From that hour the propagation and defence of truth became the sole passion of his life, and to them he consecrated all the powers of his heart. He had still, after this solemn hour, to undergo, as he says, 'great anxiety, sorrow, tears, and distress.' But his resolution was taken. He belonged to himself no longer, but to God. 'In everything and in every place he would guide himself entirely by his obedience.' He never forgot the fearful adjuration which Farel had employed. He had not set himself (he thought) in the place he occupied, but had been put there by the arm of the Almighty. Hence, whenever he met with obstacles, he called to mind 'the hand stretched down from heaven,' and knowing its sovereign power, he took courage.
The reformer did not, however, stop at Geneva immediately. On leaving France, he had undertaken to accompany one of his relations, named Artois, to Basle. For some days the brethren of Geneva refused to let him go. At last, seeing that Calvin was decided, they confined themselves to extorting from him an engagement to return; after which he started for Basle with his relation. On the road he encountered fresh importunities; the Churches, whom the author of the Christian Institutes saluted on his journey, desired to detain him.[851] Whether these entreaties, on which Calvin had not reckoned before setting out, proceeded from Lausanne, Neuchâtel, Berne, or rather from some other and younger Churches, it is hard to say. At last he arrived at Basle, and having finished his business returned to Geneva, probably in the latter half of the month of August. But he had no sooner arrived than his delicate health was shaken; he suffered from a severe cold, and was ill for nine days.
=CALVIN'S VOCATION.=
When Calvin recovered from his indisposition, he at once set about the work for which he had been detained. As he would have a crowd of hearers—men and women, old and young, Genevese and strangers—the cathedral of St. Pierre was assigned him. It was in that vast building, where the mass had been so often sung, that Calvin was about to inaugurate the reign of Holy Scripture. The gates of St. Pierre's opened; the frail and humble, but powerful preacher entered the Gothic portal; a numerous crowd made their way with him into the nave, whose majestic grandeur seemed to harmonize so well with the new teaching that was about to be heard in it; and soon his voice resounded under those time-honored arches.
Calvin, coming after Luther and Farel, was called to complete the work of both. The mighty Luther, to whom will always belong the first place in the work of the Reformation, had uttered the words of faith with power; Calvin was to systematize them, and show the imposing unity of the evangelical doctrine. The impetuous Farel, the most active missionary of the epoch, had detached men from Romish errors, and had united many to Christ, but without combining them; Calvin was to reunite these scattered members and constitute the assembly. Possessed of an organizing genius, he accomplished the task which God had assigned him: he undertook to form a church placed under the direction of the Word of God and the discipline of the Holy Ghost. In his opinion, this ought to be—not, as at Rome, the hierarchical institution of a legal religion; nor, as with the mystics, a vague ideal; nor, as with the rationalists, an intellectual and moral society without religious life. It is said of the Word, which was God, and which was made flesh: In Him was life. Life must, therefore, be the essential characteristic of the people that it was to form. Spiritual powers must—so Calvin thought—act in the midst of the flock of Jesus Christ. It was not ideas only that the Lord communicated to His disciples, but a divine life. 'In the kingdom of Christ,' he said, 'all that we need care for is the new man.'
And this was not a mere theory: Calvin must see it put into action. Not content with the reformation of the faith, he will combat that decline of morality which has for so long filled courts, cities, and monasteries with disorder. He will call for the conversion of the heart and holiness of life; he will interdict luxury, drunkenness, blasphemy, impurity, masquerades, and gambling, which the Roman Church had tolerated.
This strictness of discipline has brought down severe reproaches on the reformer. We must confess that if Calvin did take a false step, it was here. He conceded to man, to the magistrate, too great a share in the correction of morals and doctrine: in the sixteenth century the intervention of the State in the discipline of the Church disturbed the only truly salutary action of the Word of God. Calvin cleansed with pure water the gold and silver of the tabernacle, but left on it one spot—the employment of the civil arm. We must not, however, accuse him more than justice permits. He had to suffer from this action of the temporal power much more than he employed it. Since 1532 the Genevese government had set itself in the place of the bishop. We have seen its orders to preach the Gospel without any admixture of human doctrines. A little later it organized the grand disputation, demanded by Bernard, and presided over it as judge. Did it not even go so far as to remove from the people of Thiez the excommunication pronounced by the bishop? Elsewhere we have described how in the Swiss cantons, and especially at Zurich and Berne, the magistrates did the same. The intervention of temporal authority proceeded from the temporal power. The Council of Geneva had no intention of permitting a strange minister, a young man of Noyon, to deprive them of prerogatives to which they clung strongly. They claimed the right to regulate almost everything by their decrees—from the highest things, the profession of faith, the regulation of worship, and the government of the church, down to women's dress. Calvin often protested against those pretensions, and on this point his whole life was one long struggle. Far from blaming the reformer for certain regulations he was obliged to permit, we should praise him for the firmness with which he maintained, more than any other teacher of the sixteenth century, the great principles of the distinction between what is temporal and what is spiritual.[852]
=RESULTS OF HIS TEACHING.=
But he contributed still more forcibly by his direct teaching to scatter the seeds of a true and wise liberty among the new generations. Doubtless the sources of modern civilization are manifold. Many men of different vocations and genius have labored at this great work; but it is just to acknowledge the place that Calvin occupies among them. The purity and force of his morality were the most powerful means of liberating men and nations from the abuses which had been everywhere introduced, and from the despotic vexations under which they groaned. A nation weak in its morals is easily enslaved. But he did more. How great the truths, how important the principles that Calvin has proclaimed! He fearlessly attacked the papacy, by which all liberty is oppressed,[853] and which during so many centuries had kept the human mind in bondage; and broke the chains which everywhere fettered the thoughts of man. He boldly asserted 'that there is a very manifest distinction between the spiritual and the political or civil governments.'[854] He did more than this: the aim of his whole life was to restore the supremacy of conscience. He endeavored to re-establish the kingdom of God in man, and succeeded in doing so not only with men of genius, but with a great number of obscure persons. These were the men who, resolving to obey God above all things, were able to resist the instruments of the pope, the Valois, Philip II., Alva, and their imitators. While maintaining their liberty as regards faith, those noble disciples of the Gospel—men such as Knox, Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde, and a multitude of other Christian heroes—learnt to maintain it in earthly matters.[855] Such was the principal gate by which the different liberties have entered the world.
Calvin did not confine himself to theories: he pronounced frankly against the despotism of kings and the despotism of the people. He declared that 'if princes usurp any portion of God's authority, we must not obey them;'[856] and that if the people indulge in acts of mad violence, we should rather perish than submit to them. 'God has not armed you,' he said, 'that you may resist those who are set over you by Him as governors. You cannot expect He will protect you, if you undertake what He disavows.'[857] Nevertheless Calvin taught men to love such eternal blessings, and said that it was better to die than to be deprived of them. 'God's honor,' he declared, 'is more precious than your life.' And from that hour we see those in the Netherlands and elsewhere, who had learnt at Geneva to maintain freedom of conscience, acquiring such a love for liberty that they claimed it also for the State, sought it for themselves, and endeavored to give it to others. Religious liberty has been, and is still, the mother of every kind of liberty; but in our days we witness a strange sight. Many of those who owe their emancipation in great part to Calvin, have lost all recollection of it, and some of them insult the noble champion who made them free.