The French have always been the most successful interpreters of new ideas to Europe. Their logical acuteness, their mastery of method, their gifts of organisation, as well as their language, with its matchless clearness and elasticity, have well fitted them for this office; and these gifts were now to be illustrated in a pre-eminent degree by their great countryman John Calvin.
This son of the notary in the episcopal court of Noyon in Picardy, was born in the year 1509. At the age of twelve he had been appointed to a chaplaincy in the cathedral,John Calvin. and received the tonsure. But, though he subsequently became a curé, he never proceeded any further in clerical orders; for his father, thinking that the legal profession offered more promise, sent him to Orleans, and then to Bourges to study law, 1529–1531. It was during these years that Calvin fell under the influence of Lutheran teachers, notably of Jacques Lefèvre, a man of Picardy like himself, and one of the fathers of French Protestantism. In the year 1534, Calvin was driven from his country by the persecutions instituted by Francis I., and retired to Basle. Here at the age of twenty-five he published the first edition of his great work, The Institutes, a manual of Christian religion, which, although subsequently enlarged, contains a complete outline of his theological system, and which probably has exercised a more profound influence than any other book written by so young a man. In the year 1536, as he passed through Geneva, he was induced by the solemn adjurations of William Farel of Dauphiné, a French exile himself,Condition of Geneva. to abandon the studies he so dearly loved, and devote himself to missionary effort. The imperial city of Geneva was of importance because it commanded the valley of the Rhone, and the commercial routes which united there; it enjoyed municipal self-government, but was under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of its bishop and was threatened by the Duke of Savoy, who held the surrounding country and possessed certain judicial powers within the town itself. To emancipate themselves more completely from this double yoke of ecclesiastical and temporal authority was the constant aim of the patriots of Geneva, and with that view they had made an alliance with the canton of Freibourg in 1519, and that of Bern in 1526. An intermittent struggle had ensued, which was embittered by the adoption of the Lutheran Doctrine by the city in 1535, at the instigation of Farel. In 1536, war had broken out between the Duke and the canton of Bern, when the Swiss succeeded in conquering the whole of the country of Vaud, and thus relieved Geneva of all immediate danger from the Duke.
Calvin, induced to stay in Geneva at this moment, commenced forthwith to found a Christian church after the model of the Institutes; but the severity of his system led to a reaction, and caused his exile, and that of Farel, in 1538. Three years afterwards (September 1541), the city, torn by internal discord, and afraid of being conquered either by the Duke, who was supported by the Catholics within the walls,Calvin at Geneva, 1536–1538, 1541–1564. or by Bern, which courted the Protestants, recalled the Reformer, and accepted his system of church-government. Leaving the municipal government of the city intact, he set up by its side an ecclesiastical consistory, consisting of the pastors, and twelve elders elected from the two councils of the town on the nomination of the clergy. The jurisdiction of this consistory was nominally confined to morals, and the regulation of Church matters. It could only punish by penance, and by exclusion from the Sacrament, but as it was the duty of the secular authority to enforce its decisions, every sin became a crime, punished with the utmost severity. All were forced by law to attend public worship, and partake of the Lord’s Supper. To wear clothes of a forbidden stuff, to dance at a wedding, to laugh at Calvin’s sermons, became an offence punishable at law. Banishment, imprisonment, sometimes death, were the penalties inflicted on unchastity, and a child was beheaded for having struck his parents. When offences such as these were so severely visited, we cannot wonder that heresy did not escape. In 1547, Gruet was executed, and in 1553, Servetus was burnt. This remorseless tyranny, which reminds one forcibly of the rule of Savonarola, was not established without opposition. A party termed the Libertines was formed, who endeavoured to relax the severity of the discipline, and to vindicate the independence of the secular authority. Nevertheless Calvin, aided by the French exiles who crowded into Geneva and obtained the freedom of the city and a share in the government, successfully maintained his supremacy until his death in 1564, when he was succeeded by his pupil, Théodore Beza.
Geneva had been relieved from fear of attack from the Duke of Savoy by the French conquest of his country in 1543, and although, in the October of the year in which Calvin died, the Duke obtained from Bern a restoration of all the country south of the Lake of Geneva which it had seized in 1536, he did not make any attempt on the city itself. Geneva continued to be an independent republic, forming from time to time alliances with some of the Swiss cantons, till 1815, when she finally became a member of the Swiss Confederation.
The predominant characteristic of the teaching of Calvin lies in its eclecticism. In his doctrinal views: in his tenets as to Predestination, the Eucharist,Characteristics of Calvinism. and the unquestioned authority of Scripture to the exclusion of tradition, he approached the views of Zwingle rather than those of Luther. But if in so doing he represents the most uncompromising and pronounced antagonism to the teaching of Rome, yet in his conviction that outside the Church there is no salvation, and in the overwhelming authority he ascribes to her, he reasserts the most extravagant tenets of Catholicism, and revives the spirit of Hebraism. That the religion he established, if not exactly ascetic, was gloomy beyond measure; that it has inspired no art except, perhaps, certain forms of literature; that his principles of church-government, though founded on a democratic basis, in practice destroyed all individual liberty; that, so far from advancing the spirit of toleration, they necessarily involved persecution—all this must be admitted. His strong predestinarian views, if logically acted up to, ought to have led to a fatalistic spirit most dangerous to morals, and paralysed action, as perhaps they have in a few cases. But few sane men have ever believed themselves to be eternally reprobate, or acted as if they disbelieved in free-will. The practical results of Calvinism have therefore been to produce a type of men like the founder himself, John Knox, and Théodore Beza, men of remarkable strength of will, extraordinary devotion, and indomitable energy, and to furnish a creed for the most uncompromising opponents of Rome.
Henceforth Geneva was to become the citadel of the Reformers; the refuge of those who had to fly from other lands; the home of the printing-press whence innumerable pamphlets were despatched; the school whence missionaries went forth to preach; the representative of the most militant form of Protestantism on a republican basis; the natural and inevitable enemy of the Counter-Reformation which was the ally of the Jesuits, and of the monarchical forces of Catholic Europe, headed by Spain.
CHAPTER VII
PHILIP AND SPAIN