It is matter of deep regret that with the exception of the first communication of Calvin to Villeneuve, which is in the form of an essay rather than a familiar epistle, and was written some time before the stinging missive sent through Frelon, we have nothing from him that would have enabled us to judge of the general style and character of his letters, though of this we may form an estimate from his subsequent writings. Calvin was far too much engaged to make copies of his letters, and we may feel certain that Villeneuve, on the first intimation of danger threatening him from the authorities of Vienne, destroyed every scrap of writing he had ever had from the Reformer, calculated as it was to compromise him in the eyes of Roman Catholics. Forced, for the sake of his French correspondents, to resort to a pseudonym, Calvin had probably addressed Villeneuve in his proper name. The letter to Frelon and the one from Frelon to Villeneuve must have been overlooked, or thought to contain nothing that could be adversely interpreted, and so found their way to the Judicial Archives of Vienne, whence they were recovered and published by Mosheim.[56]
The letters of Villeneuve to Calvin, or a certain number of them, at all events, have been transmitted to us by their writer in a section of his work on the Restoration of Christianity; and we turned to them with the interest of expectation, thinking we might there find a key to the singular and persistent hostility with which Calvin shows himself to have been animated towards his correspondent. Nor were we disappointed. The style of address indulged in by Villeneuve, as the correspondence proceeds, is as if purposely calculated to wound, if not even to insult, a man in the position of John Calvin, conscious of his own superiority, jealous of his authority, and become so sensitive to everything like disrespectful bearing on the part of those who approached him. But of deference or respect, save at the outset, there is not a trace in any of the letters of Villeneuve. On the contrary, they have often an air of something like familiarity that must have been extremely disagreeable to Calvin. Add to this the unseemly and disparaging epithets with which he pelts the irritable Reformer, and we have warrant enough for our assumption that, mainly out of this unfortunate epistolary encounter, was the enmity engendered which took such hold of Calvin’s mind as led him to see in a mere theological dissident a dangerous innovator and deadly personal foe.
The correspondence at the outset, however, had nothing of the unseemly character it acquired as it proceeded. Villeneuve approached the Reformer at first as one seeking aid and information from another presumed most capable of giving both; and this was precisely the style of address that suited Calvin. The subjects on which he desired the Reformer’s opinion were theological, of course, and of great gravity, involving topics of no less moment than the sense in which the Divinity and Sonship of Christ, the Doctrine of Regeneration, and the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, were to be understood.
In a letter to a friend of a later date Calvin speaks as if he believed that these questions had been proposed in mockery, or to get him into difficulty; but this was an afterthought, and when he had come to persuade himself that Servetus was a man devoid of all religious principle. Nothing of any suspicion of the kind he hints at appears in his reply to the first communication he received, for it is sober, earnest, and to the point, each subject being taken up in succession and discussed, now in conformity with his own particular views, and then with the interpretation of the Churches.
Servetus’s questions to Calvin, three in number, were propounded categorically, and in the following order:—
1st.—Was the man Jesus, who was crucified, the Son of God; and what is the rationale of the Sonship (filiatio)?
2nd.—Is the Kingdom of heaven in man; when is it entered; and when is regeneration effected?
3rd.—Is Baptism to be received in faith, like the Supper; and in what sense are these institutions to be held as the New Covenant?
To the first, Calvin replies: ‘We believe and confess that Jesus Christ, the man who was crucified, was the Son of God, and say that the Wisdom of God, born of the Eternal Father before all time, having become incarnate, was now manifested in the flesh. Therefore do we acknowledge Christ to be the Son of God by his humanity; therefore, also, do we say that he is God—sed ideo quod Deus. As by his human nature, he is engendered of the seed of David, and so is said to be the Son of David; by parity of reason, and because of his divine nature, is he the Son of God. Christ, however, is One, not Two-fold; he is at once the Son of God and the Son of Man. You own him as the Son of God, but do not admit the oneness, save in a confused way. We, who say that the Son of God is our Brother, as well as the true Immanuel, nevertheless acknowledge in the One Christ the Majesty of God and the Humility of man. But you, confounding these, destroy both; for, acknowledging God manifest in the flesh, you say the divinity is the flesh itself, the humanity God Himself.’
To the second he answers: ‘The Kingdom of God, we say, begins in men when they are regenerated; and we are said to be regenerated when, enlightened by faith in Christ, we yield entire obedience to God. I deny, however, that regeneration takes place in a moment; it is enough if progress be made therein even to the hour of death.’