It has been remarked that Calvin’s theology was less original and effective than his legislation or policy.[188] The statement seems to overlook the peculiar service which was rendered to the Reformation movement by the Institution. The Reformation was a rebellion against the external authority of the mediæval Church; but every revolt, even that against the most flagrant abuses and the most corrupt rule, carries in it seeds of evil which must be slain if any real progress is to be made. For it instinctively tends to sweep away all restraints—those that are good and necessary as well as those that are bad and harmful. The leaders of every movement for reform have a harder battle to fight against the revolutionaries in their following than against their avowed opponents. At the root of the Reformation of the sixteenth century lay an appeal from man to God—from the priest, granting or withholding absolution in the confessional, to God making the sinner, who turns from his sins and has faith in the person and work of Christ, know in his heart that he is pardoned; from the decision of Popes and Councils to the decrees of God revealed in His Holy Word. This appeal was in the nature of the case from the seen to the unseen, and therein lay the difficulty; for unless this unseen could be made visible to the eye of the intelligence to such a degree that the restraining authority which it possessed could impress itself on the will, there was risk of its proving to be no restraining authority whatsoever, and of men fancying that they had been left to be a law unto themselves. What the Christian Institution did for the sixteenth century was to make the unseen government and authority of God, to which all must bow, as visible to the intellectual eye of faith as the mechanism of the mediæval Church had been to the eye of sense. It proclaimed that the basis of all Christian faith was the Word of God revealed in the Holy Scriptures; it taught the absolute dependence of all things on God Himself immediately and directly; it declared that the sin of man was such that, apart from the working of the free grace of God, there could be neither pardon nor amendment, nor salvation; and it wove all these thoughts into a logical unity which revealed to the intellectual eye of its generation the “House of God not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” Men as they gazed saw that they were in the immediate presence of the authority of God Himself, directly responsible to Him; that they could test “the Pope’s House” by this divine archetype; that it was their duty to reform all human institutions, ecclesiastical or political, in order to bring them into harmony with the divine vision. It made men know that to separate themselves from the visible mediæval Church was neither to step outside the sphere of the purpose of God making for their redemption, nor to free themselves from the duties which God requires of man.
The work which Calvin did for his co-religionists in France was immense. He carried on a constant correspondence with them; he sustained their courage; he gave their faith a sublime exaltation. When he heard of a French Romanist who had begun to hesitate, he wrote to him combining persuasion with instruction. He pleaded the cause of the Reformation with its nominal supporters. He encouraged the weak. He sent letters to the persecuted. He forwarded short theological treatises to assist those who had got into controversies concerning their faith. He advised the organisation of congregations. He recommended energetic pastors. He warned slothful ministers.
“We must not think,” he says, “that our work is confined within such narrow limits that our task is ended when we have preached sermons ... it is our part to maintain a vigilant oversight of those committed to our care, and take the greatest pains to guard from evil those whose blood will one day be demanded from us if they are lost through our negligence.”[189]
He answered question after question about the difficulty of reconciling the demands of the Christian life with what was required by the world around—a matter which pressed hard on the consciences of men and women who belonged to a religious minority in a great Roman Catholic kingdom. He was no casuist. He wrote to Madame de Cany, the sister of the Duchess d’Étampes, that “no one, great or small, ought to believe themselves exempt from suffering for the sake of our sovereign King.” He was listened to with reverence; for he was not a counsellor who advised others to do what he was not prepared to do himself. He could say, “Be ye followers of me, as I am of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Frenchmen and Frenchwomen knew that the master whom they obeyed, the director they consulted, to whom they whispered the secrets of their souls, lived the hardest and most ascetic life of any man in Europe,—scarcely eating, drinking, or sleeping; that his frail body was kept alive by the energy of his indomitable soul.
Frenchmen of varying schools of thought have not been slow to recognise the secret of the power of their great countryman. Jules Michelet says:
“Among the martyrs, with whom Calvin constantly conversed in spirit, he became a martyr himself; he lived and felt like a man before whom the whole earth disappears, and who tunes his last Psalm his whole eye fixed upon the eye of God, because he knows that on the following morning he may have to ascend the pyre.”
Ernest Renan is no less emphatic:
“It is surprising that a man who appears to us in his life and writings so unsympathetic should have been the centre of an immense movement in his generation, and that this harsh and severe tone should have exercised so great an influence on the minds of his contemporaries. How was it, for example, that one of the most distinguished women of her time, Renée of France, in her Court at Ferrara, surrounded by the flower of European wits, was captivated by that stern master, and by him drawn into a course that must have been so thickly strewn with thorns? This kind of austere seduction is exercised only by those who work with real conviction. Lacking that vivid, deep, sympathetic ardour which was one of the secrets of Luther’s success, lacking the charm, the perilous, languishing tenderness of Francis de Sales, Calvin succeeded, in an age and in a country which called for a reaction towards Christianity, simply because he was the most Christian man of his generation.”
Thus it was that all those in France who felt the need of intimate fellowship with God, all to whom a religion, which was at once inflexible in matters of moral living and which appealed to their reasoning faculties, was a necessity, hailed the Christian Institution as the clearest manifesto of their faith, and grouped themselves round the young author (Calvin was barely twenty-six when he wrote it) as their leader. Those also who suffered under the pressure of a despotic government, and felt the evils of a society constituted to uphold the privileges of an aristocracy, learnt that in a neighbouring country there was a city which had placed itself under the rule of the Word of God; where everyone joined in a common worship attractive from its severe simplicity; where the morals, public and private, were pure; where the believers selected their pastors and the people their rulers; where there were neither masters nor subjects; where the ministers of religion lived the lives of simple laymen, and were distinguished from them only by the exercise of their sacred service. They indulged in the dream that all France might be fashioned after the model of Geneva.
Many a Frenchman who was dissatisfied with the condition of things in France, but had come to no personal decision to leave the mediæval Church, could not help contrasting what he saw around him with the life and aspiration of those “of the religion,”[190] as the French Protestants began to be called. They saw themselves confronted by a religion full of mysteries inaccessible to reason, expressing itself even in public worship in a language unintelligible to most of the worshippers, full of pomp, of luxury, of ceremonies whose symbolical meaning had been forgotten. They saw a clergy commonplace and ignorant, or aristocratic and indifferent; a nobility greedy and restless; a Court whose luxurious display and scandals were notorious; royal mistresses and faithless husbands and wives. Almost everywhere we find a growing tendency to contrast the purity of Protestantism and the corruption of Roman Catholicism. It found outcome in the famous scene in the Parlement of Paris (1559), when Antoine de Bourg, son of a former Chancellor, advocated the total suspension of the persecution against those “who were called heretics,” and enforced his opinion by contrasting the blasphemies and scandals of the Court with the morality and the purity of the lives of those who were being sent to the stake,—a speech for which he afterwards lost his life.[191]