William Farel

Evangelist of French Switzerland, 1489–1565

William Farel was the evangelist of French-speaking Switzerland. He preached in market squares, churchyards, and fields, and he was beaten, mobbed, and driven out of town after town. He won Neuchâtel and Geneva to the gospel, and he held John Calvin in Geneva with words that Calvin never forgot. Theodore Beza, who knew both men, said that no one could “hear his thunders without trembling, or listen to his most fervent prayers without feeling almost as it were carried up into heaven.”1

The Papist of Dauphiné

He was born in 1489 near Gap, among the Alps of Dauphiné, to devout and noble parents. As a young man no one was more zealous for Rome. “Satan,” he wrote later, “had so lodged the pope, the papacy, and all that is his in my heart, that even the pope had not so much of it in himself.”2, 3 At twenty he went to Paris to study, and there he attached himself to the aged scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. Lefèvre would take the young man by the hand after Mass and tell him, “My dear William, God will renew the world, and you will see it!”3 Then Lefèvre himself laid aside his lives of the saints for the epistles of Paul, and Farel heard him say, “Salvation is of grace.… It is the cross of Christ alone that openeth the gates of heaven and shutteth those of hell.” The light broke on the disciple too. “All things,” he testified, “appear to me under a new light.”2

An Exile Who Could Not Be Silenced

He taught for a time at the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine and then joined Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet’s circle of preachers at Meaux. When persecution broke out in 1523 he fled to Basel, where he disputed so sharply that he was expelled. Strasbourg and then Montbéliard followed, with the same result.2 In the winter of 1526–1527 a red-bearded schoolmaster calling himself Ursinus appeared at Aigle, a little town of the Alps under the rule of Bern, and mixed new doctrines into his lessons. It was Farel. Lost one night in the rain on the road there, he had said, “God, by showing me my helplessness in these little things, has willed to teach me what I am in the greatest, without Jesus Christ!”4

From Aigle he carried the gospel through the Pays de Vaud and to Lausanne, Morat, and Neuchâtel.2 In December 1529 he climbed onto a platform at the market cross in Neuchâtel. Merle d’Aubigné describes his “voice like thunder” and the monks in the crowd who cried, “Duck him, duck him!” and tried to throw him into a fountain.5 On Sunday, October 23, 1530, the people carried him up the hill to the church of Our Lady and set him in its pulpit, crying, “We will follow the Evangelical religion, both we and our children, and in it will we live and die.” Images were thrown down that day, and when the citizens voted soon after, “a majority of eighteen voices gave the victory to the Reformation.”5 At Orbe the congregation hissed and stamped, calling him “dog,” “heretic,” and “devil,” and pulled him from the pulpit, but there he found and called a young man of the town, Pierre Viret, into the ministry.6, 7 In 1532 he crossed the Alps with Antoine Saunier to visit the Waldensian brethren in the valleys of Piedmont.8

Geneva

In October 1532 Farel, Saunier, and Olivétan came to Geneva. Summoned before the bishop’s council, Farel told the priests, “We affirm these doctrines in the strongest way possible, and again offer to die if we cannot prove them out of scripture.” Two canons drove him out “in the name of all the devils,” he was kicked and struck, and a priest rushed at him with a sword before a syndic caught his arm.9 He was ordered out of the city within three hours, but he returned in 1533, and within two years Geneva had renounced the authority of the pope and adopted the Reformation.2

In the summer of 1536 a young French scholar stopped for one night in Geneva on his way to Strasbourg. Farel learned that the author of the Institutes was in the city, sought him out, and begged him to stay. When entreaty failed, he resorted to an imprecation. Calvin recalled it this way:

He proceeded to utter an imprecation that God would curse my retirement, and the tranquility of the studies which I sought, if I should withdraw and refuse to give assistance, when the necessity was so urgent. By this imprecation I was so stricken with terror, that I desisted from the journey which I had undertaken.10 John Calvinpreface to the Commentary on the Psalms (1557)

Merle d’Aubigné puts the words in Farel’s mouth: “May God curse your repose! may God curse your studies, if in such a great necessity as ours you withdraw and refuse to give us help and support!” Calvin felt, he says, “that the hand of God was stretched down from heaven.”11

Neuchâtel and the Last Journeys

Farel and Calvin were banished together in 1538. Calvin went to Strasbourg, and Farel to Neuchâtel, where he served as pastor for the rest of his life. When Geneva recalled Calvin in 1541, there was little hope of prying Farel loose from Neuchâtel. From there he made long preaching journeys, among them to Metz, where Beza says he “happily commenced” the work of the Lord.2, 12 In 1553 he came to Geneva at Calvin’s request during the trial of Michael Servetus, and he walked with the condemned man to the stake, urging him to the last to repent.2 In 1558, at sixty-nine, he married a very young woman, which brought a coolness between him and Calvin that passed away before Calvin’s death.2

In May 1564 the old man wrote that he would come to see his dying friend. Calvin dictated a reply:

Farewell, my best and most right-hearted brother; and since God is pleased that you should survive me in this world, live mindful of our friendship, of which, as it was useful to the Church of God, the fruit still awaits us in heaven.13 John Calvinto William Farel, May 11, 1564

Farel came anyway, walking from Neuchâtel at nearly eighty. Beza records only that he saw and talked with Calvin and went home the next day.13 The following spring he preached once more at Metz with all his old fire. The effort was too much for him, and he died at Neuchâtel in 1565.2

Other Reformers   John Calvin

Notes

  1. Theodore Beza, The Life of John Calvin, in John Calvin, Tracts Relating to the Reformation, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), on Farel, Viret, and Calvin. ↩
  2. C. G. M’Crie, ed., Beza’s “Icones”: Contemporary Portraits of Reformers of Religion and Letters (London: Religious Tract Society, 1906), “William Farel.” The biographical sketches in this edition are the editor’s; the portraits and epigrams are Beza’s. ↩
  3. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, trans. H. White, vol. 3, bk. 12, ch. 2, on Farel and Lefèvre in Paris. ↩
  4. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Great Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Germany, Switzerland, &c., trans. H. White, vol. 4, bk. 15, “The Schoolmaster,” on Farel at Aigle in 1526–1527. ↩
  5. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Great Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Germany, Switzerland, &c., trans. H. White, vol. 4, bk. 15, on Farel at Neuchâtel, 1529–1530. ↩
  6. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, trans. William L. R. Cates, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green), bk. 5, ch. 2, on Farel at Orbe. ↩
  7. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, trans. William L. R. Cates, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green), bk. 5, ch. 3, on Farel and Viret at Orbe. ↩
  8. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, trans. William L. R. Cates, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green), bk. 5, ch. 5, on Farel and Saunier among the Waldenses. ↩
  9. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, trans. William L. R. Cates, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green), bk. 5, ch. 7, and ch. 8, on Farel before the episcopal council at Geneva in October 1532. ↩
  10. John Calvin, preface to Commentary on the Book of Psalms (1557), trans. James Anderson (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), as quoted in Steven J. Lawson, Pillars of Grace (AD 100–1564) (Sanford, FL: Reformation Trust, 2011), chap. on Calvin. ↩
  11. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, trans. William L. R. Cates, vol. 5 (London: Longmans, Green), bk. 9, ch. 17, on Farel and Calvin in 1536. ↩
  12. Theodore Beza, The Life of John Calvin, in John Calvin, Tracts Relating to the Reformation, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), on Farel at Neuchâtel and Metz. ↩
  13. Theodore Beza, The Life of John Calvin, in John Calvin, Tracts Relating to the Reformation, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), on the year 1564. ↩