Part 21

The _Institutio_ bears the date "_Mense Martio; Anno_ 1536"; but Calvin, without waiting till his book was on the market, made a hurried journey to Ferrara, whose Duchess, Renee, a daughter of Louis XII, stood in active sympathy with the reformers. The reasons for this brief visit are very obscure; but it may have been undertaken in the hope of mitigating, by the help of Renee, the severity of the persecutions in France. On his return Calvin ventured, tradition says, to Noyon, probably for the sake of family affairs; but he certainly reached Paris; and, while in the second half of July making his way into Germany, he arrived at Geneva. An old friend, possibly Louis du Tillet, discovered him, and told Farel; and Farel, in sore straits for a helper, besought him, and indeed in the name of the Almighty commanded him, to stay. Calvin was reluctant, for he was reserved and shy, and conceived his vocation to be the scholar's rather than the preacher's; but the entreaties of Farel, half tearful, half minatory, prevailed. And thus Calvin's connection with Geneva began.

Calvin's life from this point onward falls into three parts: his first stay in Geneva from July, 1536, to March, 1538; his residence in Strasburg from September, 1538, to September, 1541; and his second stay in Geneva from the last date till his death, May 27, 1564. In the first period, he, in company with Farel, made an attempt to organize the church and reform the mind and manners of Geneva, and failed; his exile, formally voted by the council, was the penalty of his failure. In the second period he was professor of theology and French preacher at Strasburg, a trusted divine and adviser, a delegate to the Protestant churches of Germany, which he learned to know better, making the acquaintance of Melanchthon, and becoming more appreciative of Luther.

At Strasburg some of his best literary work was done--his _Letter to Cardinal Sadoleto_ (in its way his most perfect production), his _Commentary on the Romans_, a _Treatise on the Lord's Supper_, the second Latin and the first French edition of his _Institutio_. In the third period he introduced and completed his legislation at Geneva, taught, preached, and published there, watched the churches everywhere, and conducted the most extensive correspondence of his day. In these twenty-eight years he did a work which changed the face of Christendom.

We come then to Calvin's legislative achievements as his main title to name and fame. But two points must here be noted. In the first place, while his theology was less original and effective than his legislation or polity, yet he so construed the former as to make the latter its logical and indeed inevitable outcome. The polity was a deduction from the theology, which may be defined as a science of the divine will as a moral will, aiming at the complete moralization of man, whether as a unit or as a society. The two were thus so organically connected that each lent strength to the other, the system to the church and the church to the system, while other and more potently reasonable theologies either died or lived a feeble and struggling life.

Secondly, the legislation was made possible and practicable by Geneva, probably the only place in Europe where it could have been enacted and enforced. We have learned enough concerning Genevan history and institutions to understand why this should have been the case. The city was small, free, homogeneous, distinguished by a strong local patriotism, a stalwart communal life. In obedience to these instincts it had just emancipated itself from the ecclesiastical Prince and its ancient religious system; and the change thus accomplished was, though disguised in a religious habit, yet essentially political. For the council which abolished the bishop had made itself heir to his faculties and functions; it could only dismiss him as civil lord by dismissing him as the ecclesiastical head of Geneva, and in so doing it assumed the right to succeed as well as to supersede him in both capacities.

This, however, involved a notable inversion of old ideas; before the change the ecclesiastical authority had been civil, but because of the change the civil authority became ecclesiastical. If theocracy means the rule of the church or the sovereignty of the clergy in the state, then the ancient constitution of Geneva was theocratic; if democracy means the sovereignty of the people in church as well as in state, then the change had made it democratic. And it was just after the change had been effected that Calvin's connection with the city began.

Its chief pastor had persuaded him to stay as a colleague, and the council appointed him professor and preacher. He was young, exactly twenty-seven years of age, full of high ideals, but inexperienced, unacquainted with men, without any knowledge of Geneva and the state of things there. He could therefore make no terms, could only stay to do his duty. What that duty was soon became apparent. Geneva had not become any more moral in character because it had changed its mind in religion. It had two months before Calvin's arrival sworn to live according to the holy evangelical law and Word of God; but it did not seem to understand its own oath. And the man whom his intellectual sincerity and moral integrity had driven out of Catholicism could not hold office in any church which made light of conviction and conduct; and so he at once set himself to organize a church that should be efficaciously moral.

He built on the ancient Genevan idea, that the city is a church; only he wished to make the church to be primary and real. The theocracy, which had been construed as the reign of the clergy, he would interpret as ideal and realize as a reign of God. The citizens, who had assumed control of their own spiritual destinies and ecclesiastical affairs, he wanted to instruct in their responsibilities and discipline into obedience. And he would do it in the way of a jurist who believes in the harmony of law and custom; he would by positive enactments train the city, which conceived itself to be a church, to be and behave as if it were indeed a church, living according to the gospel which it had sworn to obey.

Thus a confession of faith was drawn up which the people were to adopt as their own, and so attain clarity and concordance of mind concerning God and his Word; and a catechism was composed which was to be made the basis of religious instruction in both the school and the family, for the citizen as well as the child. Worship was to be carefully regulated, psalm-books prepared, psalm-singing cultivated; the preacher was to interpret the Word, and the pastor to supervise the flock.

The Lord's Supper was to be celebrated monthly, but only those who were morally fit or worthy were to be allowed to communicate. The church, in order that it might fulfil its functions and guard the holy table, must have the right of excommunication. It was not enough that a man should be a citizen or a councillor to be admitted to the Lord's Supper; his mind must be Christian and his conduct Christlike. Without faith the rite was profaned, the presence of Christ was not realized. Moreover, since matrimonial cases were many and infelicity sprang both from differences of faith and impurity of conduct, a board, composed partly of magistrates and partly of ministers, was to be appointed to deal with them; and it was to have the power to exclude from the church those who either did not believe its doctrines or did not obey its commandments.

These were drastic proposals to be made to a city which had just dismissed its bishop, attained political freedom, and proclaimed a reformation of religion; and Calvin was not the man to leave them inoperative. A card-player was pilloried; a tire-woman, a mother, and two bridesmaids were arrested because they had adorned the bride too gayly; an adulterer was driven with the partner of his guilt through the streets by the common hangman, and then banished. These things taxed the temper of the city sorely; it was not unfamiliar with legislation of the kind, but it had not been accustomed to see it enforced. Hence, men who came to be known as "libertines," though they were both patriotic and moral and only craved freedom, rose and said: "This is an intolerable tyranny; we will not allow any man to be lord over our consciences." And about the same time Calvin's orthodoxy was challenged. Two Anabaptists arrived and demanded liberty to prophesy; and Peter Caroli charged him with heresy as to the Trinity. He would not use the Athanasian creed; and he defended himself by reasons that the scholar who knows its history will respect. The end soon came. When he heard that he had been sentenced to banishment he said, "If I had served men this would have been a poor reward, but I have served Him who never fails to perform what he has promised."

In 1541 Geneva recalled Calvin, and he obeyed as one who goes to fulfil an imperative but unwelcome duty. There is nothing more pathetic in the literature of the period than his hesitancies and fears. He tells Farel that he would rather die a hundred times than again take up that cross "_in qua millies quotidie pereundum esset_." And he writes to Viret that it were better to perish once for all than "_in illa carnificina iterum torqueri_." But he loved Geneva, and it was in evil case. Rome was plotting to reclaim it; Savoy was watching her opportunity, the patriots feared to go forward, and even the timid dared not go back. So the necessities of the city, divided between its factions and its foes, constituted an appeal which Calvin could not resist; but he did not yield unconditionally. He went back as the legislator who was to frame laws for its church; and he so adapted them to the civil constitution and the constitution to them, that he raised the little city of Geneva to be the Protestant Rome.

The _Ordonnances ecclesiastiques_ may be described as Calvin's programme of Genevan reform, or his method for applying to the local and external church the government which our Lord had instituted and the Apostles had realized. These ordinances expressed his historical sense and gratified his religious temper, while adapting the church to the city, so that the city might become a better church. To explain in detail how he proposed to do this is impossible within our limits; and we shall therefore confine ourselves to the most important of the factors he created, the ministry.

The ministerial ideal embodied in these ecclesiastical ordinances may be said to have had certain indirect but international results; it compelled Calvin to develop his system of education; it supplied the reformed church, especially in France, with the men which it needed to fight its battles and to form the iron in its blood; it presented the reformed church everywhere with an intellectual and educational ideal, which must be realized if its work was to be done; and it created the modern preacher, defining the sphere of his activity and setting up for his imitation a noble and lofty example.

Calvin soon found that the reformed faith could live in a democratic city only by an enlightened pulpit speaking to enlightened citizens, and that an educated ministry was helpless without an educated people. His method for creating both entitles him to rank among the foremost makers of modern education. As a humanist he believed in the classical languages and literatures--there is a tradition which says that he read through Cicero once a year--and so "he built his system on the solid rock of Graeco-Roman antiquity." Yet he did not neglect religion; he so trained the boys of Geneva through his catechism that each was said to be able to give a reason for his faith "like a doctor of the Sorbonne." He believed in the unity of knowledge and the community of learning, placing the magistrate and the minister, the citizen and the pastor, in the hands of the same teacher, and binding the school and the university together. The boy learned in the one and the man studied in the other, but the school was the way to the university, the university was the goal of the school.

In nothing does the pedagogic genius of Calvin more appear than in his fine jealousy as to the character and competence whether of masters or professors, and in his unwearied quest after qualified men. His letters teem with references to the men in various lands and many universities whom he was seeking to bring to Geneva. The first rector, Antoine Saunier, was a notable man; and he never rested till he had secured his dear old teacher, Mathurin Cordier. Castellio was a schoolmaster; Theodore Beza was head of college and academy, or school and university, together; and Calvin himself was a professor of theology. The success of the college was great; the success of the academy was greater. Men came from all quarters--English, Italians, Spanish, Germans, Russians, ministers, jurists, old men, young men, all with the passion to learn in their blood--to jostle each other among the thousand hearers who met to listen to the great reformer. But France was the main feeder of the academy; Frenchmen filled its chairs, occupied its benches, learned in it the courage to live and the will to die. From Geneva books poured into France; and the French church was ever appealing for ministers, yet never appealed in vain.

Within eleven years, 1555-1566--Calvin died in 1564--it is known that Geneva sent one hundred sixty-one pastors into France; how many more may have gone unrecorded we cannot tell. And they were learned men, strenuous, fearless, praised by a French bishop as modest, grave, saintly, with the name of Jesus Christ ever on their lips. Charles IX implored the magistrates of Geneva to stop the supply and withdraw the men already sent; but the magistrates replied that the preachers had been sent not by them, but by their ministers, who believed that the sovereign duty of all princes and kings was to do homage to Him who had given to them their dominion. It was small wonder that the Venetian Suriano should describe Geneva as "the mine whence came the ore of heresy"; or that the Protestants should gather courage as they heard the men from Geneva sing psalms in the face of torture and death.

It was indeed a very different France which the eyes of the dying Calvin saw from that which the young man had seen thirty years before. Religious hate was even more bitter and vindictive; war had come and made persecution more ferocious; but the Huguenots had grown numerous, potent, respected, feared, and disputed with Catholicism the supremacy of the kingdom. And Calvin had done it, not by arms nor by threats, nor by encouragement of sedition or insurrection--to such action he was ever resolutely opposed--but by the agency of the men whom he formed in Geneva, and by their persuasive speech. The reformed minister was essentially a preacher, intellectual, exegetical, argumentative, seriously concerned with the subjects that most appealed to the serious-minded.

Modern oratory may be said to begin with him, and indeed to be his creation. He helped to make the vernacular tongues of Western Europe literary. He accustomed the people to hear the gravest and most sacred themes discussed in the language which they knew; and the themes ennobled the language, the language was never allowed to degrade the themes. And there was no tongue and no people that he influenced more than the French. Calvin made Bossuet and Massillon possible; as a preacher he found his successor in Bourdaloue; and a literary critic who does not love him has expressed a doubt as to whether Pascal could be more eloquent or was so profound. And the ideal then realized in Geneva exercised an influence far beyond France. It extended into Holland, which in the strength of the reformed faith resisted Charles V and his son, achieved independence, and created the freest and best educated state on the continent of Europe.

John Knox breathed for a while the atmosphere of Geneva, was subdued into the likeness of the man who had made it, and when he went home he copied its education and tried to repeat its reformation. English reformers, fleeing from martyrdom, found a refuge within its hospitable walls, and, returning to England, attempted to establish a Genevan discipline, and failed, but succeeded in forming the Puritan character. If the author of the _Ordonnances ecclesiastiques_ accomplished, whether directly or indirectly, so much, we need not hesitate to term him a notable friend to civilization.

JEAN M. V. AUDIN

When the sword of the law fell upon one of his followers, the voice of Luther was magnificent; it exclaimed, in the ears of emperors, kings, and dukes, "You have shed the blood of the just," and then the Saxon, in honor of the martyr, extemporized a hymn which was chanted in the very face of the civil power:

"In the Low Countries, at Brussels, The Lord his greatness hath displayed, In the death of two of his loved children On whom grand gifts he had bestowed."

Calvin had not the courage to imitate Luther. He has told us that he wanted courage; he again repeats it: he says that he, a plebeian, trifling as a man, and having but little learning, has nothing in him which could deserve celebrity. And yet he essayed a timid protest in favor of certain Huguenots who had been burned on the public square. "The work," says Prince Masson, "of a double-faced writer, a Catholic in his writings and a Lutheran in his bedchamber."

This is his first book. It is entitled _de Clementia_ (or _Treatise on Clemency_), and is a paraphrase of some Latin writer of the decline. Moreover, this is the first time that a commentator is ignorant of the life of him whose work he publishes. Calvin has confounded the two Senecas, the father and the son; the rhetorician and the philosopher, of both of whom he makes but one literary personage, living the very patriarchal life of more than one hundred fifteen years.

We must pardon Varillas for having, with sufficient acrimony, brought into relief this mistake of the biographer of Seneca the philosopher, and not, like the historians of the Reformation, become vexed at the proud tone of the French historian. Had the fault been committed by a Catholic, where is the Protestant who would not have done the same thing as Varillas?

The literary work which Calvin, in the shape of a commentary, has interwoven with the treatise of Seneca is a production not unworthy a literator of the revival; it is an amplification, which one would have supposed to have been written in the cell of a Benedictine monk, so numerous are the citations, so great is the display of erudition, so replete is it with the names, Greek and Latin, of poets, historians, moralists, rhetoricians, philosophers, and philologists.

Calvin is a coquettish student, who loves to parade his reading and his memory. His work is a gallery, open to all the modern and ancient glories of literature, whom the commentator calls to his aid, often for the elucidation of a doubtful passage. The young rhetorician glorifies his country, and when upon his march he encounters some historic name, by which his idea can be illustrated, he hastens to proclaim it, with all its titles to admiration. He there salutes Bude in magnificent terms: "Bude, the glory and pillar of human learning, thanks to whom, at this day, France can claim the palm of erudition." The portrait which he draws of Seneca is the production of a practised pen: "Seneca, whose pure and polished phrase savors, in some sort, of his age; his diction florid and elegant; his style, without labor or restraint, moves on, free and unembarrassed." It may be seen that the student had the honor to study under Mathurin Cordier and to attend the lectures of Alciati; but, after all, his book is but a defective allegory; for what reader could have divined that the writer designed to represent Francis I, under the name of Nero, as addressed by the Cordovan? The treatise could produce no sensation, and, like the work of Seneca, must be shipwrecked in that sea of the passions which, at the two epochs, raged around both writers.

Calvin experienced much trouble in having his Latin commentary printed; he was in need of funds, and the revenues of his benefice of Pont l'Eveque were insufficient to defray the expense of printing. How could he apply to the Mommor family? Moreover, he was in dread that his book should prove a failure and thereby injure his budding reputation. All these alarms of a maiden author are set forth in various letters which he addressed on this subject to the dear friends of his bosom.

"Behold my books of Seneca concerning clemency, printed at my own expense and labor! They must now be sold, in order that I may again obtain the money which I have expended. I must also watch that my reputation does not suffer. You will oblige me, then, by informing me how the work has been received, whether with favor or indifference." The whole anxiety of the poor author is to lose nothing by the enterprise; his purse is empty; it needs replenishing; and he urges the professors to give circulation to the treatise; he solicits one of his friends at Bourges, a member of the university, to bring it forward in his lectures; and appeals to the aid of Daniel, to whom he sent a hundred copies. Papire Masson was mistaken: the commentary on clemency did not first appear, as he supposes, under the title of _Lucius Calvinus, civis Romanus_, but under that of _Calvinus_, a name ever after retained by the reformer.

This treatise introduced Calvin to the notice of the learned world: Bucer, Capito, Padius, sent congratulations to the writer; Calvin, in September, 1532, had sent a copy of his work to Bucer, who was then at Strasburg. The person commissioned to present it was a poor young man, suspected of Anabaptism, and a refugee from France. Calvin's letter of recommendation is replete with tender compassion for the miseries of the sinner. "My dear Bucer," he writes, "you will not be deaf to my entreaties, you will not disregard my tears; I implore you, to come to the aid of the proscribed, be a father to the orphan."

This was sending the sick man to a sad physician. Bucer, by turns Catholic, Lutheran, Anabaptist, Zwinglian! Besides, why this proselytism of a moral _cure_? The exile was Anabaptist by the same title as Calvin was predestinarian, in virtue of a text of Scripture: "Go; whoever shall believe and be baptized will be saved." The Anabaptist believed in the inefficacy of baptism without faith manifested by an external act; but is not Calvin, at this very hour, as much to be pitied as the Anabaptist? He also doubted, searched, and interrogated his Bible, and imagined that he had caught the meaning of a letter which no intelligence before him had been able to seize. And what was this truth, the conquest of which infused such fear into his soul that, before he could announce it to the world, he sold his charge of Pont l'Eveque and even his paternal inheritance?