When Luther was face to face with the hierarchy at the Diet of Worms, Calvin, a French boy of twelve, was already a sharer in the worldly advantage which the hierarchy could bestow upon its favorites. He held a benefice in the Cathedral of Noyon, his native town, and at seventeen he drew additional revenue from a curacy in a neighboring parish. The tonsured boy owed this ridiculous preferment to the circumstance that his father, being secretary to the bishop of the diocese, was sure to be at hand when the bishop happened to have a good thing to give away. In all probability Jean Calvin would have died an archbishop or a cardinal if he had remained in the Church of his ancestors, for he possessed the two requisites for advancement—fervent zeal for the Church and access to the bestowers of its prizes. At Paris, however, whither he was sent by his father to pursue his studies, a shy, intense, devout lad, already thin and sallow with fasting and study, the light of the Reformation broke upon him. Like Luther, he long resisted it, and still longer hoped to see a reformation in the Church, not outside of its pale. The Church never had a more devoted son. Not Luther himself loved it more. "I was so obstinately given to the superstitions of popery," he said, long after, "that it seemed impossible I should ever be pulled out of the deep mire."
He struggled out at length. Observe one of the results of his conversion in this picture, in which a slander of the day is preserved for our inspection.[13]
Calvin branded. (Paris.)
Gross and filthy calumny was one of the familiar weapons in the theological contests of that century. Both sides employed it—Luther and Calvin not less than others—for it belonged to that age to hate, and hence to misinterpret, opponents. "Search the records of the city of Noyon, in Picardie," wrote Stapleton, an eminent controversialist on the Catholic side, and professor in a Catholic college of Calvin's own day, "and read again that Jean Calvin, convicted of a crime" (infamous and unmentionable), "by the very clement sentence of the bishop and magistrate was branded with an iron lily on the shoulders." The records have been searched; nothing of the kind is to be found in them; but the picture was drawn and scattered over France. Precisely the same charge was made against Luther. That both the reformers died of infamous diseases was another of the scandals of the time. In reading these controversies, it is convenient to keep in mind the remark of the collector of the Calvin pictures: "When two theologians accuse one another, both of them lie." One of these calumnies drew from Calvin a celebrated retort. "They accuse me," said he, "of having no children. In every land there are Christians who are my children."
Another caricature, shown on the following page, representing Calvin at the burning of Servetus, had only too much foundation in truth.
The reformer was not indeed present at the burning, but he caused the arrest of the victim, drew up the charges, furnished part of the testimony that convicted him, consented to and approved his execution. Servetus was a Spanish physician, of blameless life and warm convictions, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. Catholic and Protestant equally abhorred him, and Protestant Geneva seized the opportunity to show the world its attachment to the true faith by burning a man whom Rome was also longing to burn. It was a hideous scene—a virtuous and devoted Unitarian expiring in the flames after enduring the extremest anguish for thirty minutes, and crying, from the depths of his torment, "Jesus, thou Son of the eternal God, have mercy on me!" But it was not Calvin who burned him. It was the century. It was imperfectly developed human nature. Man had not reached the civilization which admits, allows, welcomes, and honors disinterested conviction. It were as unjust to blame Calvin for burning Servetus as it is to hold the Roman Catholic Church of the present day responsible for the Inquisition of three centuries ago. It was Man that was guilty of all those stupid and abominable cruelties. Luther, the man of his period, honestly declared that if he were the Lord God, and saw kings, princes, bishops, and judges so little mindful of his Son, he would "knock the world to pieces." If Calvin had not burned Servetus, Servetus might have burned Calvin, and the Pope would have been happy to burn both.
