Great Christians of France: Saint Louis and Calvin

by François Guizot

Calvin left Angoulême and Nérac, and stayed for a time at Poitiers, where the friends of religious reform who gathered round him, eager for his words, celebrated for the first time the Lord's Supper according to the evangelical rites, in a cave near the town, which is called to this day Calvin's Cave. He was soon compelled to leave Poitiers, and went to Orleans and thence secretly to Paris, where he saw a man whose name was one day to spread a dark stain over his own, the Spaniard, Michael Servetus, a guilty heretic in his eyes. Calvin offered to meet him at a conference, and discuss with him the doctrine of the Trinity, which the Spaniard had just then openly attacked. Servetus accepted the challenge, but did not appear when the appointed time arrived. Possibly some angry scorn lingered in Calvin's heart, who left Paris and went to Noyon, to take final leave of his family. At length he set out for Strasburg, already one of the strongholds of the Reformation, where he had many friends—among others, the learned Bucer, with whom he had been in constant correspondence. He arrived there probably about the beginning of the year 1535; but he did not settle at Strasburg; he preferred Basle, the place where men of letters, scholars, theologians, and celebrated printers were to be found—Erasmus, Simon Grynæus, and Froben— and where he hoped to find the leisure which he needed in order to produce the great work which he had projected, his "Institutes of the Christian Religion."

Chapter V.
Calvin The Theologian.

The production of the 'Institutes' was by no means the most difficult or meritorious act of Calvin's life, for a man's superiority and force of character are not manifested in the labour of solitary thought, but in the contests of public and practical life. Geneva was the stage on which we can best see how Calvin comported himself as a man; but the 'Institutes of the Christian Religion' were, and are still, the noblest monument of the greatness of mind and originality of idea which distinguished him in his own century. More than that, I believe this book to be the most valuable and enduring of all his labours; for those churches which are specially known as the reformed Churches of France, Switzerland, Holland, Scotland, and the United States of America, received from Calvin's Institutes the doctrine, organization and discipline which, in spite of sharp trials, grave mistakes, and claims that are incompatible with the progress of liberty, have still, for more than three centuries, been the source of all their strength and vitality.

The preface of the book is, in itself and apart from what follows, very remarkable and very characteristic of the man. Calvin dedicated his work to Francis I., to the persecutor of French reformers during one of the fiercest outbreaks of persecution, and at a time when he himself had been compelled to leave his country in order to live in security, and speak with freedom. 'And do not think,' he says to the king, 'that I endeavour here to plead my own individual defence, in order to obtain permission to return to the land of my birth; for, although I have such an affection for it as it is in human nature to feel, yet, under existing circumstances, I do not suffer any great grief at being absent from it. But I plead the cause of all the faithful, nay the cause of Christ, which is at the present time so completely rent and trampled under foot throughout your kingdom that it seems to be in a very desperate case. And all this has come to pass more through the tyranny of certain Pharisees than by your desire.'

Calvin was the boldest, and at the same time the least revolutionary among the reformers of the sixteenth century; he was devoid of fear, but he had great deference and consideration for authority, even whilst he was openly opposing it. It appears that the original idea of his great work occurred to him in 1534, whilst he was at Angoulême, on a visit to the canon Louis du Tillet. 'But nothing was farther from my thoughts, Sire,' he says in the preface, 'than to write things which should be laid before your Majesty; my intention was only to teach certain rudiments, so that those who were moved by some good impulse from God might be instructed in true piety. And chiefly, by this my labour, I wished to serve our people of France, of whom I saw many hungering and thirsting for Jesus Christ, but very few who had any true knowledge of him.' The idea of the book was therefore, at first, exclusively religious, and it was destined for the use of the followers of the French reformers. But when Calvin was about to publish it, he again becomes prudent and politic; he addresses his book to the King of France, invokes the authority of the persecutor, and endeavours to convince his reason. He shows himself to be a respectful and faithful subject at the same time that he is an independent Christian and a reformer.

The language and conduct of Calvin were certainly not owing to any uncertainty in his convictions, or any feeling of timidity in the presence of royalty; in this preface he often forgets or puts aside the very prudence and policy which induced him to address the king. He places Francis I. in a very difficult position, and hopelessly offends him by the brutal violence and insulting familiarity with which, whilst addressing the king, he speaks of the Catholic Church and of its dignitaries; sometimes he encourages, sometimes threatens the king himself; he undertakes to prove that the reformers are not insurgents, that they do not meditate any plot against the crown or threaten any danger to the state; he goes so far as to promise that, even if the king refuses to do them justice, and if he continues to allow them 'still to be cruelly persecuted by imprisonment, scourging, torture, confiscation, and the stake, yet in our patience we shall possess our souls, and shall wait for the mighty hand of the Lord.' But at the same time Calvin predicts that the Divine wrath will overtake the king if he persists in persecuting the reformers: 'For he is a true king who, in the government of his kingdom, recognises that he is indeed the minister of God; and, on the contrary, he who does not reign to the end that he may set forth and show the glory of God is not a king but a brigand. They are deceived who expect long prosperity in a kingdom which is not ruled by the sceptre of God; that is to say, by his Holy Word.' From page to page we see this alternation between religious zeal and policy; the author is aiming at a revolution, but all the time we see in the reformer the man who respects law and order.

The question whether the 'Institutes of the Christian Religion' was written first in French or in Latin has been often discussed and is not yet decided. The preface from which I have quoted the preceding passages is in French, and bears date Basle, 'the first day of August, 1535.' I have it now before me in a copy of the French edition which was published at Geneva in 1562; my copy formerly belonged to Sully, and the margin is full of notes in his own handwriting. It is said that no French edition of the work itself bearing date 1535 can now be discovered; the earliest edition known is that which was published at Basle in 1536, in Calvin's own name, and of which both the body of the work and the preface are in Latin. There was no French edition with date and the author's name until 1540. I do not intend at this time to plunge into the controversy that has been excited by the chronological difficulty which envelopes the history of this book; I have studied it carefully, and am inclined to think, with many of Calvin's latest and most learned historians, that the 'Institutes of the Christian Religion' was written originally in French, and published at Basle in 1535, without the author's name, and that it was written first of all and specially for the French nation, and was intended to remove from the mind of Francis I. and the general public, the impressions produced by the recent excesses of the Anabaptists, which their enemies laid to the charge of the reformers also. It is certain that the dedication to Francis I. was written and published first of all in French, and on the first of August, 1535: these facts are beyond dispute. How was it that a preface written in French, and dated 1535, was put at the head of a book written in Latin, and not published until 1536? The book itself, in this first edition, was probably nothing more than the rather hasty and incomplete anonymous work of a young man as yet little known, who had just left France, and was still much more French than, as he became later, European. It was a first work, a sketch rather than such a treatise as the title would lead the reader to expect. Calvin himself points this out in the preface to his 'Commentaries on the Psalms,' in which he gives many important details connected with his own life and works. That which seems to me the most probable solution of the question is still beset with many difficulties, and I will not linger to discuss them. Be this as it may, from 1536 to 1559 Calvin published eight editions of his 'Christian Institutes,' and they were successively revised and enlarged to such a degree as ultimately to form a work which differs from the first known edition both in extent and form, although it is identical in spirit and in all essential points. The edition of 1559 is the last which Calvin prepared for the press, and it has therefore served as the basis for all other editions and for the numerous translations which were made at a later period. It is undoubtedly the true work of Calvin, and contains his latest injunctions respecting the doctrines of the reformed Church, the rules for its internal government and its relation to the state, its position in the commonwealth as well as its faith and Christian discipline.

In order thoroughly to understand the fundamental idea and true aim of Calvin's book we must transport ourselves to the precise period when he first originated and wrote it. Luther, born in 1483, twenty-six years before Calvin, had accomplished, between the years 1517 and 1532, his work of struggle and rupture with the Church of Rome; the Confession of Augsburg had been published; [Footnote 60] the Protestant princes had entered into the Smalcaldic league; [Footnote 61] the religious peace of Nuremberg had been concluded and ratified by the Diet of Ratisbon; [Footnote 62 ] in fact, when Calvin left France and took refuge at Basle in 1534, the German Reformation was established in central and northern Europe. But the new work was not so far advanced in western Europe, especially in France and the neighbouring countries speaking the French language. In them the war against the Church of Rome had also been eagerly commenced, the demolition of the ancient edifice had been pursued with ardour, but the work was hindered and opposed by the people, and the construction of a new Church had not even been commenced. The reformed Church appeared here and there, but without any bond of unity or organization, and even in its cradle a prey to uncertainty, confusion, and anarchy.