STRUGGLES, political or religious, are the normal state of society and the life of history. Their necessity in a christian point of view is established by the highest of authorities: I am not come to bring peace upon earth but the sword, said the Saviour of men;[370] and one of his disciples sixteen centuries later, developing his master's words, added: 'As the greater part of the world is hostile to the gospel, we cannot confess Christ without encountering opposition and hatred.'[371]
=USES OF OPPOSITION.=
This thought would be saddening indeed, did not experience and Scripture teach us that opposition is often a means of developement; that the gifts of God to man easily perish if nothing revives them; that contradiction, resistance, and trial (thanks to the care of divine providence) tend to civilise nations, and preserve to Christianity the truth, morality, and life it has received from on high.
Whence proceeds this moral influence of contradiction? A principle never evolves all that it contains, says a school, except by coming in collision with a contrary principle. In effect, the blow which a soldier receives on the battle-field adds to his valour. The inflexible obstinacy of Rome in upholding all abuses, excited Luther to display with more energy the great principles of the Reformation. And at Geneva, it was because the huguenots had to contend perpetually against a mean despotism in the State and an incorrigible corruption in the Church, that their souls groaned after liberty and a better religion.
Yet contradiction is not all that is necessary: there must be reconciliation afterwards. The twofold opposition of the huguenots (high-minded as it was) against civil and religious despotism, would have been ruined by its excess and would have ruined Geneva, if it had not been moderated afterwards. It was not good for the State that 'no one was willing to obey.'[372] It was not good for religion that opposition to popery should consist in walking about the churches during mass. Modern times needed, from their very cradle, authority in the bosom of a free people, and pure doctrine in the bosom of a living Church. God gave both to Geneva, and he did so essentially through the Reformation.
Care must be taken, however, that we go not too far in the way of accommodation. The Reformation must make no concessions to popery. Whenever it has gone down that easy incline, it has left its calm heights and fallen among quagmires which have endangered its purity and existence.
But that was the conciliation which had to be carried out in those times, and which ought still to be attempted in the Christendom of our times. Between negative protestantism and Roman-catholicism there is a middle path. On the one hand the gospel ought to supply this negative protestantism with what is deficient in it, and on the other to take away from Romanism whatever is erroneous in it. The huguenots, in part at least, were transformed in the city of Calvin by the great principles of the Reformation. It was by the potent virtue of the gospel that this little city, which had been only an Alpine burgh, was so marvellously metamorphosed and became in Europe the capital of a great opinion.
One circumstance, however, tended to compromise its future. The Reform triumphed, but not without losing strength, for the sword struck foul in the struggle. 'If a man strive for mastery, he is not crowned, except he strive lawfully.'[373] Calvin understood better than the other reformers the spirituality and independence of the Church; and yet giving way to the general weakness, he had recourse to the secular arm to maintain discipline, and was unable to prevent the death of Servetus. That fatal stake did more injury to truth than to falsehood. From that hour, the doctrine lost its power, a stain soiled its flag, and error seized the advantage of slipping into the ranks of those who were summoned to combat her. Eminent minds were seen abandoning the doctrines of the Reformation, chiefly on account of the civil intolerance by which they were defended. And thus a more or less culpable stagnation followed the powerful activity and glorious battles of the primitive days of the Reformation. There were no more combats round the expiatory cross, the eternal Word, the fall, grace, and regeneration. No more struggles, and therefore no more life. The christian fortress that Calvin had erected having been assailed for two centuries, shaken and dismantled, was on the point of being razed to the ground; when fortunately the struggles, entirely spiritual struggles, began again, and religion was saved by them. When God, after ploughing Europe in the early part of this century with the terrible share of a conqueror, awoke it from its long sleep, he remembered Geneva, and revived there as in other places doctrine and life. That city and all Christendom are now challenged again to the old struggles, and also to new ones, in which faith shall triumph over absolute thoroughgoing negations, which not only deprive man of the grace and adoption of the children of God, but deny also the immateriality and immortality of the soul.
=VAUD AND GENEVA.=
We shall not begin with the struggles of the Reformation in Geneva, but with those which were fought in a country beautifully situated between the lakes and the mountains,—the Pays de Vaud. The country was not large, its cities were not populous, and the names of the men who struggled there do not occupy an important place in the annals of nations. Let us not forget, however, that there are two kinds of history: the stage of one is a brilliant circle, of the other a humble sphere. The actors in the former are great personages, in the latter men of low esteem in their own day. But is not the least sometimes the greatest of these two kinds of history? Are not events of small dimensions geometrically similar to great ones? Have they not often a deeper moral significance and a wider practical influence? With truth it may be said of the struggles of Vaud and Geneva: Magnam causam in parvum locum concludi, a great cause is here confined within narrow limits. The scenes, so modest and obscure, so full of decision and life, which this history presents, have probably done more to found the kingdom of truth and liberty, than the disputes and wars of powerful potentates. Such a thought as this has been expressed, even in Paris. A contemporary writer, after tracing in his history of the sixteenth century an outline of the portentous future threatened by the intrigues of the papacy, regains his courage with the words: Europe was saved by Geneva.[374]