Part 20
As the leading lines of the procession entered the great square--larger, says an old chronicler, than any square in Spain--they opened to the right and left for the royal retinue to pass. Everything was conducted with admirable order. The monarch was permitted to traverse the plaza in silence, and not a Spaniard was to be seen. When some five or six thousand of his people had entered the place, Atahualpa halted, and, turning round with an inquiring look, demanded, "Where are the strangers?"
At this moment Fray Vicente de Valverde, a Dominican friar, Pizarro's chaplain, and afterward Bishop of Cuzco, came forward with his breviary, or, as other accounts say, a Bible, in one hand and a crucifix in the other, and, approaching the Inca, told him that he came by order of his commander to expound to him the doctrines of the true faith, for which purpose the Spaniards had come from a great distance to his country. The friar then explained, as clearly as he could, the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity, and, ascending high in his account, began with the creation of man, thence passed to his fall, to his subsequent redemption by Jesus Christ, to the Crucifixion, and the Ascension, when the Saviour left the apostle Peter as his vicegerent upon earth.
This power had been transmitted to the successors of the apostle, good and wise men, who, under the title of popes, held authority over all powers and potentates on earth. One of the last of these popes had commissioned the Spanish Emperor, the most mighty monarch in the world, to conquer and convert the natives in this western hemisphere; and his general, Francisco Pizarro, had now come to execute this important mission. The friar concluded with beseeching the Peruvian monarch to receive him kindly, to abjure the errors of his own faith and embrace that of the Christians now proffered to him, the only one by which he could hope for salvation; and, furthermore, to acknowledge himself a tributary of the emperor Charles, who, in that event, would aid and protect him as his loyal vassal.
Whether Atahualpa possessed himself of every link in the curious chain of argument by which the monk connected Pizarro with St. Peter, may be doubted. It is certain, however, that he must have had very incorrect notions of the Trinity if, as Garcilasso states, the interpreter, Felipillo, explained it by saying that "the Christians believed in three gods and one God, and that made four." But there is no doubt he perfectly comprehended that the drift of the discourse was to persuade him to resign his sceptre and acknowledge the supremacy of another.
The eyes of the Indian monarch flashed fire and his dark brow grew darker as he replied: "I will be no man's tributary! I am greater than any prince upon earth. Your Emperor may be a great prince; I do not doubt it when I see that he has sent his subjects so far across the waters; and I am willing to hold him as a brother. As for the Pope of whom you speak, he must be crazy to talk of giving away countries which do not belong to him. For my faith," he continued, "I will not change it. Your own God, as you say, was put to death by the very men whom he created. But mine," he concluded, pointing to his deity--then, alas! sinking in glory behind the mountains--"my God still lives in the heavens and looks down on his children."
He then demanded of Valverde by what authority he had said these things. The friar pointed to the book which he held as his authority. Atahualpa, taking it, turned over the pages a moment; then, as the insult he had received probably flashed across his mind, he threw it down with vehemence and exclaimed: "Tell your comrades that they shall give me an account of their doings in my land. I will not go from here till they have made me full satisfaction for all the wrongs they have committed."
The friar, greatly scandalized by the indignity offered to the sacred volume, stayed only to pick it up, and, hastening to Pizarro, informed him of what had been done, exclaiming at the same time: "Do you not see that, while we stand here wasting our breath in talking with this dog, full of pride as he is, the fields are filling with Indians? Set on at once! I absolve you." Pizarro saw that the hour had come. He waved a white scarf in the air, the appointed signal. The fatal gun was fired from the fortress. Then, springing into the square, the Spanish captain and his followers shouted the old war-cry of "St. Iago and at them!"
It was answered by the battle-cry of every Spaniard in the city, as, rushing from the avenues of the great halls in which they were concealed, they poured into the plaza, horse and foot, each in his own dark column, and threw themselves into the midst of the Indian crowd. The latter, taken by surprise, stunned by the report of artillery and muskets, the echoes of which reverberated like thunder from the surrounding buildings, and blinded by the smoke which rolled in sulphurous volumes along the square, were seized with a panic. They knew not whither to fly for refuge from the coming ruin. Nobles and commoners, all were trampled down under the fierce charge of the cavalry, who dealt their blows right and left without sparing; while their swords, flashing through the thick gloom, carried dismay into the hearts of the wretched natives, who now, for the first time, saw the horse and his rider in all their terrors.
They made no resistance, as, indeed, they had no weapons with which to make it. Every avenue to escape was closed, for the entrance to the square was choked up with the dead bodies of men who had perished in vain efforts to fly; and such was the agony of the survivors under the terrible pressure of their assailants that a large body of Indians, by their convulsive struggles, burst through the wall of stone and dried clay which formed part of the boundary of the plaza! It fell, leaving an opening of more than a hundred paces, through which multitudes now found their way into the country, still hotly pursued by the cavalry, who, leaping the fallen rubbish, hung on the rear of the fugitives, striking them down in all directions.
Meanwhile the fight, or rather massacre, continued hot around the Inca, whose person was the great object of the assault. His faithful nobles, rallying about him, threw themselves in the way of the assailants, and strove, by tearing them from their saddles, or, at least, by offering their own bosoms as a mark for their vengeance, to shield their beloved master. It is said by some authorities that they carried weapons concealed under their clothes. If so, it availed them little, as it is not pretended that they used them. But the most timid animal will defend itself when at bay. That they did not so in the present instance is proof that they had no weapons to use. Yet they still continued to force back the cavaliers, clinging to their horses with dying grasp, and, as one was cut down, another taking the place of his fallen comrade with a loyalty truly affecting.
The Indian monarch, stunned and bewildered, saw his faithful subjects falling round him without hardly comprehending his situation. The litter on which he rode heaved to and fro as the mighty press swayed backward and forward; and he gazed on the overwhelming ruin, like some forlorn mariner, who, tossed about in his bark by the furious elements, sees the lightning's flash and hears the thunder bursting around him, with the consciousness that he can do nothing to avert his fate. At length, weary with the work of destruction, the Spaniards, as the shades of evening grew deeper, felt afraid that the royal prize might, after all, elude them; and some of the cavaliers made a desperate effort to end the affray at once by taking Atahualpa's life. But Pizarro, who was nearest his person, called out with stentorian voice, "Let no one who values his life strike at the Inca"; and, stretching out his arm to shield him, received a wound on the hand from one of his own men--the only wound received by a Spaniard in the action.
The struggle now became fiercer than ever round the royal litter. It reeled more and more, and at length, several of the nobles who supported it having been slain, it was overturned, and the Indian prince would have come with violence to the ground, had not his fall been broken by the efforts of Pizarro and some other of the cavaliers, who caught him in their arms. The imperial borla was instantly snatched from his temples by a soldier named Estete, and the unhappy monarch, strongly secured, was removed to a neighboring building, where he was carefully guarded.
All attempt at resistance now ceased. The fate of the Inca soon spread over town and country. The charm which might have held the Peruvians together was dissolved. Every man thought only of his own safety. Even the soldiery encamped on the adjacent fields took alarm, and, learning the fatal tidings, were seen flying in every direction before their pursuers, who, in the heat of triumph, showed no touch of mercy. At length night, more pitiful than man, threw her friendly mantle over the fugitives, and the scattered troops of Pizarro rallied once more to the sound of the trumpet in the bloody square of Cajamarca.
CALVIN IS DRIVEN FROM PARIS
HE MAKES GENEVA THE STRONGHOLD OF PROTESTANTISM
A.D. 1533
A. M. FAIRBAIRN
JEAN M. V. AUDIN
Among what may be called the second generation of Protestant reformers, the great leader was John Calvin. By his writings, and by his directive and administrative work, he exerted a strong influence upon the reformed churches in his own day and upon the theology and polity of later times. He was born in France in 1509, and while still in early manhood, having become familiar with classical learning, with law, and especially with theology, he ardently embraced the Protestant faith and began to preach the reformed doctrines.
Calvin spent some time in Paris, then a centre of the "New Learning" and of religious ferment, and there he felt the effects of raging persecution. The publication of his great work, the _Institutes of the Christian Religion_, marked an epoch in the history of Protestantism. Though differing on certain points from the teachings of Luther, it was a powerful exposition of the Protestant faith as Calvin understood it, severely logical in form, and especially distinguished by its stern doctrines relating to divine sovereignty.
When in 1536 Calvin went to live in Geneva, it was already a Protestant city. He became virtually its ruler and made it a kind of theocracy, or rather a "religious republic," which he administered with vigorous laws enforced with the greatest strictness. Zealous Protestants from many countries gathered at Geneva, and from there the influence of Calvin, somewhat modified by that of his Swiss predecessor Zwingli, spread rapidly into France, England, Scotland, and Germany. At the time of Calvin's death (1564) there were three types of Protestantism established in the world--his own, and those of Luther and Zwingli. In Great Britain, and afterward in America, the Calvinistic type came to play a most important part in religious and national development.
Two estimates of Calvin, the first from a Protestant point of view, the second that of a Roman Catholic writer, are here presented.
A. M. FAIRBAIRN
In 1528 Calvin's father, perhaps illuminated by the disputes in his cathedral chapter, discovered that the law was a surer road to wealth and honor than the church, and decided that his son should leave theology for jurisprudence. The son, nothing loath, obeyed, and left Paris for Orleans, possibly, as he descended the steps of the College de Montaigu, brushing shoulders with a Spanish freshman named Ignatius Loyola. In Orleans Calvin studied law under Pierre de l'Estoile, who is described as _jurisconsultorum Gallorum facile princeps_, and as eclipsing in classical knowledge Reuchlin, Aleander, and Erasmus; and Greek under Wolmar, in whose house he met for the first time Theodore Beza, then a boy about ten years of age.
After a year in Orleans he went to Bourges, attracted by the fame of the Italian jurist Alciati, whose ungainliness of body and speech and vanity of mind his students loved to satirize and even by occasional rebellion to chasten. In 1531 Gerard Calvin died and his son, in 1532, published his first work, a commentary on Seneca's _de Clementia_. His purpose has been construed by the light of his late career; and some have seen in the book a veiled defence of the Huguenot martyrs, others a cryptic censure of Francis I, and yet others a prophetic dissociation of himself from Stoicism. But there is no mystery in the matter; the work is that of a scholar who has no special interest in either theology or the Bible. This may be statistically illustrated: Calvin cites twenty-two Greek authors and fifty-five Latin, the quotations being most abundant and from many books; but in his whole treatise there are only three Biblical texts expressly cited, and those from the Vulgate.
The man is cultivated and learned, writes elegant Latin, is a good judge of Latinity, criticises like any modern the mind and style, the knowledge and philosophy, the manner, the purpose, and the ethical ideas of Seneca; but the passion for religion has not as yet penetrated as it did later into his very bones. Erasmus is in Calvin's eyes the ornament of letters, though his large edition of Seneca is not all it ought to have been; but even Erasmus could not at twenty-three have produced a work so finished in its scholarship, so real in its learning, or so wide in its outlook.
The events of the next few months are obscure, but we know enough to see how forces, internal and external, were working toward change. In the second half of 1532 and the earlier half of 1533 Calvin was in Orleans, studying, teaching, practising the law, and acting in the university as proctor for the Picard nation; then he went to Noyon, and in October he was once more in Paris. The capital was agitated; Francis was absent, and his sister, Margaret of Navarre, held her court there, favoring the new doctrines, encouraging the preachers, the chief among them being her own almoner, Gerard Roussel.
Two letters of Calvin to Francis Daniel belong to this date and place; and in them we find a changed note. One speaks of "the troublous times," and the other narrates two events: first, it describes a play "pungent with gall and vinegar," which the students had performed in the College of Navarre to satirize the Queen; and secondly, the action of certain factious theologians who had prohibited Margaret's _Mirror of a Sinful Soul_. She had complained to the King, and he had intervened. The matter came before the university, and Nicolas Cop, the rector, had spoken strongly against the arrogant doctors and in defence of the Queen, "mother of all the virtues and of all good learning." Le Clerc, a parish priest, the author of the mischief, defended his performance as a task to which he had been formally appointed, praising the King, the Queen as woman and as author, contrasting her book with "such an obscene production" as _Pantagruel_, and finally saying that the book had been published without the approval of the faculty and was set aside only as "liable to suspicion."
Two or three days later, on November 1, 1533, came the famous rectorial address which Calvin wrote, and Cop revised and delivered, and which shows how far the humanist had travelled since April 4, 1532, the date of the _de Clementia_. He is now alive to the religious question, though he has not carried it to its logical and practical conclusion. Two fresh influences have evidently come into his life, the New Testament of Erasmus and certain sermons by Luther. The exordium of the address reproduces, almost literally, some sentences from Erasmus' _Paraclesis_, including those which unfold his idea of the _philosophia Christiana_; while the body of it repeats Luther's exposition of the beatitudes and his distinction between law and gospel, with the involved doctrines of grace and faith. Yet "_Ave gratia plena_" is retained in the exordium; and at the end the peace-makers are praised, who follow the example of Christ and contend not with the sword, but with the word of truth.
This address enables us to seize Calvin in the very act and article of change; he has come under a double influence. Erasmus has compelled him to compare the ideal of Christ with the church of his own day; and Luther has given him a notion of grace which has convinced his reason and taken possession of his imagination. He has thus ceased to be a humanist and a papist, but has not yet become a reformer. And a reformer was precisely what his conscience, his country, and his reason compelled him to become. Francis was flagrantly immoral, but a fanatic in religion; and mercy was not a virtue congenial to either church or state. Calvin had seen the Protestants from within; he knew their honesty, their honor, the purity of their motives, and the integrity of their lives; and he judged, as a jurist would, that a man who had all the virtues of citizenship ought not to be oppressed and treated as unfit for civil office or even as a criminal by the state. This is no conjecture, for it is confirmed by the testimony he bears to the influence exercised over him by the martyred Etienne de la Forge. He thus saw that a changed mind meant a changed religion, and a changed religion a change of abode. Cop had to flee from Paris, and so had Calvin.
In the May of 1534 he went to Noyon, laid down his offices, was imprisoned, liberated, and while there he seems to have finally renounced Catholicism. But he feared the forces of disorder which lurked in Protestantism, and which seemed embodied in the Anabaptists. Hence at Orleans he composed a treatise against one of their favorite beliefs, the sleep of the soul between death and judgment. Conscious personal being was in itself too precious, and in the sight of God too sacred, to be allowed to suffer even a temporary lapse. But to serve the cause he loved was impossible with the stake waiting for him, its fires scorching his face, and kindly friends endangered by his presence. And so, in the winter of 1534, he retired from France and settled at Basel.
Now a city where Protestantism reigned, where learning flourished, and where men so unlike as Erasmus and Farel--the fervid preacher of reform--could do their work unhindered, was certain to make a deep impression on a fugitive harassed and expatriated on account of religion; and the impression it made can be read in the _Christianae Religionis Institutio_, and especially in the prefatory _Letter to Francis I_. The _Institutio_ is Calvin's positive interpretation of the Christian religion: the _Letter_ is learned, eloquent, elegant, dignified, the address of a subject to his sovereign, yet of a subject who knows that his place in the state is as legal, though not as authoritative, as the sovereign's. It throbs with a noble indignation against injustice, and with a noble enthusiasm for freedom and truth. It is one of the great epistles of the world, a splendid apology for the oppressed and arraignment of the oppressors. It does not implore toleration as a concession, but claims freedom as a right.
Its author is a young man of but twenty-six, yet he speaks with the gravity of age. He tells the King that his first duty is to be just; that to punish unheard is but to inflict violence and perpetrate fraud. Those for whom he speaks are, though simple and godly men, yet charged with crimes that, were they true, ought to condemn them to a thousand fires and gibbets. These charges the King is bound to investigate, for he is a minister of God, and if he fails to serve the God whose minister he is, then he is a robber and no king.
Then he asks, "Who are our accusers?" and he turns on the priests like a new Erasmus, who does not, like the old, delight in satire for its own sake or in a literature which scourges men by holding up the mirror to vice, but who feels the sublimity of virtue so deeply that witticisms at the expense of vice are abhorrent to him. He takes up the charges in detail: it is said that the doctrine is new, doubtful, and uncertain, unconfirmed by miracles, opposed to the fathers and ancient custom, schismatical and productive of schism, and that its fruits are sects, seditions, license. On no point is he so emphatic as the repudiation of the personal charges: the people he pleads for have never raised their voice in faction or sought to subvert law and order; they fear God sincerely and worship him in truth, praying even in exile for the royal person and house.
The book which this address to the King introduces is a sketch or programme of reform in religion. The first edition of the _Institutio_ is distinguished from all later editions by the emphasis it lays, not on dogma, but on morals, on worship, and on polity. Calvin conceives the Gospel as a new law which ought to be embodied in a new life, individual and social. What came later to be known as Calvinism may be stated in an occasional sentence or implied in a paragraph, but it is not the substance or determinative idea of the book. The problem discussed has been set by the studies and the experience of the author; he has read the New Testament as a humanist learned in the law, and he has been startled by the contrast between its ideal and the reality which confronts him. And he proceeds in a thoroughly juridical fashion, just as Tertullian before him, and as Grotius and Selden after him. Without a document he can decide nothing; he needs a written law or actual custom; and his book falls into divisions which these suggest.
Hence his first chapter is concerned with duty or conduct as prescribed by the Ten Commandments; his second with faith as contained in the apostolic symbol; his third with prayer as fixed by the words of Christ; his fourth with the sacrament as given in the Scriptures; his fifth with the false sacraments as defined by tradition and enforced by Catholic custom; and his sixth with Christian liberty or the relation of the ecclesiastical and civil authorities. But though the book is, as compared with what it became later, limited in scope and contents--the last edition which left the author's hand in 1559 had grown from a work in six chapters to one in four books and eighty chapters--yet its constructive power, its critical force, its large outlook impress the student. We have here none of Luther's scholasticism, or of Melanchthon's deft manipulation of incompatible elements; but we have the first thoughts on religion of a mind trained by ancient literature to the criticism of life.