When Calvin received, the order to leave Geneva within three days: 'Well,' said he, 'so be it; if we had served man this would be a bad return, but we serve a great master who will reward us.' Calvin was not presumptuous, but he was proud, and he distrusted men almost as much as he trusted God; he left Geneva dejected and sad, and yet with a feeling of relief: 'Whenever I think how wretched I was in Geneva,' he wrote a little later, 'I tremble throughout my whole being; when I had to administer the sacrament, I was tortured by anxiety for the state of the souls of those for whom I should one day have to render an account before God; there were many whose faith seemed to me uncertain, nay doubtful, and yet they all thronged to the table of the Lord without distinction. I cannot tell you with what torments my conscience was beset, day and night.' [Footnote 77]
[Footnote 77: Stähelin, 1860, vol. i. p. 157.]
Calvin did not know that he had sown seeds in Geneva which would soon spring up and bear fruit.
Chapter X.
Calvin's Polemics.
For four months Calvin wandered in Switzerland, visiting the different centres of the Reformation, Berne, Zurich, Lausanne, and Basle; sometimes doing his best to prove the lawfulness of his actions at Geneva and of their motives, at others acquiescing, although without hope of success, in the attempts of some of his friends to bring about a reconciliation with the Genevese. It was at Strasburg that he finally resolved to establish himself: about fifteen hundred Frenchmen, who had adopted the reformed faith and were fugitives like himself, had found an asylum there; two celebrated reformers, who were already his friends, Bucer and Capito, lived there and possessed great influence; they pressed him to join them: 'It was,' says Calvin, 'a similar appeal to that of Farel, which had formerly touched me so deeply: I yielded, like Jonah, [Footnote 78] to the warning which called me to another work.'
[Footnote 78: Jonah, chap. i.]
He arrived at Strasburg in the early part of September 1538, and preached with his accustomed success before the assembled French refugees. The magistrates immediately authorized him to organize a religious congregation of his countrymen, he received the right of citizenship, was appointed professor of theology, and commenced a life of study and religious instruction, the only life that was in harmony, so he said, 'with my timid, weak, and even pusillanimous nature.' Wearied and disgusted with his first combat, he was far from foreseeing the destiny for which he was reserved, as the heroic champion of the reformed faith.
No sooner was he settled at Strasburg than he was unexpectedly called upon to take up arms in defence of Geneva, the city which had just banished him. In April 1539, Cardinal Sadolet, Bishop of Carpentras, one of the most learned, most highly esteemed, and moderate of the prelates at the court of Rome, wrote a long letter to the Genevese, with the object of inducing them to return to the bosom of the Church of Rome. The banishment of Calvin had probably inspired him with some hope of the possibility of such an event. The letter was singularly prudent and temperate, free from all personal attack and special controversy: its sole aim was to urge the following argument, that eternal salvation being the first and chief interest of the human soul, there was more certainty of obtaining it by faith and humble submission to the Catholic church, than by accepting the audacious and vagrant doctrines of the innovators. The cardinal made numerous appeals to the authority of St. Paul, the favourite apostle of the reformers; and he ended his letter with an eloquent description of the different positions in which two Christians would find themselves at the Day of Judgment, in presence of the Supreme Judge, one of whom had humbly obeyed the teaching and authority of the Church, whilst the other had set up his own intellect and his own will as the law of his faith and life. Without a single reproach or threat, and in a tone of confident though sorrowful affection, the cardinal recalled the children who had gone astray, warned them of their great danger, and entreated them to return to the home of their fathers.