V.
The prey of calumnies that descended from the throne, and from thence spread throughout all Europe; accused of sedition, blasphemy, enmity to God and to man; judged and condemned with closed doors; their tongues mutilated before undergoing their final sentence, the Reformers of France had no means of justification, and their very martyrdom was dishonoured.
It was then that the most energetic of apologies appeared in the Institutes of the Christian Religion. “This,” says Calvin, in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms, “is what led me to publish the Institutes: first, to relieve my brethren from an unjust accusation, whose death was precious before the Lord; and moreover, that, as the same sufferings were suspended over the heads of many poor faithful, foreign nations might be touched with commiseration for their woes, and might afford them a shelter.”
This book announced the true leader of the French Reformation. Luther was too distant, and his German genius could not wholly sympathize with that of France. Guillaume Farel was too ardent; he had not that firm and solid character which was necessary for great undertakings. The others were obscure. The growing churches awaited a man able to place himself at their head, and Calvin was this man.
His life is everywhere; I will only recount that which enters into the plan of this history.
Jean Calvin was born in 1509 at Noyon, in Picardy. Destined from his infancy to the priesthood, he was presented with an ecclesiastical benefice at the age of twelve. But his own will and that of his father led him from theology to the law, which he went to study at Bourges and at Orleans. He distinguished himself there by his precocious intelligence and the severity of his manners.
The Reformation agitated at that time all the schools of learning. Masters and students occupied themselves with nothing else, either through a spirit of curiosity, or through the yearning of conscience and faith. Calvin was among these last, and the Bible which he received from the hands of one of his relations, Pierre Robert Olivétan, detached him from Catholicism, as it had already rescued Zwinglius and Luther. The three great Reformers arrived at the same end by the same road.
He was not of those who are silent on what they believe. Listeners flocked round him, and the solitude he loved became impossible for him. “As for me,” he says again, in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms, “inasmuch as being naturally diffident and retiring I have always preferred repose and tranquillity; I began to seek for some hiding-place, and means of withdrawing myself from the world; but so far from obtaining my wish, every retreat and every secluded spot were to me so many public schools.”
Calvin comprehended that his time and his powers were no longer his own. He preached in the secret meetings at Bourges and at Paris. Theodore de Bèze says: “He advanced wonderfully the cause of God in many families, teaching the truth not with an affected language, to which he was always opposed, but with a depth of knowledge and so much gravity of speech, that no man heard him without being filled with admiration.”[15] He was at that time twenty-four years of age.
A discourse which he composed, in 1533, for the rector of the university of Paris, and which was condemned for heresy by the Sorbonne, compelled him to fly. It is said that he escaped by a window, a few moments before the serjeants broke into his chamber.
He withdrew, under the name of Charles d’Espeville, to Angoulême, and was received into the house of the canon Louis du Tillet, where he had a rich library at his service.
He was already occupied with his great work on the Christian religion, and laboured upon it with such ardour that he frequently passed nights without sleeping, and days without eating. When he had finished a chapter, he read it to his friends; and on opening the manuscript, he was wont to say: “Let us find the truth.”
He sowed the doctrines of the Reformation in Poitou and Saintonge, publicly when he could, secretly when persecution was too violent. There is still shown near Poitiers an excavation to which popular tradition gives the name of Calvin’s cave. When there one day with several of his disciples, one of them represented that there must be truth in the sacrifice of the Mass, since it was celebrated in every place in Christendom. “My mass is there,” replied Calvin, pointing to the Bible. Then throwing down upon the table his cap, and raising his eyes to heaven, he exclaimed: “O Lord, if on the day of judgment Thou reprehendest me for that I have been to Mass and that I have deserted it, I will say to Thee with reason: Lord, Thou hast not bidden me to it. There is Thy law; there is the Scripture Thou hast given me, in the which I have found no other sacrifice than Thy immolation on the altar of the cross.”
The supper was celebrated in the depth of the cavern by Calvin and his friends. So, fourteen centuries before, the Christians communicated in the catacombs of Rome; so, two centuries after, the Reformers of France have held communion in the wilderness; and still later, in the days of the Revolution, (Roman) Catholic priests have erected their altars amidst the woods.
Constantly in peril of his life, Calvin went to fix himself at Bâle, the city of refuge for the French, when the Geneva of the Reformation did not yet exist. There the last touch was put to his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and it appeared in the month of August, 1535.
This was the first theological and literary monument of the French Reformation. There may be disputes about Calvin’s notions (he belonged to his time, as we do to ours), but his genius cannot be contested. His premises, which corresponded to the intellectual and moral level of his times, once laid down, he pursued them with an incomparable vigour of logic. His system was completed.
Spreading abroad in the schools, the castles of the gentry, the houses of the burghers, even the workshops of the people, the Institutes became the most powerful of preachers. Round this book the Reformers arrayed themselves as round a standard. They found in it everything—doctrine, discipline, ecclesiastical organization; and the apologist of the martyrs became the legislator of their children.
We will not dwell upon the lofty style of the Institutes; Calvin cared little for literary fame, whatever Bossuet may have said. He went straight to the point, and the expression came clear, energetic, full of life, from the very circumstance of his only troubling himself about the correctness of his thoughts.
In his dedicatory epistle to Francis I., he refuted the following objections addressed to the disciples of the Reformation: “Your doctrine is new and untried; you confirm it by no miracle; you are in contradiction with the Fathers; you overthrow tradition and custom; you make war upon the Church; you engender sedition.” In concluding, Calvin supplicated the king to examine the confession of faith of the Reformers, so that, beholding them to be in accordance with the Bible, he might treat them no longer as heretics. “It is your duty, sire,” he says to the king, “to close neither your understanding nor your heart against so just a defence, especially when the question is of such high import, namely, how the glory of God shall be maintained on earth.... A matter worthy of your ears, worthy of your jurisdiction, worthy of your royal throne!”
We are assured that the king did not deign even to read this epistle. Some court intrigue, or a caprice of the Duchess d’Etampes, absorbed, it would appear, his leisure. If one considered, not the hand of God, that orders all things, but the visible causes of events, upon what would depend the religious and political destiny of nations?
His Institutes were scarcely finished before Calvin went to Italy to see Rénée de France, daughter of Louis XII. and duchess of Ferrara, who had, like Marguérite de Valois, opened her heart to the Reformed faith. This visit established a correspondence which was never interrupted, and Calvin still wrote to her when on his death-bed.
In 1536 he was appointed pastor and professor at Geneva. The religious, moral, intellectual, and even political revolution he brought into that town with him, is beside our work. Let us only add, that from his new country he never ceased to act upon France by his books, his letters, and by the numerous students, who, after having received his lessons, carried back to their churches what he had taught them. Calvin was the guide of the French Reformers, their counsellor, the soul of their first synods; and the immense authority he exercised over them was so well recognised, that the name of Calvinists was given to them about the middle of the sixteenth century.
“He was most restless for the advance of his sect,” says Etienne Pasquier. “When our prisons were gorged with victims, he incessantly exhorted, consoled, confirmed them by his letters, and never wanted messengers, to whom the doors were open, despite whatever trouble the gaolers might take.”[16]
Considering the irreparable loss the Romish church has suffered through this Reformer, we are little astonished at the anathemas she poured upon him, and with which she still pursues him. She has measured the strength of her blows according to the magnitude of her wounds. We are not penning Calvin’s apology, but some short explanations may not be out of place here. Calvin has been accused of ambition. He had only that which is common to men of genius, who are thrust into the foremost rank by the instinct of ordinary minds, and by the force of circumstances. Did they refuse to ascend, they would not be humble; they would be unfaithful to their mission, and prevaricators. The vulgar herd, which sees their lofty position, raises the cry of pride: it judges the vocation of great souls by its own.
It is also said that Calvin was absolute and inflexible in his ideas. Yes, because he had strong convictions, with the consciousness of his own superiority. And if we consider the wants of his time, it will be acknowledged, perhaps, that this was the only way of preventing the new doctrines from failure in every sense, and being lost.
That he should appear to us, at the distance we are from him, with our opinions and our manners, to have fallen into grave errors, may be conceived. But to judge him properly, it is from his own point of view, and from that of his age, that we must observe him—not from our own.
We are constantly reminded of the execution of Michel Servet. If it be said that this was an act to be deeply deplored, the remark is just; but if Calvin is accused of contradicting his own maxims, it will only be proved that those who make the accusation have never studied them. The Protestants claimed the right of citizenship in Germany, in Switzerland, in France, in the name, in the sole name of the Divine truth of which they judged themselves to be the faithful interpreters, and never in the name of liberty of belief and of worship. To convince oneself of this, it is only necessary to read the detail of their trials. Not a single word could be found in the whole volume of Crespin’s Martyrs, expressive of toleration understood in the sense of Bayle, Locke, and modern ideas. They justify themselves by texts from the Bible, and summon their adversaries to prove that their faith is not conformable to it, or able to absolve them. Their defence is here, and here only. If it had been proposed to them to accord similar rights to those whom they themselves regarded as impious or heretics, they would have beheld herein a rebellion against the will of God. It is not, therefore, Calvin who set up the stake of Michel Servet: it is the whole sixteenth century.[17]
If Rome beholds in this act an excuse for her own intolerance, we do not deny it. But it is no excuse for her refinements of cruelty; it is none for her slaughters en masse, nor for her perpetual violations of plighted faith. Either no treaty of peace, no contract between the two worships ought to have been accepted, or, when they were accepted, they ought to have been kept.
We will further observe, that if the two communions were intolerant in the sixteenth century, the one was so by virtue of its principles, the other was so in spite of itself. The Reformation, by granting the right of private judgment, had indirectly established religious liberty. It did not perceive at once all the consequences of this principle, because the Reformers had carried over with them a part of the prejudices of their first education; but these consequences were to become apparent sooner or later, and it is therefore justly regarded as the mother of all modern liberty.
Calvin had a share in only one execution. His heart was not cruel, and he was horrified at all the sanguinary acts unauthorized by a regular judicial sentence. He more than once restrained the hands of those who would have shed the blood of François de Guise, the cut-throat of Vassy. “I can protest,” he wrote to the duchess of Ferrara, “that it alone depended upon me that men of resolve and action, before the war, who were only restrained by my exhortation, did not devote themselves to exterminate him from the world.”
Calvin was sometimes impatient and irascible, and he has accused himself of being so. But the soft and affectionate sentiments that one would scarcely expect to find in the austere soul of the Reformer, were not strangers to him. Read his correspondence with his intimate friends Farel and Viret: how one hears the voice of the man, who reposed in the bosom of friendship from the grievous duties of his charge! and with what emotion the minister Des Gallards, who had spent sixteen years near him, speaks of his goodness!
He died poor. His disinterestedness was so great that the sceptic Bayle, on relating that he had left only three hundred crowns, inclusive of his library, could not repress a cry of admiration. “It is one of the rarest victories,” says he, “that virtue and grandeur of soul can obtain over nature in those who exercise the apostolic mission.”
The prodigious labours of Calvin oppress our imagination. “I do not believe,” Theodore de Bèze states, “that his equal can be found. Beside preaching every day from week to week, most frequently and whenever he could, he preached twice every Sunday. He lectured three times a week on theology. He made the remonstrances at the consistory, and gave an entire lecture every Friday in the conference of the Scripture, which we call Congregation; and he so persisted in this course to his death, that he never missed once, except when extremely ill. For the rest, who can recount his other works, ordinary and extraordinary? I do not think any man of our time has had more to hear, to answer, to write, or things of greater importance to deal with. The multiplicity and quality of his writings are alone sufficient to astound every man who looks at them, and still more those who read them. And what makes his labours more astonishing is, that his frame was naturally so weak, so attenuated by watching and too great abstinence, and what is more, subject to so many disorders, that any man who saw him could not have thought but that he had a very short while to live; and yet, notwithstanding all this, he never ceased to labour night and day in the Lord’s work. Many a time we urged him to take more care of himself; but his constant answer was that he did next to nothing, and that we ought to let him be, so that God might find him watching and working his best, until his last breath.”[18]
Calvin died on the 27th of May, 1564, aged fifty-five years all but one month. He was of the middle height, and had a pale face, brown complexion, and serene, brilliant eyes. He was neat and plain in his dress; and he ate so little, that for many years he took but one meal a day.
A few weeks before his death he dictated his will, in which he takes God to witness as to the sincerity of his faith, and offers his thanksgivings that he should have been employed in the service of Jesus Christ and the truth.