JOHN CALVIN.*

"TRUTH," says Calvin, "is the child of Time ; " a memorable generalization of which, in these last days, it would, perhaps, be difficult to find a more satisfactory illustration than is supplied by the gradually increasing appreciation of the work and the cha- racter of the great Reformer who uttered it. No doubt, epi- grammatic Frenchmen still speak of the ruthless despot who would fain have transported the Vatican to Geneva, and clever young Englishmen, especially those of the old Unitarian type, still repeat, in their essays and reviews, the language of Macaulay and Brougham, and Hallam and Gibbon, touching the death of Servetus. But both in this country and in Germany—not to speak of Geneva itself—there are few thoughtful and impartial students of history who would not indignantly repudiate the once popular platitudes about the fanatical persecutor and the pro- pounder of" The Horrible Decree." Had Calvin been called on to crown his righteous life and enormous labours by a martyr's death —and no one of "the noble army" ever showed a more perfect trust in God than he would have manifested at the stake—we cannot but believe that the • star of his reputation would never have suffered an eclipse at all. For, generally speaking, the "children" have ever been forward to "build the tombs" of the prophetic whom their "fathers slew." But if the denouncer of orthodox iniquity, or the preacher of heretical truth, is allowed to go to his grave in peace, it is curious to note how long be may have to wait before his rightful In Memoriam is reared.

It is not a little enigmatic that so much antipathy, we might almost say malevolence, has been manifested towards Calvin him- self. For during his mortal life he was from his boyhood upwards one "greatly beloved," while, on the other band, among all his great contemporaries not one was to be found in whom all merely personal motives were, so to speak, more thoroughly absorbed into the focus of higher influences. It has been said that Calvin's heart was in his head. The imputation would have been resented by all who knew him, and can never be honestly repeated by • Calvin: Sa Vie, son (Shore, et sea Emits. Pour F6lix Bungener. Paris. 1862. —Calvin: his Life, his Labours. and his Writings. Translated from the French of Fdlis Bungener. T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh. (This translation is eridently the work of one who thoroughly understands the original.)

those who are familiar with the Reformer's letters. Unlike Luther, who not only thinks aloud, but makes public confession of his varying moods of feeling, "pope one-another" being his favou rite father confessor, Calvin is, as a rule, severely reticent about himself. But in various "dedications" to his friends, and throughout his endless correspondence, we have amplest proof that beneath the granite logic there flowed the living waters of deep affection.

How pathetic is his lamentation over Philip Melancthon, which masters even Calvin's wonted self-restraint, and makes itself for ever audible in the volume against Heshusius :—

" Oh! Philip Melancthon—for it is thou whom I address, thou who now livest at the light hand of God with Christ, awaiting us on high until we shall be gathered together with thee into the blissful rest—an hundred times, in thy hours of weariness and dejection, hast thou leaned thy head on my bosom and said, Would to God, would to God, I might thus die !' And as for me, an hundred times have I regretted that it was not granted to us to be constantly near each other."

But in addition to the depth and tenacity of his undemonstra- tive affection for his friends, Idelette de Bure, who was in very deed an angel in his modest home for nine years, could testify how blessed it was to share the love of such a husband as John Calvin, and in his silent, but all the more suffering way, he carried with him to the grave the sorrow, still fresh, which her removal from his companionship had occasioned. When he ever did speak of Idelette, during the fifteen years that be survived her, it was always with profound emotion, while in the quite early days of his grief he writes to Vivet :—" She was a precious help to me— I struggle to restrain my grief, and my friends, too, do their best. We make, however, but little progress. Thou knowest the tender- ness of my heart, not to say its weakness ; and but for the most resolute efforts to vanquish my over-sorrow, I should wholly sink beneath its weight." His letter to Fare' is equally affecting :— "Adieu! then, dear and well-beloved brother ; may God guide thee by His Spirit, and help me in my tribulation! I, should have been quite crushed by this blow, if God had not stretched out His hand to me from heaven."

We have to note in addition, that inexorably uncompromising though Calvin was, whenever the claims of what he conceived to be truth directly revealed from Heaven were involved, there was in him a grand generosity of nature, which at once enabled him to recognize the nobler qualities of his brother reformers, and prompted him to forgive and forget their discourtesies, or even injustice towards himself. For example, in a letter to Bullinger (1544), after alluding to the wrong which Luther had recently done him in a polemic against the Zwinglians, he thus speaks of the great German :—

" 0 Bullinger ! I implore thee never to forget how great, and how greatly gifted a man Luther is. . . . . As for myself, I have often said, and I still repeat the saying, that if he were to call me a devil I should still continue to regard him with great esteem, and to acknowledge him as a distinguished servant of God."

A few months after those words were written, he thus addressed Luther himself, though Melancthon, in his timidity, never forwarded the letter :—

" Would that I could fly to thee and enjoy thy society, were it only for a few hours ! But since that blessedness is not granted to me here, I hope it will soon be given to us in the Kingdom of God. Farewell till then, most honoured man, thou eminent servant of Christ and father, for ever to be venerated by me."

Very strange language, no doubt, for a quite heartless man to use. But even if it were true that Calvin possessed very little "natural affection," the fact could hardly be reckoned criminal, unless it could at the same time be established that the slender amount of relative sensibility which nature had given him was trodden under foot by the remorseless logician, and that only a man who had wilfully desecrated the impulses of his own heart could have looked on the death of Servetus as anything less than judicial murder.

As we have seen that the indifference to human joys and griefs ascribed to Calvin is the fiction of those who did not know him, we must look elsewhere for the secret of his predestinarian- ism, and of his participation in the martyrdom of the unhappy Spaniard.

Nineteen years before his tragic end, Michael Servetus chal- lenged John Calvin to a public discussion on the subject of the Trinity. Calvin was then in his twenty-fifth year, and was just emerging into notoriety. Already (1534) he had had to make his escape from Paris, in consequence of an oration which he wrote for Nicolas Cop, the rector of the Univer- sity, and which was delivered by the latter. "The young Reformer escaped by a window, and ran to the house of a vinedresser, in the suburb of St. Victor, where he changed his dress." Before his retreat men of all ranks had become his

devout disciples. It is not known where or when be himself first discerned clearly the great doctrine which, as some would put the matter, it was previously given to Luther to discover: We learn from Calvin himself, however, that he, too, had to pass through experiences of "extreme horror," ere he learned the- secret of ceasing to torture himself by gazing on his own dark shadow, and turned round in self-forgetfulness and self-renuncia- tion, to behold the light that shone in the face of Christ. And it was probably at Bourges, while studying Greek, and especially the Greek of the New Testament, under Melchior Weimar, that the tonsured boy-chaplain, who had now reached his twentieth year, and had recently filled Orleans with the fame of his vast legal acquirements, in his quiet but intense way sundered for ever the links which bound him to the Church of Rome. Luther,. the impulsive Teuton, clasps his hands with childlike delight at each fresh discovery, and shouts his " Eureka " over Chris- tendom. Calvin, the Frenchman, whose passion is symmetry and order, makes no hasty sign, but works on in silent, in-burning enthusiasm, until a coherent system is shaped and perfected. No sooner, however, had he completed his plans, so to speak, than first at Bourges, and then in Paris, the living materials of the new ecclesiastical edifice ranged themselves under his architec- tonic will. "There was," he says, "no retreat for him any- where any longer ;" and though, "by nature somewhat shame- faced and unsocial, and one who loved repose," he was "led and whirled about" until he wholly consecrated himself to the task of teacher to which men called him so urgently, and for which he seemed to have received a higher than human ordination. His mastery of his native language, to the grammatical development of which he gave an immense impulse, was one of the elements of his quite regal influence over his countrymen. From the first, by his letters to the poor deceived people, with whom the " prisons overflowed," and by his preaching in private houses,. Calvin was gradually inscribing on men's hearts the ineffaceable tokens of his apostleship ; not unwatched by the Sorbonne and the Parliament, until an order of imprisonment was issued against the suspected author of the very Lutheran oration already alluded to. At the court of Marguerite of Valois Calvin found a genial asylum, and it wasthere, too, that the good old Le Fevre recognized, as by an intuition, that in the person of the pale and worn refugee there stood before him the man who beyond all others was to build up the Reformation in France. Through the intervention of Marguerite with her brother Francis I., "the: obscure Lutherans" enjoyed a season of comparative freedom from molestation, and during the brief respite Calvin returned to Paris.

Servetus, in singling out his antagonist, only showed that the tide of men's interests was steadily flowing in the direction of Calvin. Calvin defeated would, moreover, mean that the Reform- ation itself, in adopting the dogma of the Trinity, was based on an indefensible foundation. But Servetus failed to appear, and the two young men, who curiously enough were children of the same year (1509), were not now to meet on the arena of debate.

The hour, however, for their meeting was to come : alas! that history has to record it. But, notwithstanding all the evil epithets which have been hurled at Calvin's head, as if he eminently, he almost single-handed, had compassed and perpetrated that enormity which has left so sad a blot on nascent Protestantism, the fact is buttressed by incontestable proof that though Calvin shared with Melancthon, and Cranmer, and Jewel, and we may say, indeed, with nearly all his noteworthy contemporaries, the general conviction of the age that heresy was a crime to be punished, even by death, it was not Calvin who burned Servetus. Had Calvin been absolutely master of Geneva when Servetus appeared within her gates, the fatal pile would never have been kindled. And as briefly as is consistent with clear- ness, we shall now endeavour to indicate how far Calvin really participated in those transactions which led, first, to the appre- hension and condemnation of Servetus by the Romish Inquisition at Vienne, as in those which only terminated with the barbarous auto da fe in Geneva.

At Vienne, in Dauphiny, a Catholic tribunal had found Servetus guilty of blasphemy, and had sentenced him to be burned by a slow fire. He made his escape from prison, and came to Geneva. Did Calvin initiate or assist in the procedure which brought about the seizure of Servetus by the Catholic authorities?

Appearances were alleged to be against Calvin, and the pre- sumptions have been paraded unscrupulously as solid proofs by writers who seem to have ignored both what the Reformer frankly admits, and what he emphatically denies, in his Declaration against the Errors of Servetus, which was published in 1559., only

M. Bungener, whose candour is not less striking than the in- two years' banishment, was but the application to the 20,000 Ullectual ability and fine pictorial power which characterize his citizens of the same re'gime to which from his very boyhood he sub- -most interesting volume, appears to attach very little, if any, im- jected himself. He loved and he wept ; but he had no laughter portanee at all to the statements of Trie. On the other hand, like Knox or Luther. "Smiles are for heaven," he writes ; and we find that the Scotch Dr. Cunningham, in his "Essay on Calvin," for him, lifelong, existence was a labour, and a battle with powers accepts Trie's evidence as quite conclusive. After a very careful of darkness, visible and invisible. That, unrelieved by ramie, consideration of the subject, we are persuaded with M. Bungener or imagination, or playful fancy, and amid failing . health, that the "Secretary had no authority from Calvin to do what he crushed hopes, and many bereavements, his temper gave did." At all events, although the untoward letters* are men- sting and bitterness to much that he wrote in his /titer tioned among the pieces justificatives in the sentence pronounced days, is not altogether surprising, however much we may by the Catholic authorities upon Servetus, it was from quite other regret his occasional vehemence. Besides, who thou& it sources that they obtained full and unmistakeable proof that, in a duty to cultivate the amenities in theological centre- -spite of his deliberate perjury, the accused was Servetus ; that he versy in Calvin's days ? But if there is a kind of Hebrew had lived for thirteen years in Vienne, under a feigned name, and scorn, and a censurable use of strong adjectives or substantives that he had caused to be printed and published the book which towards adversaries, it is not as Calvin's antagonists, but solely had been ascribed to him. But even if we were forced to con- as enemies of truth that they are stigmatized. Certainly not. If -cede that the letters in question were, reluctantly, indeed, ever a man, in old language, lived and died for "the glory of but still really, handed over to the secretary, rhetorical animosity God," subordinating all selfish considerations to the one great aim is none the less outrageous when it talks of Calvin's plotting for of entire submission to the Divine will, that man was John Calvin. years the destruction of Servetus, and instigating from the begin The times had need of such a man. He "served his generation," fling the proceedings against him. We must refer our readers to and "fell on sleep." We are thankful that he planted the standard the very clear and comprehensive narrative of M. Bungener for of the Divine decree on the walls of Geneva, and made the city an account of the later scenes of the Servetus drama. As every- which he entered as an exile in 1536 a far-shining Pharos to all body knows, Calvin was the first in Geneva to move against his the churches of the Reformation. But we are still more thankful old challenger ; and it was he who procured his arrest. It was for the unveilings of later days, and for the growing recognition be, too, who, as the criminal process advanced, became the prin. that the Divine will is not limited in its charitable visitations to -tips], if not sole, accuser of Servetus. But in the end the fate of a select few ; but comprehends that entire humanity for which the gifted, yet not very interesting sufferer, was pronounced, not the Son of God laid down His life. The doctrine of predestination, by Calvin, but, we may say, outside of Geneva itself. The as taught by Calvin, and previously by Augustine, fell among the Churches of Switzerland, when appealed to by the lesser Council intellectual and moral Pelagianisms of the time with the power of -of Geneva, unanimously decided that a blasphemer so pronounced a living and regenerating truth. But Calvinism, so called, has must die ; and the Genevese felt that this formidable harmony of become among us a dead truism—a kind of Medusa head, which -opinion left them no alternative, unless they were to expose Petrifies the best affections of our nature.

themselves to the twofold charge of being more tolerant of heresy

-than Rome was, and of proving faithless at the same time to the A LITERARY WEDDING GIFT TO THE PRINCESS

Reformation itself, which bad demanded the death of the gain- ALEXANDRA.*

-sayer of orthodoxy. That all Calvin said and did in the matter THESE are few processes of the human mind which entail more was tmtinged by poor personal animosity is palpable to all who certainly on the intellect premature exhaustion and decay than read the story without a bias ; and, as a proof that even the tre- that of brooding over possible wedding gifts,—not costly and mendous belief inherited from Rome had not, in the case of gorgeous wedding gifts, which any one may suggest in ordinary Calvin, wholly annihilated the humanities, it has to be recorded instances, because there is so little competition and, where -that he strove, but strove in vain, to get the punishment by the there is, as in the case of our new Princess, the same risk sword substituted for death by fire, of endangered reason exists, as the Ladies' Committees in Liver- Justice to Calvin demands these further considerations—that pool and other large places could probably testify,—but modest . A Welcome. Original Contributions in Poetry and l'rose. London: Emily . See Cunningham's " The Reformers and the Theoloa of the Reformation," p. 332. raithfull, Prinees street, Hanover square, and WA Farring,dou street.

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a few months after the terrible tragedy took place. Calvin's he was no heresy hunter, that his condemnation of Servetus was words are these :—" The rumour is current that through my not based on the ground that the latter entertained heterodox opi- management Servetus was apprehended on Papal territory, nions, for in the eyes of Calvin all Papists were in error ; yet he 'namely, at Vienne, and, in consequence, many affirmed that I never hinted that it was lawful or right for him to persecute them, -acted wrongly in abandoning him to the deadly enemies of the because from his point of view they were heterodox ; and that the faith. There is no truth in this frivolous scandal." But,he adds:— reason which chiefly swayed with him was, that Servetus had "If the accusation were true, I would not deny it, and I do not think published and was propagating principles not only opposed to it would tend to my dishonour." From a man like Calvin we Christianity, but subversive of social order as well. Neverthe- -accept this denial without the slightest hesitation. But while the less, the martyrdom of Servetus was both a blunder and a crime— initial measures against Servetus were neither suggested nor a blunder, for, as M. Bungener well says, " infallibility alone can shared in by him, it has to be added that certain letters of logically persecute ;" but a blunder which even the logic of Calvin Servetus to Calvin were furnished by Calvin's secretary to the failed to detect, and a crime whose criminality was wholly foreign Catholic Inquisition atVienne, and that, by means of these letters, to the Christian consciousness of the age. the evidence, already sufficient, of the identity of the ill-starred From his birth at Noyon in Picardy, in 1509, to his death at heretic was strikingly corroborated. Nay more, it was from a Geneva, after weeks of sad suffering, in 1564, the story of Calvin's letter of this same secretary, by name Trie, to a friend in Lyons, life is unfolded by M. Bungener in a very orderly and luminous -that the Viennese ecclesiastics first learned that Servetus had way. And not that story only, but the contemporary environment recently printed in Vienne itself a large edition of his e Chris_ of those fifty-five yeats during which Calvin lived and laboured, is

tianismi Restitutio." sketched with a vigorous hand, and we had almost said a poet's

On the fact thus supplied by The the Inquisition based its eye. M. Bungener is, indeed, a master artist ; and one of his rare -whole procedure ; but there is not the faintest whisper that gifts is his power of compression. He never wearies us with Calvin was cognizant of the writing of the letter in which the details. By a few suggestive strokes he sets before the imagine- fact was mentioned, while we have, on the contrary, Calvin's own don a vivid and impressive picture. And if, on the one hand, we express contradiction of the rumour that he had first set the are struck with our author's narrative accomplishment, we are Inquisitorial machinery in motion. What is still doubtful in not less admirers of his power of analysis. Readers, for example, -the matter is whether Trie obtained the letters of Servetus who know of Calvin's Institutes, or of his Catechism, only by name, surreptitiously. The secretary does, indeed, say, "I must con- will learn from a few pages of M. Bungener what Calvin really fess I have had great trouble in procuring what I now send you meant to teach in both ; and will, perhaps, somewhat marvel that from Mr. Calvin. . . . I have, however, importuned him so the former, which not only was an apology for French Pro- much, representing to him that I should incur the reproach of testantism, addressed in a noble preface to Francis I., but has levity if he did not help me, that he has at last consented to given form we may say to the religious conceptions of millions of band over what I send." But we hardly think that this state- Protestants for the last 300 years, was the work, expanded after- ment, which was not published before 1749, counterbalances wards, it is true,—but still in spirit and substance the same work Calvin's denial, which was given to the world, as we have seen, —of a youth of six-and-twenty. Calvin was, indeed, never young.

immediately after the death of Servetus. The discipline be at last succeeded in enforcing in Geneva, after