God, by giving in the sixteenth century a man who to the lively faith of Luther and the scriptural understanding of Zwingle joined an organising faculty and a creative mind, gave the complete reformer. If Luther laid the foundations, if Zwingle and others built the walls, Calvin completed the temple of God.
We shall have to see how this doctor arrived at a knowledge of the truth; we shall have to study his labours and his struggles until the moment when, quitting for ever a country whose soil trembled under his feet and threatened to swallow him up, he went to plant upon a lowly Alpine hill that standard around which he meditated rallying the scattered members of Jesus Christ. But we must first see what was the state of France at the time when the reformer was brought to the Gospel.
The history of the Reformation in France, prior to the establishment of Calvin at Geneva, is divided into two parts: the first includes the favourable times, the second the unfavourable. We confess that the favourable times were occasionally the reverse, and that the unfavourable times were often favourable; and yet we believe that, generally speaking, this distinction may be justified. This subject has been frequently treated of; we shall, however, have to describe some phases of the French Reformation which have not always been set forth by those who have written its history.
Two persons, a man and a woman, whose social position and character present the most striking contrasts, laboured with particular zeal to propagate the Gospel in France at the epoch of the Reformation.
The woman appears first. She is the most beautiful and intelligent, the wittiest, most amiable and influential, and, with the exception of her daughter, the greatest of her age. Sister, mother of kings, herself a queen, grandmother of the monarch whom France (right or wrong) has extolled the most, namely, Henry IV., she lived much in the great world, in great ceremonials, with great personages, among the magnificence of the Louvre, St. Germain, and Fontainebleau. This woman is Margaret of Angoulême, Duchess of Alençon, Queen of Navarre, and sister of Francis I.
The man who appears next (he was younger than her by seventeen years) contrasts with all these grandeurs by the lowness of his origin. He is a man of the people, a Picardin; his grandfather was a cooper at Pont l’Evêque; his father was secretary to the bishop, and, in the day of his greatest influence in the world, he apprenticed his own brother Anthony to a bookbinder. Simple, frugal, poor, of a disposition ‘rather morose and bashful’[417]—such is the humble veil that hides the greatness of his genius and the strength of his will. This man is Calvin.
This man and this woman, so opposite as regards their condition in the world, resemble each other in their principal features. They both possess faith in the great truths of the Gospel; they love Jesus Christ; they have the same zeal for spreading with unwearied activity the truths so dear to them; they have the same compassion for the miserable, and especially for the victims of religious persecution. But while the man sometimes presumes upon his manly strength, the woman truly belongs to the weaker sex. She possesses indeed a moral virtue which resists the seductions of the age; she keeps herself pure in the midst of a depraved court; but she has also that weakness which disposes one to be too indulgent, and permits herself to be led away by certain peculiarities of contemporary society. We see her writing tales whose origin may be explained and even justified, since their object was to unveil the immorality of priests and monks, but they are nevertheless a lamentable tribute paid to the spirit of her age. While Calvin sets up against the papacy a forehead harder than adamant, Margaret, even in the days of her greatest zeal, is careful not to break with Rome. At last she yields, outwardly at least, to the sovereign commands of her brother, the persevering hostility of the court, clergy, and parliament, and though cherishing in her heart faith in the Saviour who has redeemed her, conceals that faith under the cloak of Romish devotion; while Calvin propagates the Gospel, in opposition to the powers of the world, saying: ‘Such as the warfare is, such are the arms. If our warfare is spiritual, we ought to be furnished with spiritual armour.’[418] Margaret doubtless says the same thing; but she is the king’s sister, summoned to his council, accustomed to diplomacy, respected by foreign princes; she hopes that a union with the evangelical rulers of Germany may hasten on the Reformation of France. Finally, while Calvin desires truth in the Church above all things, Margaret clings to the preservation of its unity, and thus becomes the noble representative of a system still lauded by some protestants—to reform the Church without breaking it up: a specious system, impossible to be realised. And yet this illustrious lady, in spite of her errors, plays a great part in the history of the Reformation: she was respected by the most pious reformers. An impartial historian should brave hostile prejudices, and assign her the place which is her due.
Let us enter upon the French Reformation at the moment when, after great but isolated preparations, it is beginning to occupy a place in the affairs of the nation.[419]
The defeat at Pavia had plunged France into mourning. There was not a house where they did not weep for a son, a husband, or a father; and the whole kingdom was plunged in sorrow at seeing its king a prisoner. The recoil of this great disaster had not long to be waited for. ‘The gods chastise us: let us fall upon the christians,’ said the Romans of the first centuries; the persecuting spirit of Rome woke up in France. ‘It is our tenderness towards the Lutherans that has drawn upon us the vengeance of heaven,’ said the zealous catholics, who conceived the idea of appeasing heaven by hecatombs.