In the May of 1534 he went to Noyon, laid down his offices, was imprisoned, liberated, and while there he seems to have finally renounced Catholicism. But he feared the forces of disorder which lurked in Protestantism, and which seemed embodied in the Anabaptists. Hence at Orleans he composed a treatise against one of their favorite beliefs, the sleep of the soul between death and judgment. Conscious personal being was in itself too precious, and in the sight of God too sacred, to be allowed to suffer even a temporary lapse. But to serve the cause he loved was impossible with the stake waiting for him, its fires scorching his face, and kindly friends endangered by his presence. And so, in the winter of 1534, he retired from France and settled at Basel. Now a city where Protestantism reigned, where learning flourished, and where men so unlike as Erasmus and Farel--the fervid preacher of reform--could do their work unhindered, was certain to make a deep impression on a fugitive harassed and expatriated on account of religion; and the impression it made can be read in the _Christianae Religionis Institutio_, and especially in the prefatory _Letter to Francis I_. The _Institutio_ is Calvin's positive interpretation of the Christian religion: the _Letter_ is learned, eloquent, elegant, dignified, the address of a subject to his sovereign, yet of a subject who knows that his place in the state is as legal, though not as authoritative, as the sovereign's. It throbs with a noble indignation against injustice, and with a noble enthusiasm for freedom and truth. It is one of the great epistles of the world, a splendid apology for the oppressed and arraignment of the oppressors. It does not implore toleration as a concession, but claims freedom as a right. Its author is a young man of but twenty-six, yet he speaks with the gravity of age. He tells the King that his first duty is to be just; that to punish unheard is but to inflict violence and perpetrate fraud. Those for whom he speaks are, though simple and godly men, yet charged with crimes that, were they true, ought to condemn them to a thousand fires and gibbets. These charges the King is bound to investigate, for he is a minister of God, and if he fails to serve the God whose minister he is, then he is a robber and no king.