Servetus's challenge was not however without consequences. He had called Calvin into the lists, he had made him the champion of the doctrine of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; the opportunity of answering this challenge occurred twenty years later at Geneva. If the struggle had then been confined to a learned discussion between these two great minds, it would have been right enough; Servetus himself had challenged it. But the ideas of the times, from which Calvin (even while seeking a relaxation in the form) could not free himself, led to one of those distressing calamities, so frequent during a long series of ages in the annals of Rome, but of which, God be thanked! there is only this one instance in those of the Reformation.
Calvin did not fight only with the tongue: he was then hurrying on the printing of his first theological work. It was the book written against those who said 'that the soul was only the motion of the lungs, and that if it had been endowed with immortality at the creation, it had been deprived of it by the fall.'[188] 'Let us put down those people,' he said, 'who murder souls without appearing to inflict any wounds:' and with this view he had composed a work on the Immortality of the Soul, the title given it in a letter he wrote to Fabri.[189] It is to be regretted that he afterwards substituted the rather awkward one of Psychopannychia, 'the night or sleep of the soul;' as the first indicates the subject more clearly. At the same time also he combated the opinion of those 'good men,' as he calls them,[190] who believed that the soul slept until the judgment-day. The first edition of this work, which bears the date of Paris 1534, came out probably immediately after Calvin had left that city or shortly before his departure.
=CHARACTER OF CALVIN'S DIVINITY.=
This work gave him a place apart in the ranks of the reformers. In this his earliest theological treatise he displayed the character that distinguished him, and which those who surrounded him had already been able to recognise in his conversations. His theology would not be negative, but on the contrary exceedingly positive. His first work does not combat the errors of Rome. He stands forth as the defender of the soul, the advocate of christian spiritualism. He will be, as a great historian has said, 'the man called to build the Lord's citadel, of which Luther had laid the foundation.'[191] The force of conviction, the weight of proof, the power with which he employed the Scriptures, the simplicity and clearness of style, struck every reader. We shall not speak here of Calvin as a writer: we have done so elsewhere.[192] There might, however, be discerned in this work a defect of which Calvin never entirely cured himself: it contained energetic disdain and bitter invective. He saw this himself; he did more, he moderated these expressions in a second edition. 'I said certain things in it,' he wrote, referring to the first, 'with a bitterness and severity which may have offended certain delicate ears.[193] I have therefore struck out some passages, added others, and changed many.' This did not prevent his falling into the same fault again, which, it must be acknowledged, was that of the age.
In spite of his frequent discussions, Calvin was happy in the house of De la Forge. Accustomed to a frugal life, he was little affected by the abundance of all sorts of good things by which he was surrounded; but the piety of the family delighted him much. He loved to see the master distributing the Gospel, relieving the poor, and listening to the interpretation of God's word, and took pleasure in his christian conversation. 'Most assuredly,' he said, 'true happiness is not circumscribed within the narrow limits of this frail life, and yet God promises also to believers a happy life, even in this pilgrimage and earthly dwelling-place, so far as the state of the world permits.'[194] But the happiness of this blessed household was not to be of long duration. Lieutenant-criminal Morin was ere long to enter it, throw the wife into prison, lead the husband to the scaffold, and change the happiness of a peaceful christian family into sorrow, groans, and tears.
=CALVIN RESOLVES TO LEAVE PARIS.=
Would De la Forge be the only victim? Would the first blows be aimed at him? Would they not be aimed at Calvin, the author of that bold address which had thrown both city and university into confusion? Could the friend of Rector Cop long remain in the capital without once more exciting the attention of his enemies? A great persecution was about to burst forth, and if Calvin had been living in the Rue St. Martin at that time, he would doubtless have been seized along with the pious tradesman, burnt like the other martyrs, and the history of his life would have shrunk to a paragraph in the simple annals of Crespin's Martyrs. But the Father in heaven did not permit that this sparrow should then fall to the ground. Calvin had powerful motives which urged him to leave France. His time in Paris was so taken up with visits, interviews, and other business, that he sank under the burden, without being able to discharge what he looked upon as his first duty. He was called to be a teacher rather than a mere preacher of the Gospel. To accomplish the great task he had set himself, he needed repose, leisure, and study, besides interviews and conferences with other theologians. He adopted a great resolution. 'I shall leave France,' he said, 'and go to Germany in order to find in some obscure corner the quiet refused to me elsewhere.'[195]
Du Tillet had determined to accompany him. The two friends made their preparations; they procured two horses and two servants; and one day towards the end of July Calvin bade farewell to the pious tradesman who had been as a brother to him. Their clothes were packed away in portmanteaus, in one of which they hid their money, and then they were fastened on the crupper; and so the travellers departed, the masters on horseback, the servants on foot.
'On reaching the frontier,' says a catholic historian, 'Calvin could not restrain his emotion; he lifted up his voice in distress that France rejected the men whom God sent her, and even tried to murder them.'[196] This exclamation appears rather doubtful, and the historian who reports it is not always accurate. Still it is possible and not unnatural.