The covenant - James A. Michener [109]
Head of the vineyards was a stalwart, conservative, taciturn semi-peasant named Giles de Pre, thirty years old and the father of three children who already worked with him in the fields, even though the youngest was only five. De Pre was a wonderfully solid man with an uncanny comprehension of agriculture. 'You're an oak tree yourself,' his wife often said. 'If the pigs rooted at your feet, they'd find truffles.' Like many farmers around Caix, the De Pres could read, and it was their pleasure to work their way through the French Bible the marquis had given them, noting with satisfaction that many of the noblest figures in that history had been associated with vineyards. But as they read, especially in the Old Testament, they acquired a suspicion that human lives had once been arranged somewhat better than they were now. In the days of Abraham or David or Jeremiah, society had known a sanctity which was now vanished; in those days men lived intimately with God, and rulers were acquainted with their subjects. Priests were devoted to great principles, and there was reverence in the air. Today things were much different, and even if the marquis did rule the area, it was with a most unsteady hand.
That was the village of Caix, in the year 1560: a marquis who could not be depended upon except in battle; a priest who had lost the assurances of his youth; and a farmer whose reading of the Bible confused him. It was to such men throughout France that John Calvin dispatched his emissaries from Geneva.
'Dr. Calvin is a Frenchman, you understand,' one of these austere visitors explained to the Marquis de Caix. 'He's a loyal Frenchman, and would be living here except that he made an unfortunate speech.'
'Why has he fled to Geneva?'
'Because that city has placed itself in his hands. It thirsts to be ruled by the institutes of God.' At this mention the emissary said, 'Of course, you've read Dr. Calvin's remarkable summary of his beliefs?' The marquis hadn't, and it was in this way that one of the greatest books in the history of man's search for religious truth, John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, reached Caix.
It was a profound book, written with strokes of lightning when Calvin was only twenty-six and published widely the next year. It was beautifully French, so clear in its logic that even the tamest mind could find excitement in its handsomely constructed thought. Martin Luther in Germany had made wild, explosive charges which repelled thoughtful men, while John Knox in Scotland had raged and roared in a way that often seemed ridiculous, but Calvin in Geneva, patiently and with sweet reason, spread out the principles of his thought and with irrefutable clarity invited his readers to follow him to new light springing from old revelation.
But it was also revolutionary, 'like nine claps of thunder on a clear night,' the Geneva man said when handing over the book, and he enumerated Calvin's shocking rejections: 'First, he rejects the Mass as an accretion in no way connected with our Lord. Second, he rejects compulsory confession as an ungodly intrusion. Third, he dismisses all saints. Fourth, their relics. Fifth, their images. Sixth, he denies out of hand that the Virgin Mary enjoys any special relationship to either God or man. Seventh, he has abolished all monasteries and nunneries as abominations. Eighth, he rejects priests as power-grasping functionaries. And ninth, it must be obvious by now that he rejects the Pope in Rome as unnecessary to the operation of God's church in France.'
The marquis was hesitant about accepting so radical a doctrine, but when he passed the Institutes along to the abbe, he confided, 'What I like about Calvin's system is the way it works with civil government to create a stable, just social order. I've become really irritated by the confusions in our land.' He was correct in assuming that Calvin sponsored civil order, for in Geneva he taught that the governance of his church must rest with four