Many people, even today, go to Paris to see the famous city. They visit the huge Eiffel Tower and perhaps taste the good French food and see where the kings once lived. The Eiffel Tower hadn’t even been built yet when William Farel went to that great city. He went, not to see the sights, but to study. His father had seen how William was not afraid of the mountain heights or the wild streams and had hoped that his son would be a soldier. William himself had other ideas and wanted to study to become an intelligent man who could write books and have a great name. Neither William nor his father could possibly have imagined what was going to happen when William reached Paris.
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There was a second, rather secret reason that William wanted to go to Paris. It was that he did not have peace with God, and he hoped that he would learn from the religious men in Paris how to be more holy and get closer to God. There were indeed many men in Paris who could teach William Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He could study all he wished there, but his other, greatest wish seemed farther away than ever. The priests and other religious men, instead of living close to God, made fun of religion and lived wicked lives. Was there no one who could help him live a more holy life and find peace with God?
At last Farel met the man he had hoped to find. Master Faber took his religion seriously and bowed before the idols longer than any person William had ever met. William was glad to get to know him and thought that he had at last found the man to help him. Sad to say, Master Faber himself did not know that God wanted, not prayers to images and saints, but rather faith in His Son, the Lord Jesus.
So it was not from Master Faber, the learned man, that help came. We do not even know the name of the person who told William Farel God’s good news. Another Christian, unknown to us but not to God, taught William the value of the death of the Lord Jesus, and that one ray of light swept away many years of darkness. “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).