanities. His first work, a commentary on Seneca's _De Clementia_, witnesses his wide reading, his excellent Latin style, and his ethical interests. It was apparently through the humanists Erasmus and Lefevre that he was led to the study of the Bible and of Luther's writings. Probably in the fall of 1533 he experienced a "conversion" such as stands at the head of many a religious career. A sudden beam of light, he says, came to him at this time from God, putting him to the proof and showing him in how deep an abyss of error and of filth he had been living. He thereupon abandoned his former life with tears.