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

by Thomas M. Lindsay

Calvin was overcome. He consented to return to Geneva, and entered the city still suffering from his repugnance to undertake work he was not at all sure that he was fitted to do. Historians speak of a triumphal entry. There may have been, though nothing could have been more distasteful to Calvin at any time, and eminently so on this occasion, with the feelings he had. Contemporary documents are silent. There is only the minute of the Council, as formal as minutes usually are, relating that “Maystre Johan Calvin, ministre evangelique,” is again in charge of the Church in Geneva (Sept. 13th, 1541).[151]

Calvin was in Geneva for the second time, dragged there both times unwillingly, his dream of a quiet scholar’s life completely shattered. The work that lay before him proved to be almost as hard as he had foreseen it would be. The common idea that from this second entry Calvin was master within the city, is quite erroneous. Fourteen years were spent in a hard struggle (1541-55); and if the remaining nine years of his life can be called his period of triumph over opponents (1555-64), it must be remembered that he was never able to see his ideas of an ecclesiastical organisation wholly carried out in the city of his adoption. One must go to the Protestant Church of France to see Calvin’s idea completely realised.[152]

On the day of his entry into Geneva (Sept. 13th, 1541) the Council resolved that a Constitution should be given to the Church of the city, and a committee was formed, consisting of Calvin, his colleagues in the ministry, and six members of the Council, to prepare the draft. The work was completed in twenty days, and ready for presentation. On September 16th, however, it had been resolved that the draft when prepared should be submitted for revision to the Smaller Council, to the Council of Sixty, and finally to the Council of Two Hundred. The old opposition at once manifested itself within these Councils. There seem to have been alterations, and at the last moment Calvin thought that the Constitution would be made worthless for the purpose of discipline and orderly ecclesiastical rule. In the end, however, the drafted ordinances were adopted unanimously by the Council of Two Hundred without serious alteration. The result was the famous Ecclesiastical Ordinances of Geneva in their first form. They did not assume their final form until 1561.[153]

When these Ordinances of 1541 are compared with the principles of ecclesiastical government laid down in the Institutio, with the Articles of 1537, and with the Ordinances of 1561, it can be seen that Calvin must have sacrificed a great deal in order to content the magistrates of Geneva.

He had contended for the self-government of the Church, especially in matters of discipline; the principle runs all through the chapters of the fourth book of the Institutio. The Ordinances give a certain show of autonomy, and yet the whole authority really rests with the Councils. The discipline was exercised by the Consistory or session of Elders (Anciens); but this Consistory was chosen by the Smaller Council on the advice of the ministers, and was to include two members of the Smaller Council, four from the Council of Sixty, and six from the Council of Two Hundred, and when they had been chosen they were to be presented to the Council of Two Hundred for approval. When the Consistory met, one of the four Syndics sat as president, holding his baton, the insignia of his magisterial office, in his hand, which, as the revised Ordinances of 1561 very truly said, “had more the appearance of civil authority than of spiritual rule.” The revised Ordinances forbade the president to carry his baton when he presided in The Consistory, in order to render obedience to the distinction which is “clearly shown in Holy Scripture to exist between the magistrate’s sword and authority and the superintendence which ought to be in the Church”; but the obedience to Holy Scripture does not seem to have gone further than laying aside the baton for the time. It appears also that the rule of consulting the ministers in the appointments made to the Consistory was not unfrequently omitted, and that it was to all intents and purposes simply a committee of the Councils, and anything but submissive to the pastors.[154] The Consistory had no power to inflict civil punishments on delinquents. It could only admonish and warn. When it deemed that chastisements were necessary, it had to report to the Council, who sentenced. This was also done in order to maintain the separation between the civil and ecclesiastical power; but, in fact, it was a committee of the Council that reported to the Council, and the distinction was really illusory. This state of matters was quite repugnant to Calvin’s cherished idea, not only as laid down in the Institution, but as seen at work in the Constitution of the French Protestant Church, which was mainly his authorship. “The magnificent, noble, and honourable Lords” of the Council (such was their title) of this small town of 13,000 inhabitants deferred in words to the teachings of Calvin about the distinction between the civil and the spiritual powers, but in fact they retained the whole power of rule or discipline in their own hands; and we ought to see in the disciplinary powers and punishments of the Consistory of Geneva, not an exhibition of the working of a Church organised on the principles of Calvin, but the ordinary procedure of the Town Council of a mediæval city. Their petty punishments and their minute interference with private life are only special instances of what was common to all municipal rule in the sixteenth century.

Through that century we find a protest against the mediæval intrusion of the ecclesiastical power into the realm of civil authority, with the inevitable reaction which made the ecclesiastical a mere department of national or civic administration. Zurich under Zwingli, although it is usually taken as the extreme type of this Erastian policy, as it came to be called later, went no further than Bern, Strassburg, or other places. The Council of Geneva had legal precedent when they insisted that the supreme ecclesiastical power belonged to them. The city had been an ecclesiastical principality, ruled in civil as well as in ecclesiastical things by its Bishop, and the Council were legally the inheritors of the Bishop’s authority. This meant, among other things, that the old laws against heresy, unless specially repealed, remained on the Statute Book, and errors in doctrine were reckoned to be of the nature of treasonable things; and this made heresies, or variations in religious opinion from what the Statute Book had declared to be the official view of truth, liable to civil pains and penalties.

“Castellio’s doubts as to the canonicity of the Song of Songs and as to the received interpretation of Christ’s descent into Hades, Bolsec’s criticism of predestination, Gryet’s suspected scepticism and possession of infidel books, Servetus’ rationalism and anti-Trinitarian creed, were all opinions judged to be criminal.... The heretic may be a man of irreproachable character; but if heresy be treason against the State,”[155]

he was a criminal, and had to be punished for the crime on the Statute Book. To say that Calvin burnt Servetus, as is continually done, is to make one man responsible for a state of things which had lasted in western Europe ever since the Emperor Theodosius declared that all men were out of law who did not accept the Nicene Creed in the form issued by Damasus of Rome. On the other hand, to release Calvin from his share in that tragedy and crime by denying that he sat among the judges of the heretic, or to allege that Servetus was slain because he conspired against the liberties of the city, is equally unreasonable. Calvin certainly believed that the execution of the anti-Trinitarian was right. The Protestants of France and of Switzerland in 1903 (Nov. 1st) erected what they called a monument expiatoire to the victim of sixteenth century religious persecution, and placed on it an inscription in which they acknowledged their debt to the great Reformer, and at the same time condemned his error,—surely the right attitude to assume.[156]

Calvin did three things for Geneva, all of which went far beyond its walls. He gave its Church a trained and tested ministry, its homes an educated people who could give a reason for their faith, and to the whole city an heroic soul which enabled the little town to stand forth as the Citadel and City of Refuge for the oppressed Protestants of Europe.

The earlier preachers of the Reformed faith had been stray scholars, converted priests and monks, pious artisans, and such like. They were for the most part heroic men who did their work nobly. But some of them had no real vocation for the position into which they had thrust themselves. They had been prompted by such ignoble motives as discontent with their condition, the desire to marry or to make legitimate irregular connections,[157] or dislike to all authority and wholesome restraints. They had brought neither change of heart nor of conduct into their new surroundings, and had become a source of danger and scandal to the small Protestant communities.