But how earnestly he served them and Protestantism in the quarter-century that intervened from the time of the refusal and the months during which he lay “long a-dying” in the strait Rue des Chanoines, almost in the shadow of the Cathedral!
The ground-floor and part of the second-story of the “plain house provided for him,” are now used as a dispensary and doctor’s office,—a charitable institution. A placard at the door sets forth the hours at which patients can be admitted to the consulting-rooms. After Calvin’s death, and until within a few years, it was occupied as a convent and school by a Roman Catholic sisterhood. The building is of brick and “plain” to humbleness, two stories in height, and built around four sides of an open court. We saw the closet in which Calvin studied and wrote—so overwhelmed by preparations for the pulpit, the university lecture-room, and with voluminous correspondence with churches at home and abroad, that he passed whole nights without laying by his pen, and, by day, had not, he says, “time to look up to the light of the blessèd sun;”—and the chamber in which he died. This is low-ceiled and of fair size, wainscoted with dark wood. Over the doors are paneled paintings representing the Four Seasons. These were there during Calvin’s occupancy, as was the carved mantel of black oak. Two windows open upon a balcony hung thickly with ivy.
One speculates fruitlessly touching the incidents of the private life of him of whom it was said that “he was never for one day unfaithful to his apostolate.” We questioned the woman who showed us the house and who said she was a Protestant,—hoping to glean some interesting local traditions. But she knew nothing beyond her lesson—a brief and a dry one. We longed to know if in this apartment came and went the child whose biography is comprised by the father in one line:—
“God gave us a little son. He took him away.”
The mother who “always aided, never opposed” her husband, survived the boy eight years. Calvin never married again. Henceforward, his earthly ties were the Reformed Church and Geneva. “I offer to my God my slain heart as a sacrifice, forcing myself to obedience to His will,” became the motto of a life that had, no more, in it the sweet elements of home-happiness and repose.
The sun set while we stood upon the balcony, the room behind us growing darker and more desolately-silent, while the heavens brightened, ruddying the tiled roofs and time-stained walls of the “Old Town” in which the house stands. The wife may have sat here at even-tide, thinking of the babe that was coming to cheer her lonely, frugal dwelling, and, in those eight childless years, of the little son God took away. Her husband had no time for loverly converse or sad reverie—with his daily sermon every other week; his Theology lectures; his semi-weekly Consistory-meeting; his written controversies with Unitarians and Anabaptists, and the government, in all its details, of a municipality that owned him Dictator of letter and of spirit.
“Geneva”—wrote Knox to a friend during a visit to Calvin’s model town—“is the most perfect school of Christ the world has seen since the days of the Apostles.”
Scoffers said that Calvin resisted the Divine decree in his own case when the physicians pronounced him to be dying from seven mortal diseases. When he could no longer eat or sit up, he dictated, between the paroxysms of nausea and faintness, letters to all parts of Europe to one scribe, comments upon the Book of Joshua to another. He fainted in the pulpit, his sermon unfinished, the last time he was carried to the Cathedral. One month before his death, the most eminent medical authorities in Switzerland declaring that he could not survive a day longer, civil and ecclesiastical officers were collected to receive his solemn farewell. Still he lived—in such agony of body as chills the blood to read of, but in calm joyfulness of soul, until the end of May, almost four months after the Sabbath when he was brought back from the Cathedral fainting—it was believed, in a dying condition. The Battle of Life was with him a favorite figure in speech and writings. How he fought it until the last drop of blood was drained from his veins and heart is worthily told by Theodore Beza.
His handsome face hangs near Calvin’s in the Reviliod Gallery. So genial and débonnaire does this one of the Reformers look that we marvel—not at the charge of French levity brought against him by certain of his confrères—but that he should have loved so well his stern, joyless brother-in-arms. Yet gentle Melanchthon sighs, oppressed by the conviction that “Old Adam is too strong for young Melanchthon,”—“If I could but lay my weary head upon thy” (Calvin’s) “faithful heart and die there!”