For Morus, uncomfortable at Amsterdam, and every day under some fresh discredit there, a splendid escape had at length presented itself.

He had received an invitation to be one of the ministers of the Protestant church of Charenton, close to Paris.

This church of Charenton was indeed the main Protestant church of Paris itself and the most flourishing representative of French Protestantism generally.

For the French law then obliged Protestants to have their places of worship at some distance from the cities and towns in which they resided, and the village of Charenton was the ecclesiastical rendezvous of the chief Protestant nobility and professional men of the capital, some of whom, in the capacity of lay-elders, were associated in the consistory of the church with the ministers or pastors.

Of these, in the beginning of 1657, there had been five, all men of celebrity in the French Protestant world--viz.