A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

This memorandum, for it is scarcely more, was dignified with the name of the Articles (Articuli de regimine ecclesiæ). It was generally approved by the Small Council and the Council of Two Hundred, who made, besides, the definite regulations that the Holy Supper should be celebrated four times in the year, and that announcements of marriages should be made for three successive Sundays before celebration. But it is very doubtful whether the Council went beyond this general approval, or that they gave definite and deliberate consent to Calvin’s proposals about “the discipline of excommunication.”

These Articles were superseded by the famous Ordonnances ecclésiastiques de l’Église de Genève, adopted on Nov. 20th, 1541; but as they are the first instance in which Calvin publicly presented his special ideas about ecclesiastical government, it may be well to describe what these were. To understand them aright, to see the new thing which Calvin tried to introduce into the Church life of the sixteenth century, it is necessary to distinguish between two things which it must be confessed were practically entangled with each other in these days—the attempt to regulate the private life by laws municipal or national, and the endeavour to preserve the solemnity and purity of the celebration of the Holy Supper.

When historians, ecclesiastical or other, charge Calvin with attempting the former, they forget that there was no need for him to do so. Geneva, like every other mediæval town, had its laws which interfered with private life at every turn, and that in a way which to our modern minds seems the grossest tyranny, but which was then a commonplace of city life. Every mediæval town had its laws against extravagance in dress, in eating and in drinking, against cursing and swearing, against gaming, dances, and masquerades. They prescribed the number of guests to be invited to weddings, and dinners, and dances; when the pipers were to play, when they were to leave off, and what they were to be paid. It must be confessed that when one turns over the pages of town chronicles, or reads such a book as Baader’s Nürnberger Polizeiordnung, the thought cannot help arising that the Civic Fathers, like some modern law-makers, were content to place stringent regulations on the statute-book, and then, exhausted by their moral endeavour, had no energy left to put them into practice. But every now and then a righteous fit seized them, and maid-servants were summoned before the Council for wearing silk aprons, or fathers for giving too luxurious wedding feasts, or citizens for working on a Church festival, or a mother, for adorning her daughter too gaily for her marriage. The citizens of every mediæval town lived under a municipal discipline which we would pronounce to be vexatious and despotic. Every instance quoted by modern historians to prove, as they think, Calvin’s despotic interference with the details of private life, can be paralleled by references to the police-books of mediæval towns in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. To make them ground of accusation against Calvin is simply to plead ignorance of the whole municipal police of the later Middle Ages. To say that Calvin acquiesced in or approved of such legislation is simply to show that he belonged to the sixteenth century. When towns adopted the Reformation, the spirit of civic legislation did not change, but some old regulations were allowed to lapse, and fresh ones suggested by the new ideas took their place. There was nothing novel in the law which Bern made for the Pays de Vaud in 1536 (Dec. 24th), prohibiting dancing with the exception of “trois danses honêtes” at weddings; but it was a new regulation which prescribed that parents must bring their daughters to the marriage altar “le chiefz couvert.” It was not a new thing when Basel in 1530 appointed three honourable men (one from the Council and two from the commonalty) to watch over the morals of the inhabitants of each parish, and report to the Council. It was new, but quite in the line of mediæval civic legislation, when Bern forbade scandalous persons from approaching the Lord’s Table (1532).

Calvin’s thought moved on another plane. He was distinguished among the Reformers for his zeal to restore again the conditions which had ruled in the Church of the first three centuries. This had been a favourite idea with Lefèvre,[117] who had taught it to Farel, Gerard Roussel, and the other members of the “group of Meaux.” Calvin may have received it from Roussel; but there is no need to suppose that it did not come to him quite independently. He had studied the Fathers of the first three centuries more diligently than any of his contemporaries. He recognised as none of them did that the Holy Supper of the Lord was the centre of the religious life of the Church, and the apex and crown of her worship. He saw how careful the Church of the first three centuries had been to protect the sacredness of the simple yet profound rite; and that it had done so by preventing the approach of all unworthy communicants. Discipline was the nerve of the early Church, and excommunication was the nerve of discipline; and Calvin wished to introduce both. Moreover, he knew that in the early Church it belonged to the membership and to the ministry to exercise discipline and to pronounce excommunication. He desired to reintroduce all these distinctive features of the Church of the first three centuries—weekly communion, discipline and excommunication exercised by the pastorate and the members. He recognised that when the people had been accustomed to come to the Lord’s Table only once or twice in the year, it was impossible to introduce weekly communion all at once. But he insisted that the warnings of St. Paul about unworthy communicants were so weighty that notorious sinners ought to be prevented from approaching the Holy Supper, and that the obstinately impenitent should be excommunicated. This and this alone was the distinctive thing about Calvin’s proposals; this was the new conception which he introduced.

Calvin’s mistake was that, while he believed that the membership and the pastorate should exercise discipline and excommunication, he also insisted that the secular power should enforce the censures of the Church. His ideas worked well in the French Church, a Church “under the cross,” and in the same position as the Church of the early centuries. But the conception that the secular power ought to support with civil pains and penalties the disciplinary decisions of ecclesiastical Courts, must have produced a tyranny not unlike what had existed in the mediæval Church. Calvin’s ideas, however, were never accepted save nominally in any of the Swiss Churches—not even in Geneva. The very thought of excommunication in the hands of the Church was eminently distasteful to the Protestants of the sixteenth century; they had suffered too much from it as exercised by the Roman Catholic Church. Nor did it agree with the conceptions which the magistrates of the Swiss republics had of their own dignity, that they should be the servants of the ministry to carry out their sentences.[118] The leading Reformers in German Switzerland almost universally held that excommunication, if it ever ought to be practised, should be in the hands of the civil authorities.

Zwingli did not think that the Church should exercise the right of excommunication. He declared that the example of the first three centuries was not to be followed, because in these days the “Church could have no assistance from the Emperors, who were pagans”; whereas in Zurich there was a Christian magistracy, who could relieve the Church of what must be in any case a disagreeable duty. His successor, Bullinger, the principal adviser of the divines of the English Reformation, went further. Writing to Leo Jud (1532), he declares that excommunication ought not to belong to the Church, and that he doubts whether it should be exercised even by the secular authorities; and in a letter to a Romance pastor (Nov. 24th, 1543) he expounds his views about excommunication, and states how he differs from his optimos fratres Gallos (Viret, Farel, and Calvin).[119] The German Swiss Reformers took the one side, and the French Swiss Reformers took the other; and the latter were all men who had learned to reverence the usages of the Church of the first three centuries, and desired to see its methods of ecclesiastical discipline restored.

The people invariably sided with the German-speaking Reformers.[120] Calvin managed, with great difficulty, to introduce excommunication into Geneva after his return from exile, but not in a way conformable to his ideas. Farel could not get it introduced into Neuchâtel. He believed, founding on the New Testament,[121] that the membership of each parish had the right to exclude from the Holy Supper sinners who had resisted all admonitions. But the Council and community of Neuchâtel would not tolerate the “practice and usage of Excommunication,” and did not allow it to appear in their ecclesiastical ordinances of 1542 or of 1553. Oecolampadius induced the Council of Basel to permit excommunication, and to inscribe the names of the excommunicate on placards fixed on the doors of the churches. Zwingli remonstrated vigorously, and the practice was abandoned. Bern was willing to warn open sinners from approaching the Lord’s Table, but would not hear of excommunication, and declared roundly that “ministers, who were sinners themselves, being of flesh and blood, should not attempt to penetrate into the individual consciences, whose secrets were known to God alone.” Viret tried to introduce a discipline ecclésiastique into the Pays de Vaud, but was unable to induce magistrates or people to accept it. The young Protestant Churches of Switzerland, with the very doubtful exception of Geneva after 1541, refused to allow the introduction of the disciplinary usages of the primitive Church. They had no objection to discipline, however searching and vexatious, provided it was simply an application of the old municipal legislation, to which they had for generations been accustomed, to the higher moral requirements of religion.[122] It was universally recognised that the standard of moral living all over French Switzerland was very low, and that stringent measures were required to improve it. No exception was taken to the severe reprimand which the Council of Bern addressed to the subject Council of Lausanne for their failure to correct the evil habits of the people of that old episcopal town;[123] but such discipline had to be exercised in the old mediæval way through the magistrates, and not in any new-fangled fashion borrowed from the primitive Church. So far as Switzerland was concerned, Calvin’s entreaties to model their ecclesiastical life on what he believed with Lefèvre to be the golden period of the Church’s history, fell on heedless ears. One must go to the French Church, and in a lesser degree to the Church of Knox in Scotland, to see Calvin’s ideas put in practice; it is vain to look for this in Switzerland.

The Catechism for children was published in 1537, and was meant, according to the author, to give expression to a simple piety, rather than to exhibit a profound knowledge of religious truth. But, as Calvin himself felt later, it was too theological for children, and was superseded by a second Catechism, published immediately after his return to Geneva in 1541. The first Catechism was entitled Instruction and Confession of Faith for the use of the Church of Geneva. It expounded successively the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Sacraments. The duties of the pastorate and of the magistracy were stated in appendices.[124]

The Confession of Faith had for its full title, Confession de la Foy laquelle tous bourgois et habitans de Genève et subjectz du pays doyvent jurer de garder et tenir extraicte de l’Instruction dont on use en l’Église de la dicte ville.[125] It reproduced the contents of the Instruction, and was, like it, a condensed summary of the Institutio.

This Confession has often been attributed to Farel, but there can be little doubt that it came from the pen of Calvin.[126] It was submitted to the Council and approved by them, and they agreed that the people should be asked to swear to maintain it, the various divisions of the districts of the town appearing for the purpose before the secretary of the Council. The proposal was then sent down to the Council of the Two Hundred, where it was assented to, but not without opposition. The minutes show that some members remained faithful to the Romanist faith. They said that they ought not to be compelled to take an oath which was against their conscience. Others who professed themselves Protestants asserted that to swear to a Confession took from them their liberty. “We do not wish to be constrained,” they said, “but to live in our liberty.” But in the end it was resolved to do as the Council had recommended. So day by day the dizenniers, or captains of the divisions of the town, brought their people to the cathedral, where the secretary stood in the pulpit to receive the oath. The magistrates set the example, and the people were sworn in batches, raising their hands and taking the oath. But there were malcontents who stayed away, and there were beginnings of trouble which was to increase. Deputies from Bern, unmindful of the fact that their city had sworn in the same way to their creed, encouraged the dissentients by saying that no one could take such an oath without perjuring himself; and this opinion strengthened the opposition. But the Council of Bern disowned its deputies,[127] and refused any countenance to the malcontents, and the trouble passed. All Geneva was sworn to maintain the Confession.