These heretics had been put to death at Orleans. Would they be seen rising again, after more than five centuries, in the city and even in the university? Many doctors and students opposed Calvin: 'You are a schismatic,' they said; 'you are separating from the Church!' Calvin, alarmed at these accusations, was a prey to fresh anguish.
=CALVIN'S ANGUISH AND HUMILITY.=
Then, as he informs us, he began to meditate on the Psalms, and in the struggles of David he found an image of his own: 'Ah!' he exclaimed, 'the Holy Spirit has here painted to the life all the pains, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, anxieties, perplexities, and even the confused emotions with which my mind is wont to be agitated.... This book is an anatomy of all the parts of the soul.... There is no affection in man which is not here represented as in a glass.'[35]
This man, whom the Romish and other legends describe as vain, proud, and insensible, desired to see himself as he was, without screening any of his faults. 'Of the many infirmities to which we are subject,' he said, 'and of the many vices of which we are full, not one ought to be hidden. Ah! truly it is an excellent and singular gain, when all the hiding-places are laid open, and the heart is brought into the light and thoroughly cleansed of all hypocrisy and foul infection.'[36]
Such are the principles by which the Reformation has triumphed. Its great organs desired that men's hearts should be 'cleansed of all foul infection.' It is a singular delusion of those writers who, seeing things otherwise than they are, ascribe this divine work to vile interests and base passions. According to them, its causes were jealousy of the Augustine monks, the ambition of princes, the greed of nobles, and the carnal passions of priests, which, however, as we have seen, had but too free scope during the middle ages. A searching glance into the souls of the Reformers lays bare to us the cause of the revival. If the writers of whom I have spoken were right, the Reformation ought not to have waited until Luther for its accomplishment; for there had existed for ages in christendom ambitious princes, greedy nobles, jealous monks, and impure priests. But what was really a new thing was to find men who, like the reformers, opened their hearts to the light of the Holy Spirit, believed in the Word of God, found Jesus Christ, esteemed everything in comparison with him as loss, lived the life of God, and desired that 'all hiding-places should be laid open,' and men's hearts cleansed of all hypocrisy. Such were the true sources of the Reformation.
The adversaries of the Gospel understood the danger incurred by the Church of Rome from the principles professed by Calvin; and hence they called him wicked and profane, and, as he says, 'heaped upon his head a world of abuse.' They said that he ought to be expelled from the Church. Then the student, 'cast down but not destroyed,' retiring to his chamber, would exclaim: 'If I am at war with such masters, I am not, however, at war with thy Church, O God! Why should I hesitate to separate from these false teachers whom the apostles call thy enemies?[37] ... When cursed by the unrighteous priests of their day, did not thy prophets remain in the true unity of thy children? Encouraged by their example, I will resist those who oppress us, and neither their threats nor their denunciations shall shake me.'[38]
=PHASES OF CALVIN'S CONVERSION.=
The conversion of Calvin, begun at Paris, was completed at Orleans. There are, as we have said, several phases in this work. The first is that of the conscience, where the soul is aroused; the second is that of the understanding, where the mind is enlightened; then comes the last, where the new man is built up, where he strikes deeper root in Christ, and bears fruit to God. At Paris, Calvin had heard in his heart the divine voice calling him to eternal life; at Orleans, he constantly studied the Holy Scriptures,[39] and became 'learned in the knowledge of salvation,' as Theodore Beza tells us. The Church herself has gone through similar phases: the first epoch of her history, that of the apostolic fathers,[40] was that of simple piety without the scientific element; the second, the age of the apologists, was that of a christian understanding seeking to justify its faith in the eyes of reason. Calvin had followed this road; but he did not give way to an intellectualism which would have brought back death into his heart. On the contrary, the third phase began immediately, and from day to day the christian life became in him more spiritual and more active.
The conversion of Calvin and of the other reformers—we must insist upon this point—was not simply a change wrought by study in their thoughts and in their system. Calvin did not set himself the task of inventing a new theology, as his adversaries have asserted. We do not find him coldly meditating on the Church, curiously examining the Scriptures, and seeking in them a means of separating a portion of christendom from Rome. The Reformation was not the fruit of abstract reasoning; it proceeded from an inward labour, a spiritual combat, a victory which the reformers won by the sweat of their brow, or rather ... of their heart. Instead of composing his doctrine chapter after chapter, Calvin, thirsting for righteousness and peace, found it in Christ. 'Placed as in the furnace of God (they are his own words), the scum and filth of his faith were thus purified.' Calvin was put into the crucible, and the new truth came forth, burning and shining like gold, from the travail of his melted soul. In order to comprehend the productions of nature or of art, we must study closely the secrets of their formation. We have on a former occasion sought to discover the generative principle of the Reformation in the heart of Luther; we are now striving to discern it in Calvin also. Convictions, affections, intelligence, activity—all these were now in process of formation in that admirable genius under the life-giving rays of truth.
='I SACRIFICE MY HEART TO THEE.'=