There were minds, however, upon which persecution produced a very different effect. Amid all this indignation and sorrow, Du Tillet remained shut up in himself and silent. The gentleness of the Word of God attracted him, but the bitterness of the cross terrified him. He had quitted everything with joy, believing that a general reform of the Church would be carried out promptly; but when he saw a mortal combat beginning between the Gospel and popery, 'he felt a deep emotion, he lost his rest,' as he tells us himself, 'and suffered inexpressible trouble and anguish of mind.' Each of the punishments at Paris added to the doubts and agitation of that candid but weak nature. He seemed to fear schism only, but the prospect of persecution and reproach had some share in his alarm. 'He did not understand,' as Calvin says, 'that while bearing the cross we keep Christ company, so that all bitterness is sweetened.' He kept himself apart, he passed days and nights filled with torture. 'I have been lonely, and without rest for the space of three years and a half,' he wrote to his old friend in 1538.[342] His intimacy with the reformer was changed, and three years later he was to cause him a sorrow as great, nay greater, no doubt, than that which Calvin had felt when he heard of the deaths of the martyrs.
The intrigues of the agents of Francis I. began to be attended with success. They displayed inconceivable activity to mislead public opinion. They spoke, wrote, and distributed everywhere 'certain little books full of lies, in which it was said that the king had behaved harshly to none but rebels, who desired to disturb the State under the cloak of religion.' Men, and often the best of men, are unhappily prone to believe evil. Germany began to cool down; even at Basle many people were deceived; and although they did not believe all the calumnies circulated against the martyrs, the impression still remained. 'If a few sectarians have been punished,' said many good men, 'they are anabaptists, who, far from taking the Word of God for the rule of their faith, follow only their own corrupt imaginations, and have at bottom no other doctrine but a contempt of the higher powers. We cannot defend the cause of a handful of seditious people who desire to overthrow everything, even political order.'[342a]
=EFFECT OF THE MARTYRDOMS ON CALVIN.=
Shut up with his books in the room he occupied at Catherine Klein's, Calvin thought day and night of these cruel accusations, and his noble soul felt indignant not only that the children of the heavenly Father should be forced to suffer atrocious punishments, but that it was attempted to defame their characters. 'These court practisers,' he said, 'load the holy martyrs after their death with undeserved blame and vile calumnies, and endeavour to hide the disgrace of this shedding of innocent blood under cowardly disguises. They thus put poor believers to death, and no one is able to have compassion on them.'[343] The young doctor saw himself between two rivers of blood—that of his brethren already immolated, and that of other Christians who would certainly be immolated in their turn. He had not been able to prevent the death of a Milon and a La Forge; but he would at least try to turn away the sword that threatened other lives. 'If I do not oppose it righteously and to the best of my ability,' said Calvin, 'I shall fairly be called cowardly and disloyal on account of my silence.' He will speak, he will rush between the executioners and their victims. A heavenly word rang through his soul: Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction.[344] He therefore formed one of those resolutions which, in a character such as his, are unalterable. 'I will obey Him who speaks to me from on high,' he said. 'I will reply to the wicked tales that are circulated against my brethren; and as similar cruelties may be practised against many other believers, I will endeavour to touch foreign nations with some compassion in their favour. Such was the reason,' he adds, 'which moved me to publish the Institutes of the Christian Religion.'[345] Never had noble book so noble an origin. Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and Tertullian had written their Apologies by the light of the stakes of the second century; Calvin wrote his by the light of those of the sixteenth. The publication of the Christian Institutes was the pitiful cry of a compassionate soul at the sight of those who were going to the stake.
=THEOLOGY RESTORED.=
Calvin had long meditated the great subject which then absorbed him—the system of Christian faith; and his book was to be the finest body of doctrine ever possessed by the Church of Christ. During four centuries, reckoning from the twelfth, minds of the highest order had formulated abstract systems, in which scholastic rationalism and ecclesiastical authority were habitually combined; they had wasted their strength in running after expositions, contradictions, resolutions, conclusions, and interminable pros and cons; theology was lost in an arid wilderness. It was about to come out of it in order to enter into new lands. But it was not a trifling matter to make Christian science pass from death to life, from darkness to light. It required an awakened conscience, a heart thirsting for righteousness, a high intelligence, and a powerful will boldly to break through all the chains,[346] to scatter to the winds the sentences and the sums which the schoolmen had painfully woven out of their brains or out of traditions that were often impure, and to set up in their place the living rock of the heavenly Word on which the temple of God is to be built.
Calvin was the man called to this work. Until his time, dogmatics, when passing from one period to another, had always advanced in the same direction, from abstraction to abstraction. But suddenly the course was changed; Calvin refused to tread the accustomed road. Instead of advancing in the way of the schoolmen towards new developements of a more refined intellectualism, he turned eagerly backwards, he heard the voice of conscience, he felt the wants of the heart, he ran whither alone they can be satisfied, he traversed fifteen centuries. He went to the gospel springs, and there collecting in a golden cap the pure and living waters of divine revelation, presented them to the nations to quench their thirst.
The Reformation was not simply a change in the doctrine or in the manners or in the government of the Church: it was a creation. The first century had witnessed the first Christian creation, the fifteenth century witnessed the second.
Luther, by the power of his faith, was the principal organ of this new creation. Freeing himself from the thick darkness that had hung over mankind for so many centuries, he had with holy energy hurled his lightnings and thunderbolts in every direction around him, so that all the horizon was lighted up. Calvin appeared; he gathered up these scattered flames, and made them into an immense fire; and while the gleams of the primitive creation of the Church had been confined almost entirely within the limits of the Roman world, the fires of the new creation are spreading to the ends of the earth.