CHAPTER II.
GENEVA AND THE STATE OF POLITICAL PARTIES AT THE DATE OF SERVETUS’S ARREST.
‘The year 1553,’ says Beza, in his life of Calvin, ‘by the impatience and fury of the factious, was a year so full of trouble that not only was the Church, but the Republic of Geneva, within a hair’s breadth of being wrecked and lost; all power had fallen into the hands of the wicked (i.e., the patriotic party of freethought, opposed to Calvin, and designated the Libertines), that it seemed as though they were on the point of attaining the ends for which they had so long been striving.’ Eighteen years had then elapsed since the Reformation first found footing in Geneva, and twelve since Calvin had resumed his position—interrupted during a period of two years—as a sort of spiritual dictator—‘the Lycurgus of a Christian Democracy’—not only as Organiser of the Faith, and Minister in the Church, but as regulator and supervisor of the morals and manners of the people.
The Reformation, in so far as Geneva was concerned, seems to have been hailed on political much more than on religious grounds. Emancipation from the yoke of the Roman Catholic bishop, under which its citizens had long fretted, meant escape from the political machinations, through the Priest, of France on the one hand, of Savoy on the other. The change from Romanism to Protestantism appears to have been due, in fact, to no particular discontent of the Genevese with the old Popish forms, or to any zeal for the new doctrines of Luther and his followers, but to a cherished hope of being suffered to pass their lives with as little control as might be from authority of any kind, and that little imposed and administered by themselves.
Moral discipline was notoriously lax over Europe in the early years of the sixteenth century, nowhere perhaps more so than at Geneva; and the liberty after which its people sighed was often understood as license rather than as life within the limits of moral law. Accident, however, having brought John Calvin, already a man of mark, to Geneva in the course of the year 1536, he was seized upon by William Farel, then in principal charge of the spiritual concerns of the city, and yielding to his most urgent entreaties—conjured, indeed, in the name of God, to remain and aid in the work of the Reformation—Calvin consented to cast in his lot with the Genevese, still jubilant over their lately recovered liberties and little amenable to discipline of any kind.
A more unlikely conjunction of elements can hardly be conceived than that of the ascetic, gloomy Calvin with the lively, self-indulgent Genevese, to whom life meant present enjoyment, and religion a pleasant addition to existence on festivals and Sundays, to be put off and on with their holiday garments and less to be thought of than the next excursion to the mountains in summer, or the approaching assembly for merriment and the dance in winter.
To Calvin life and its import wore a totally different aspect. To him the present was but a prelude to the future, a discipline preparing for eternity, and religion therefore the great end and aim of existence. Anchorite himself in the truest sense of the word, he would possibly have had herbs the food, the crystal spring the drink of the community. Fatalist too to a great extent through his doctrine of election and predestination, the joys of life—if life perchance had any joys—and its trials—and they were many, were to be taken with like passiveness and equanimity. Even the inclemencies of the seasons, as dispensations of providence, were not to be over-anxiously guarded against: the school-house windows, it is true, were to be glazed or protected in some sort by diaphanous skins or horn; but this was to be no higher than their lower halves; and in so much only that the snow-drift, the wind and the rain might not interfere with the work of the scholars.
Conscious himself, through natural endowment and added learning, of superiority to all about him, Calvin had little or no sympathy with the liberty the Genevese were so proud of having achieved. A despotism was his ideal of civil government; and his proclaimed purpose from the first in settling at Geneva was to make the city a stronghold of the Gospel, its people subjects of the Lord, and their faith and morals a model of all that had been proposed by the Reformation in the sense in which he understood it. And how much he differed in this from Luther, and Zwingli, need not be said. The
Wer liebt nicht Weiber, Wein und Gesang
Ein Narr ist er und bleibts sein Lebenslang[68]
of him of the Wartburg, must have sounded as simple profanity to Calvin.