CLIFF CASTLES
what a manufactory of explosives this cavern was. From this vaulted chamber was launched that doctrine which was to wreck nearly every church in France and drench the soil in blood. I do not in the least suppose that Calvin saw any beauty in the view through the gap in the rock—not in the island below with its poplars and willows whose branches trail in the bottle-green waters of the Charente—not in the lush meadows with the yellow flags fluttering by the waterside—not in the grey towers of Nersac castle and church rising above dark woods, flushed orange in the setting sun against a purple sky. I do not suppose that he noticed the scent of the wallflowers growing out of every fissure wafted in on the summer air. There was logic thought in his head, but no poetry in his heart, no sweetness in his soul. He looked across in the direction of Angoulême, and wished he had a ladder and a hammer that he might smash the serene face of the Saviour looking down on the city from the western gable of the cathedral. Five and twenty years must elapse before that wondrous domed pile was to be wrecked by the Huguenots, his disciples. But here it was, in this cavern, that he elaborated his system of reform, treating Christianity as a French peasant treats an oak tree, pollarding it, and lopping off every lateral, natural outgrowth. Assuredly, many a volatile superstition had lodged in its branches, and many a gross abuse couched under its shadow. But these might have been scared away without mutilating the tree till it was reduced to a stump. He desired, doubtless, to bring back the Church to the condition in which he supposed it had been when born. But one cannot reduce an adult to the simpHcity and innocence of childhood by stripping off all his clothes, and denying him the conventional fig-leaf.
Having shattered the Catholic faith by the crowbar of his logic, he sought to build up a grotto out of its fragments,
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