The official representatives of the Roman Catholic religion did not appear to advantage at this crisis of their fate. They were in no haste to defend their worship before the Council. When they at last appeared (Nov. 29th, 1535), the monks in the forenoon and the secular clergy in the afternoon, there was a careless indifference in their answers. The Council seem to have referred them to Farel’s summary of the matters discussed in the public Disputation which began on the 30th of May, and to have asked them what they had to say against its conclusions and in favour of the Mass and of the adoration of the saints.[92] The monks one after another (twelve of them appeared before the Council) answered monotonously that they were unlearned people, who lived as they had been taught by their fathers, and did not inquire further. The secular clergy, by their spokesman Roletus de Pane, said that they had nothing to do with the Disputation and what had been said there; that they had no desire to listen to more addresses from Farel; and that they meant to live as their predecessors.[93] This was the end. The two deputations of monks and seculars were informed by the Council that they must cease saying Mass until further orders were given. The Reformation was legally established in Geneva, and the city stood forth with Bern as altogether Protestant.[94]
The dark clouds on the political horizon were rising. France seemed about to interfere in favour of Geneva, and the fear of France in possession of the “gate of western Switzerland” was stronger than reluctance to permit Geneva to become a Protestant city. The Council of Freiburg promised to allow the Bernese army to march through their territory. Bern renounced its alliance with Savoy on November 29th, 1535. War was declared on January 16th. The army of Bern left its territories, gathering reinforcements as it went; for towns like Neuville, Neuchâtel, Lausanne, Payerne—oppressed Protestant communities in Romance Switzerland—felt that the hour of their liberation was at hand, and their armed burghers were eager to strike one good stroke at their oppressors under the leadership of the proud republic. There was little fighting. The greater part of the Pays de Vaud was conquered without striking a blow, and the army of the Duke of Savoy and the Bishop of Geneva was dispersed without a battle. A few sieges were needed to complete the victory. The great republic, after its fashion, had waited till the opportune moment, and then struck once and for all. Its decisive victory brought deliverance not only to Geneva, but to Lausanne and many other Protestant municipalities in Romance Switzerland (Aug. 7th, 1536). The democracy of Geneva was served heir to the seignorial rights of the Bishop, and to the sovereign rights of the Duke of Savoy over city and lands. Geneva became an independent republic under the protectorate of Bern, and to some extent dependent on that canton.
In the month of December 1535, the Syndics and Council of Geneva had adopted the legend on the coat of arms of the town, Post tenebras lux—a device which became very famous, and appeared on its coinage. The resolution of the Council of the Two Hundred to abolish the Mass and saint worship was officially confirmed by the citizens assembled, “as was the custom, by sound of bell and of trumpet” (May 21st, 1536).
Geneva had gained much. It had won political independence, for which it had been fighting for thirty years, modified by its relations to Bern,[95] but greater than it had ever before enjoyed. The Reformed religion had been established, although the fact remained that the Romanist partisans had still a good deal of hidden strength. But much was still to be done to make the town the citadel of the Reformation which it was to become. Its past history had demoralised its people. The rule of dissolute bishops and the example of a turbulent and immoral clergy had poisoned the morals of the city.[96] The liberty won might easily degenerate into licence, and ominous signs were not lacking that this was about to take place. “It is impossible to deny,” says Kampschulte, the Roman Catholic biographer of Calvin, “that disorder and demoralisation had become threatening in Geneva; it would have been almost a miracle had it not been so.” Farel did what he could. He founded schools. He organised the hospitals. He strove to kindle moral life in the people of his adopted city. But his talents and his character fitted him much more for pioneer work than for the task which now lay before him.
Farel was a chivalrous Frenchman, born among the mountains of Dauphiné, whose courage, amounting to reckless daring, won for him the passionate admiration of soldiers like Wildermuth,[97] and made him volunteer to lead any forlorn hope however desperate. He was sympathetic to soft-heartedness, yet utterly unable to restrain his tongue; in danger of his life one week because of his violent language, and the next almost adored, by those who would have slain him, for the reckless way in which he nursed the sick and dying during a visitation of the plague. He was the brilliant partisan leader, seeing only what lay before his eyes; incapable of self-restraint; a learned theologian, yet careless in his expression of doctrine, and continually liable to misapprehension. No one was better fitted to attack the enemy’s strongholds, few less able to hold them when once possessed. He saw, without the faintest trace of jealousy—the man was too noble—others building on the foundations he had laid. It is almost pathetic to see that none of the Romance Swiss churches whose Apostle he had been, cared to retain him as their permanent leader. In the closing years of his life he went back to his beloved France, and ended as he had begun, a pioneer evangelist in Lyons, Metz, and elsewhere,—a leader of forlorn hopes, carrying within him a perpetual spring and the effervescing recklessness of youth. He had early seen that the pioneer life which he led was best lived without wife or children, and he remained unmarried until his sixty-ninth year. Then he met with a poor widow who had lost husband and property for religion’s sake in Rouen, and had barely escaped with life. He married her because in no other way could he find for her a home and protection.
Geneva needed a man of altogether different mould of character to do the work that was now necessary. When Farel’s anxieties and vexations were at their height, he learned almost by accident that a distinguished young French scholar, journeying from Ferrara to Basel, driven out of his direct course by war, had arrived in Geneva, and was staying for a night in the town. This was Calvin.
§ 4. Calvin: Youth and Education.
Jean Cauvin (latinised into Calvinus) was born at Noyon in Picardy on the 10th of July 1509. He was the second son in a family of four sons and two daughters. His father, Gerard Cauvin, was a highly esteemed lawyer, the confidential legal adviser of the nobility and higher clergy of the district. His mother, Jeanne La France, a very beautiful woman, was noted for her devout piety and her motherly affection. Calvin, who says little about his childhood, relates how he was once taken by his mother on the festival of St. Anna to see a relic of the saint preserved in the Abbey of Ourscamp, near Noyon, and that he remembers kissing “part of the body of St. Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary.”[98]
The Cauvins belonged to what we should call the upper middle class in social standing, and the young Jean entered the house of the noble family of de Montmor to share the education of the children, his father paying for all his expenses. The young de Montmors were sent to College in Paris, and Jean Cauvin, then fourteen years of age, went with them. This early social training never left Calvin, who was always the reserved, polished French gentleman—a striking contrast to his great predecessor Luther.