Sebastian Castellio is one of these submerged venturers. While he lived he was so absolutely absorbed in the battle for truth that he took no pains at all to acquaint posterity with the details of his life, or to make his name quick and powerful in the ears of men. When he died {89} and laid down the weapons of his spiritual warfare his pious opponents thanked God for the relief and did what they could to consign him to oblivion. But after the long and silent flow of years the world has come up to his position and can appreciate a spirit who was too far in advance of the line of march to be comprehended in his lifetime. He was born in the little French village of St. Martin du Fresne—not many miles west of Lake Geneva in the year 1515. The home was pinched with poverty, but somebody in the home or in the village discovered that little Bastian was endowed with unusual gifts and must be given the chance to realize the life which his youth forecast; and that ancient family sacrifice, which has glorified so many homes of poverty, was made here in St. Martin, and the boy, possessed with his eager passion for knowledge, was started on his course in the Collège de la Trinité in Lyons. He soon found himself bursting into a new world, the world of classic antiquity, which the Humanists were restoring to the youth of that period, and he experienced that emancipating leap of soul and thrill of joy which such a world of beauty can produce upon a lofty spirit that sees and appreciates it. Some time during the Lyons period he came also under a still greater and more emancipating influence, the divine and simple Christ of the Gospels, whom the most serious of the Humanists had rediscovered, and to whom Castellio now dedicated the central loyalty of his soul.
At twenty-five years of age, now a splendid classical scholar, radiant with faith and hope and the vision of a new age for humanity which the recovered gospel was to bring in, Castellio went to Strasbourg to share the task of the Reformers and to put his life into the new movement. Calvin, then living in Strasbourg, received the brilliant recruit with joy and took him into his own home. When the great Reformer returned to Geneva in 1541 to take up the mighty task of his life he summoned Castellio to help him, and made him Principal of the College of Geneva, which Calvin planned to make one of the {90} foremost seats of Greek learning and one of the most illuminating centres for the study of the Scriptures. The young scholar's career seemed assured. He had the friendship of Calvin, he was head of an important institution of learning, the opportunity for creative literary work was opening before him, and he was aspiring soon to fulfil the clearest call of his life—to become a minister of the new gospel. His first contribution to religious literature was his volume of "Sacred Dialogues," a series of vivid scenes out of the Old and New Testaments, told in dialogue fashion, both in Latin and French.[2] They were to serve a double purpose: first, to teach French boys to read Latin, and secondly, to form in them a love for the great characters of the Bible and an appreciation of its lofty message of life. The stories were really good stories, simple enough for children, and yet freighted with a depth of meaning which made them suitable for mature minds. Their success was extraordinary, and their fine quality was almost universally recognized. They went through twenty-eight editions in their author's lifetime, and they were translated into many languages.[3] His bent toward a religion of a deeply ethical and spiritual type already appears in this early work, and here he announces a principle that was to rule his later life and was to cost him much suffering: "The friend of Truth obeys not the multitude but the Truth."
At the very time this book was appearing, an opportunity offered for testing the mettle of his courage. One of those ever-recurrent plagues that harassed former ages, before microbes were discovered, fell upon Geneva. The minister, who had volunteered to give spiritual comfort to those who were suffering with the plague in the hospital, was stricken with the dread disease, and a new volunteer was asked for. The records of the city show that Castellio, though not yet ordained, and under no obligation to take such risk, offered himself for the {91} hazardous service when the ministers of the city declined it. The ordination through human hands was, however, never to come to him, and a harder test of courage than the plague was before him. In the course of his studies he found himself compelled to take the position that the "Song of Solomon" was an ancient love poem, and that the traditional interpretation of it as a revelation of the true relation between Christ and the Church was a strained and unnatural interpretation. He also felt that as a scholar he could not with intellectual honesty agree with the statement in the Catechism that "Christ descended into Hell." Calvin challenged both these positions of Castellio, but his opposition to him was clearly far deeper than a difference of opinion on these two points. Calvin instinctively felt that the bold and independent spirit of this young scholar, his qualities of leadership, and his literary genius marked him out as a man who could not long be an easy-minded and supple subordinate. A letter which Calvin wrote at this time to his friend Viret shows where the real tension lay. "Castellio has got it into his head," he writes, "that I want to rule!" The great Reformer may not have been conscious yet of such a purpose, but there can be no question that Castellio read the signs correctly, and he was to be the first, as Buisson has said, to discover that "to resist Calvin was in the mind of the latter, to resist the Holy Ghost."[4] Calvin successfully opposed his ordination, and made it impossible for him to continue in Geneva his work as an honest scholar. To remain meant that he must surrender his right of independent judgment, he must cease to follow the line of emancipated scholarship, he must adjust his conscience to fit the ideas that were coming to be counted orthodox in the circle of the Reformed faith. That surrender he could no more make than Luther could surrender to the demands of his opponents at Worms. He quietly closed up his work in the College of Geneva and went into voluntary exile, to seek a sphere of life where he might think and speak as {92} he saw the truth and where he could keep his conscience a pure virgin.
He settled in Basle, where Erasmus had found a refuge, and where, two years before, the exiled and hunted Sebastian Franck, the spiritual forerunner of Castellio, had died in peace. For ten years (1545-1555) he lived with his large family in pitiable poverty. He read proof for the Humanist printer Oporin, he fished with a boat-hook for drift-wood along the shores of the Rhine,—"rude labour no doubt," he says, "but honest, and I do not blush for having done it,"—and he did whatever honest work he could find that would help keep body and soul together. Through all these years, every moment of the day that could be saved from bread-winning toil, and much of his night-time, went into the herculean task to which he had dedicated himself—the complete translation of the Bible from its original languages into both Latin and French.[5] Being himself one of the common people he always had the interests and needs of the common people in view, and he put the Bible into current sixteenth-century speech. His French translation has the marked characteristics of the Renaissance period. He makes patriarchs, prophets, and the persons of the New Testament live again in his vivid word-pictures, as the great contemporary painters were making them live on their canvases. But that which gave his translation its great human merit and popular interest was a serious defect in the eyes of the theologians. It was vivid, full of the native Oriental colour, true in the main to the original, and strong in its appeal to religious imagination, but painfully weak in its support of the dogmas and doctrines around which the theological battles of the Reformation were centring. Still less were the theologians pleased with the Preface of his Latin Bible, dedicated to the boy-king of England, Edward VI. Here he boldly insists that the Reformation, {93} wherever it spreads, shall champion the principle of free conscience, and shall wage its battles with spiritual weapons alone. The only enemies of our faith, he says, are vices, and vices can be conquered only by virtues. The Christ who said if they strike you on one cheek turn the other, has called us to the spiritual task of instructing men in the truth, and that work can never be put into the hands of an executioner! "I address you, O king," he concludes, "not as a prophet sent from God, but as a man of the people who abhors quarrels and hatred, and who wishes to see religion spread by love rather than by fierce controversy, by purity of heart rather than by external methods. . . . Read these sacred writings with a pious and religious heart, and prepare yourself to reign as a mortal man who must give an account to immortal God. I desire that you may have the meekness of Moses, the piety of David, and the wisdom of Solomon."[6]
Two years after this appeal to the new Protestantism to make the great venture of spreading its truth by love and persuasion, there came from Geneva the decisive answer in the burning of Servetus, followed by the famous Defence before the world, written mainly by Calvin, of the course that had been taken. One month later, a brief Latin work appeared from the press with the title, De haereticis, an sint persequendi, etc. (Magdeburgi, 1554), followed in very short time by a French edition (Rouen, 1554). The body of the work contained impressive passages in favour of toleration from Church Fathers, from Luther, Erasmus, Sebastian Franck, and others, concluding with a passage from "Basil Montfort," a name which thinly veils Bastian Castellio himself. The Preface was addressed to the Duke of Wurtemberg, bore the name of "Martinus Bellius," and was beyond doubt written by Castellio, who inspired and directed the entire work, in which he was assisted by a very small group of refugees in Basle of similar ideas on this subject to his {94} own. This Preface is one of the mother documents on freedom of conscience, from which in time came a large offspring, and it is, furthermore, an interesting interpretation of a type of Christianity then somewhat new in the world. Its simplicity, its human appeal, its restrained emotional power, its prophetic tone, its sincerity and depth of earnestness mark it as a distinct work of genius, almost in the class with Pascal's Provincial Letters.
"If thou, illustrious Prince, had informed thy subjects that thou wert coming to visit them at an unnamed time and had requested them to be prepared in white garments to meet thee on thy coming; what wouldst thou do, if, on arrival, thou shouldst find that instead of robing themselves in white they had occupied themselves in violent debate about thy person—some insisting that thou wert in France, others that thou wert in Spain; some declaring that thou would come on horseback, others that thou would come by chariot; some holding that thou would come with great pomp, others that thou would come without train or following? And what especially wouldst thou say if they debated not only with words but with blows of fist and strokes of sword, and if some succeeded in killing and destroying others who differed from them? 'He will come on horseback.' 'No, he won't; he will come by chariot.' 'You lie.' 'No, I do not; you are the liar.' 'Take that'—a blow with the fist. 'You take that'—a sword-thrust through the body. O Prince, what would you think of such citizens? Christ asked us to put on the white robes of a pure and holy life, but what occupies our thought? We dispute not only of the way to Christ, but of His relation to God the Father, of the Trinity, of predestination, of free will, of the nature of God, of angels, of the condition of the soul after death,—of a multitude of matters that are not essential for salvation, and matters, in fact, which never can be known until our hearts are pure, for they are things which must be spiritually perceived."
With a striking boldness, but with beautiful simplicity of spirit, he describes "an honest follower of Christ"—and {95} it is himself whom he is describing—"who believes in God the Father and in His Son Jesus Christ, and who wants to do His will, but cannot see that will just as others about him see it, in matters of intellectual formulation and in matters of external practice." "I cannot," he adds, "do violence to my conscience for fear of disobeying Christ. I must be saved or lost by my own personal faith, not by that of another. I ask you, whether Christ, who forgave those who went astray, and commanded His followers to forgive until seventy times seven, Christ who is the final Judge of us all, if He were here, would command a person like that to be killed! . . . O Christ, Creator and King of the world," he cries out, "dost Thou see and approve these things? Hast Thou become a totally different person from what Thou wert? When Thou wert on earth, nothing could be more gentle and kind, more ready to suffer injuries. Thou wert like a sheep dumb before the shearers. Beaten, spit upon, mocked, crowned with thorns, crucified between thieves, Thou didst pray for those who injured Thee. Hast Thou changed to this? Art Thou now so cruel and contrary to Thyself? Dost Thou command that those who do not understand Thy ordinances and commandments as those over us require, should be drowned, or drawn and quartered, and burned at the stake!"
The Christian world holds this view now. It is a part of the necessary air we breathe. But at this crisis in modern history it was unforgivably new.[7] One man's soul had the vision, one man's entire moral fibre throbbed with passion for it, and his rich intellectual nature pleaded for it as the only course of reason: "To burn a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to burn a man!" But it was a voice crying in a wilderness, and from henceforth Castellio was a marked and dangerous man in the eyes of all who were opposed to "Bellianism "—as the principle of toleration was nicknamed in honour of Martinus Bellius—and that included almost all the world. But to the end of his life, and in almost every one of his multitudinous {96} tracts he continued to announce the principle of religious liberty, and to work for a type of Christianity which depended for its conquering power solely on its inherent truth and on its moral dynamic.
Calvin, who recognized the hand of Castellio in this powerful defence of freedom of thought, called his opponent "a monster full of poison and madness," and proceeded to demolish him in a Reply. In his Contra libellum Calvini, which is an answer to this Reply, Castellio declares that Calvin's act in burning Servetus was a bloody act, and that now his book is a direct menace to honest, pious people. "I," he adds, "who have a horror of blood, propose to examine the book. I do not defend Servetus. I have never read his books. Calvin burned them together with their author. I do not want to burn Calvin or to burn his book. I am only going to answer it." He notes that Calvin complains of "novelties and innovations," a strange complaint, he thinks, from a man who "has introduced more innovations in ten years than the entire Church had introduced in six centuries!" All the sects, he reminds the great Reformer, claim to be founded on the Word of God. They all believe that their religion is true. Calvin says that his is the only true one. Each of the others says that his is the only true one. Calvin says that they are wrong. He makes himself (by what right I do not know) the judge and sovereign arbiter. He claims that he has on his side the sure evidence of the Word of God. Then why does he write so many books to prove what is evident? The truth is surely not evident to those who die denying that it is truth! Calvin asks how doctrine is to be guarded if heretics are not to be punished. "Doctrine," cries Castellio, "Christ's doctrine means loving one's enemies, returning good for evil, having a pure heart and a hunger and thirst for righteousness. You may return to Moses if you will, but for us others Christ has come."
Love, he constantly insists, is the supreme badge of any true Christianity, and the traits of the beatitudes in a person's life are a surer evidence that he belongs in {97} Christ's family, than is the fact that he holds current opinions on obscure questions of belief. "Before God," he writes in his Defensio, a work of the year 1562, to those who wish to hunt him off the face of the earth, "and from the bottom of my heart, I call you to the spirit of love." "By the bowels of Christ, I ask and implore you to leave me in peace, to stop persecuting me. Let me have the liberty of my faith as you have of yours. At the heart of religion I am one with you. It is in reality the same religion; only on certain points of interpretation I see differently from you. But however we differ in opinion, why cannot we love one another?"