The history of persecution contains little novelty: it is the same story of calumnious accusations and savage fury from the letter of Pliny to the invectives of the monks in the sixteenth century. The council which assembled at Bourges in 1528 not only condemned all Lutheran doctrines whatsoever, but compared heretics with sorcerers and magicians in order to render them more odious. The Reformers were accused of being bad subjects, rebels, revolutionists, aiming at the overthrow of the monarchy as well as the perversion of religion. This Francis I. pretended to believe, though he knew better; and it is this charge which Calvin so eloquently refutes in his “Letter to the King,” prefixed to his “Christian Institutes.” “Is it possible,” he asks, “that we who have never been heard to utter a seditious word, and whose lives have always been known to be simple and peaceable, should be plotting the overthrow of the kingdom? And what is more, being now driven from our homes (he is referring particularly to the emigration after the persecutions of 1534), we cease not to pray for your prosperity.... Praised be God, we have not profited so ill by the gospel, that our lives can not hold forth to our detractors an example of liberality, chastity, compassion, temperance, patience, modesty, and all other virtues. Verily the truth beareth witness for us that we fear and honor God purely, when by our life and by our death we desire his name to be sanctified.” In the “Institutes” he went still farther, laying down principles that almost consecrate oppression. “We must show a wicked tyrant such honor as our Lord has condescended to ordain.... We must show this obedience through fear of God, as we serve God himself, since it is from him that princes derive their power.” This obedience, however, he is very careful to restrict to secular matters. “When God ordained mortals to rule, he did not abdicate his rights. If kings command any thing contrary to him it should have no honor, for, says Peter, we ought to obey God rather than men.”