Admiration

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• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Had he been less under the influence of prejudice, and had he not been solicitous to become the leader and standard-bearer of heresy, he might have produced a work of the greatest usefulness to the Catholic Church." The same passage, with additions, occurs in French. Simon says that no author "had a better knowledge of the utter inability of the human heart," but that "he gives too much prominence to this inability," and "lets no opportunity pass of slandering the Roman Church," so that part of his commentaries is "useless declamations" (déclamations inutiles). "Calvin displays more genius and judgment in his works than Luther; he is more cautious, and takes care not to make use of weak proofs, of which his adversaries might take advantage. He is subtle to excess in his reasoning, and his commentaries are filled with references skilfully drawn from the text—which are capable of prepossessing the minds of those readers who are not profoundly acquainted with religion." Simon greatly underrates Calvin’s knowledge of Hebrew when he says that he knew not much more than the Hebrew letters. Dr. Diestel (Geschichte des Alten Test. in der christl. Kirche, 1869, p. 267) justly pronounces this a slander which is refuted by every page of Calvin’s commentaries. He ascribes to him a very good knowledge of Hebrew: "ausgewählt mit einer sehr tüchtigen hebräischen Sprachkenntniss." Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). Son of a Reformed minister, educated by the Jesuits of Toulouse, converted to Romanism, returned to Protestantism, skeptical, the author of a Dictionnaire historique et critique. "That a man who had acquired so great a reputation and so great an authority should have had only a hundred crowns of salary, and have desired no more, and that after having lived fifty-five years with every sort of frugality, he left to his heirs only the value of three hundred crowns, including his library, is a circumstance so heroical, that one must be devoid of feeling not to admire it, and one of the most singular victories which virtue and greatness of soul have been able to achieve over nature, even among ministers of the gospel. Calvin has left imitators in so far as regards activity of life, zeal and affection for the interest of his party; they employ their eloquence, their pens, their endeavors, their solicitations in the advancement of the kingdom of God; but they do not forget themselves, and they are, generally speaking, an exemplification of the maxim that the Church is a good mother, in whose service nothing is lost. "The Catholics have been at last obliged to dismiss to the region of fable the atrocious calumnies (les calomnies atroces) which they had uttered against the moral character of Calvin; their best authors now restrict themselves to stating that if he was exempt from the vices of the body, he has not been so from those of the mind, such as pride, passion, and slander.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  ln Scotland, the land of John Knox, who studied at the feet of Calvin, his principles were most highly appreciated and most fully carried out. Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856). "Looking merely to his learning and ability, Calvin was superior to all modern, perhaps to all ancient, divines. Succeeding ages have certainly not exhibited his equal. To find his peer we must ascend at least to Aquinas or Augustin." Dr. William Cunningham (1805–1861). Principal of the New College and Professor of Church History in Edinburgh. Presbyterian of the Free Church. Reformers, and the Theology of the Reformation. Edinburgh, 1866, pp. 292, 294, 299. "John Calvin was by far the greatest of the Reformers with respect to the talents he possessed, the influence he exerted, and the service he rendered to the establishment and diffusion of important truth.... "The systematizing of divine truth, and the full organization of the Christian Church according to the word of God, are the great peculiar achievements of Calvin. For this work God eminently qualified him, by bestowing upon him the highest gifts both of nature and of grace; and this work he was enabled to accomplish in such a way as to confer the greatest and most lasting benefits upon the Church of Christ, and to entitle him to the commendation and the gratitude of all succeeding ages.... "Calvin certainly was not free from the infirmities which are always found in some form or degree even in the best men; and in particular, he occasionally exhibited an angry impatience of contradiction and opposition, and sometimes assailed and treated the opponents of the truth and cause of God with a violence and invective which cannot be defended, and should certainly not be imitated. He was not free from error, and is not to be implicitly followed in his interpretation of Scripture, or in his exposition of doctrine. But whether we look to the powers and capacities with which God endowed him, the manner in which he employed them, and the results by which his labors have been followed,—or to the Christian wisdom, magnanimity, and devotedness which marked his character and generally regulated his conduct, there is probably not one among the sons of men, beyond the range of those whom God miraculously inspired by his Spirit, who has stronger claims upon our veneration and gratitude." In another place which I cannot refer to, Cunningham, the successor of Chalmers, says: "Calvin is the man who, next to St. Paul, has done most good to mankind." Dr. John Tulloch (1823–1886). Principal of St. Mary’s College in the University of St. Andrews, of the Established Church of Scotland. Luther and other Leaders of the Reformation. Edinburgh and London, 3d ed. 1883, pp. 234–237, 243, 245. "Thus lived and died Calvin, a great, intense, and energetic character, who, more than any other of that great age, has left his impress upon the history of Protestantism.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Berthelier was, with Perrin, condemned to death, but escaped with him the execution of justice by flight.773 This was the end of Libertinism in Geneva. § 110. Geneva Regenerated. Testimonies Old and New. The final result of this long conflict with Libertinism is the best vindication of Calvin. Geneva came out of it a new city, and with a degree of moral and spiritual prosperity which distinguished her above any other Christian city for several generations. What a startling contrast she presents, for instance, to Rome, the city of the vicar of Christ and his cardinals, as described by Roman Catholic writers of the sixteenth century! If ever in this wicked world the ideal of Christian society can be realized in a civil community with a mixed population, it was in Geneva from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, when the revolutionary and infidel genius of Rousseau (a native of Geneva) and of Voltaire (who resided twenty years in the neighborhood, on his estate at Ferney) began to destroy the influence of the Reformer. After the final collapse of the Libertine party in 1555, the peace was not seriously disturbed, and Calvin’s work progressed without interruption. The authorities of the State were as zealous for the honor of the Church and the glory of Christ as the ministers of the gospel. The churches were well filled; the Word of God was preached daily; family worship was the rule; prayer and singing of Psalms never ceased; the whole city seemed to present the aspect of a community of sincere, earnest Christians who practised what they believed. Every Friday a spiritual conference and experience meeting, called the "Congregation," was held in St. Peter’s, after the model of the meetings of "prophesying," which had been introduced in Zürich and Bern. Peter Paul Vergerius, the former papal nuncio, who spent a short time in Geneva, was especially struck with these conferences. "All the ministers," he says,774 "and many citizens attend. One of the preachers reads and briefly explains a text from the Scriptures. Another expresses his views on the subject, and then any member may make a contribution if so disposed. You see, it is an imitation of that custom in the Corinthian Church of which Paul speaks, and I have received much edification from these public colloquies." The material prosperity of the city was not neglected. Greater cleanliness was introduced, which is next to godliness, and promotes it. Calvin insisted on the removal of all filth from the houses and the narrow and crooked streets. He induced the magistracy to superintend the markets, and to prevent the sale ofunhealthy food, which was to be cast into the Rhone. Low taverns and drinking shops were abolished, and intemperance diminished. Mendicancy on the streets was prohibited. A hospital and poor-house was provided and well conducted. Efforts were made to give useful employment to every man that could work. Calvin urged the Council in a long speech, Dec.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  CHAPTER VIII. JOHN CALVIN AND HIS WORK. The literature in § 58, pp. 225–231. § 65. John Calvin compared with the Older Reformers. We now approach the life and work of John Calvin, who labored more than Farel, Viret, and Froment. He was the chief founder and consolidator of the Reformed Church of France and French Switzerland, and left the impress of his mind upon all other Reformed Churches in Europe and America. Revolution is followed by reconstruction and consolidation. For this task Calvin was providentially foreordained and equipped by genius, education, and circumstances. Calvin could not have done the work of Farel; for he was not a missionary, or a popular preacher. Still less could Farel have done the work of Calvin; for he was neither a theologian, nor a statesman. Calvin, the Frenchman, would have been as much out of place in Zürich or Wittenberg, as the Swiss Zwingli and the German Luther would have been out of place and without a popular constituency in French-speaking Geneva. Each stands first and unrivalled in his particular mission and field of labor. Luther’s public career as a reformer embraced twenty-nine years, from 1517 to 1546; that of Zwingli, only twelve years, from 1519 to 1531 (unless we date it from his preaching at Einsiedeln in 1516); that of Calvin, twenty-eight years, from 1536 to 1564. The first reached an age of sixty-two: the second, of forty-seven; the third, of fifty-four. Calvin was twenty-five years younger than Luther and Zwingli, and had the great advantage of building on their foundation. He had less genius, but more talent. He was inferior to them as a man of action, but superior as a thinker and organizer. They cut the stones in the quarries, he polished them in the workshop. They produced the new ideas, he constructed them into a system. His was the work of Apollos rather than of Paul: to water rather than to plant, God giving the increase. Calvin’s character is less attractive, and his life less dramatic than Luther’s or Zwingli’s, but he left his Church in a much better condition. He lacked the genial element of humor and pleasantry; he was a Christian stoic: stern, severe, unbending, yet with fires of passion and affection glowing beneath the marble surface. His name will never rouse popular enthusiasm, as Luther’s and Zwingli’s did at the celebration of the fourth centennial of their birth; no statues of marble or bronze have been erected to his memory; even the spot of his grave in the cemetery at Geneva is unknown.358 But he surpassed them in consistency and self-discipline, and by his exegetical, doctrinal, and polemical writings, he has exerted and still exerts more influence than any other Reformer upon the Protestant Churches of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon races. He made little Geneva for a hundred years the Protestant Rome and the best- disciplined Church in Christendom.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  "Calvin was one of those absolute men, cast complete in one mould, who is taken in wholly at a single glance: one letter, one action suffices for a judgment of him. There were no folds in that inflexible soul, which never knew doubt or hesitation.... Careless of wealth, of titles, of honors, indifferent to pomp, modest in his life, apparently humble, sacrificing everything to the desire of making others like himself, I hardly know of a man, save Ignatius Loyola, who could match him in those terrible transports.... It is surprising that a man who appears to us in his life and writings so unsympathetic should have been the

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Hooker calls him ’incomparably the wisest man of the French Church;’ he compares him to the ’Master of Sentences,’ and says, ’that though thousands were debtors to him as touching divine knowledge, yet he was to none, only to God.’ Montesquieu declares that ’the Genevese should ever bless the day of his birth.’ Jewel terms him ’a reverend Father, and worthy ornament of the Church of God.’ ’He that will not honor the memory of Calvin,’ says Mr. Bancroft, ’knows but little of the origin of American liberty.’ Under his influence Geneva became the ’fertile seed-plot’ of reform for all Europe; with Zurich and Strassburg, it was the refuge of the oppressed from the British Isles, and thus indoctrinated England and ourselves with its own spirit." From Dr. Smith’s article "Calvin" in Appleton’s American Cyclopaedia. "Calvin’s system of doctrine and polity has shaped more minds and entered into more nations than that of any other Reformer. In every land it made men strong against the attempted interference of the secular power with the rights of Christians. It gave courage to the Huguenots; it shaped the theology of the Palatinate; it prepared the Dutch for the heroic defence of their national rights; it has controlled Scotland to the present hour; it formed the Puritanism of England; it has been the basis of the New England character; and everywhere it has led the way in practical reforms. His theology assumed different types in the various countries into which it penetrated, while retaining its fundamental traits." Dr. George P. Fisher (b. 1827). Professor of Church History in Yale Divinity School, New Haven. Congregationalist. From his History of the Reformation. New York, 1873, pp. 206 and 238. When we look at his extraordinary intellect, at his culture—which opponents, like Bossuet, have been forced to commend—at the invincible energy which made him endure with more than stoical fortitude infirmities of body under which most men would have sunk, and to perform, in the midst of them, an incredible amount of mental labor; when we see him, a scholar naturally fond of seclusion, physically timid, and recoiling from notoriety and strife, abjuring the career that was most to his taste, and plunging, with a single-hearted, disinterested zeal and an indomitable will, into a hard, protracted contest; and when we follow his steps, and see what things he effected, we cannot deny him the attributes of greatness.... "His last days were of a piece with his life. His whole course has been compared by Vinet to the growth of one rind of a tree from another, or to a chain of logical sequences. He was endued with a marvellous power of understanding, although the imagination and sentiments were less roundly developed. His systematic spirit fitted him to be the founder of an enduring school of thought. In this characteristic he may be compared with Aquinas. He has been appropriately styled the Aristotle of the Reformation. He was a perfectly honest man.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  centre of an immense movement in his generation, and that this harsh and severe tone should have exerted 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 by those only who work with real conviction. Lacking that vivid, deep, sympathetic ardor which was one of the secrets of Luther’s success, lacking the charm, the perilous, languishing tenderness of Francis of Sales, Calvin succeeded more than all, in an age and in a country which called for a reaction towards Christianity, simply because he was the most Christian man of his century (l’homme le plus chrétien de son siècle, p. 342)." Felix Bungener (1814–1874). Pastor of the national Church of Geneva, and author of several historical works. From Calvin, sa vie, son oeuvre et ses écrits, Paris, 1862; English translation (Edinburgh, 1863), pp. 338, 349. "Let us not give him praise which he would not have accepted. God alone creates; a man is great only because God thinks fit to accomplish great things by his instrumentality. Never did any great man understand this better than Calvin. It cost him no effort to refer all the glory to God; nothing indicates that he was ever tempted to appropriate to himself the smallest portion of it. Luther, in many a passage, complacently dwells on the thought that a petty monk, as he says, has so well made the Pope to tremble, and so well stirred the whole world. Calvin will never say any such thing; he never even seems to say it, even in the deepest recesses of his heart; everywhere you perceive the man, who applies to all things—to the smallest as to the greatest—the idea that it is God who does all and is all. Read again, from this point of view, the very pages in which he appeared to you the haughtiest and most despotic, and see if, even there, he is anything other than the workman referring all, and in all sincerity, to his master.... But the man, in spite of all his faults, has not the less remained one of the fairest types of faith, of earnest piety, of devotedness, and of courage. Amid modern laxity, there is no character of whom the contemplation is more instructive; for there is no man of whom it has been said with greater justice, in the words of an apostle, ’he endured as seeing him who is invisible.’ " From Dutch Scholars. James Arminius (1560–1609). The founder of Arminianism.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He subjected his will to the eternal rule of right, as far as he could discover it. His motives were pure. He felt that God was near him, and sacrificed everything to obey the direction of Providence. The fear of God ruled in his soul; not a slavish fear, but a principle such as animated the prophets of the Old Covenant. The combination of his qualities was such that he could not fail to attract profound admiration and reverence from one class of minds, and excite intense antipathy in another. There is no one of the Reformers who is spoken of, at this late day, with so much personal feeling, either of regard or aversion. But whoever studies his life and writings, especially the few passages in which he lets us into his confidence and appears to invite our sympathy, will acquire a growing sense of his intellectual and moral greatness, and a tender consideration for his errors.’ G. G. Herrick, D. D. Congregational Minister of Mount Vernon Church, Boston. From Some Heretics of Yesterday. Boston, 1890, pp. 210 sqq. "Calvin gathered up the spiritual and intellectual forces that had been started by the Reformation movement, and marshalled and systematized them, and bound them into unity by the mastery of his logical thought, as the river gathers cloud and rill, and snow-drift and dew-fall, and constrains them through its own channel into the unity and directness of a powerful current. The action of Luther was impulsive, magnetic, popular, appealing to sentiment and feeling, that of Calvin was logical and constructive, appealing to understanding and reason. He was the systematizer of the Reformation.... "Calvin’s work was national, and more; he gave to the Reformation a universality like that of the gigantic system with which they [the Reformers] all were at war. Calvin, more than any other man that has ever lived, deserves to be called the Pope of Protestantism. While he was still living his opinions were deferred to by kings and prelates, and even after he was dead his power was confessed by his enemies. The papists called his Institutes The Heretics’ Koran.... He set up authority against authority, and maintained and perpetuated what he set up by the inherent clearness and energy and vigor of his own mental conceptions. The authority of the Romish Pope was based upon the venerable tradition of the past that had grown up by the accretion of ages; the authority of the Protestant Pope rested upon a logical structure which he himself built up, out of blocks hewn from alleged Scripture assertion and legitimate inferences therefrom.... "The man himself is one of the wonders of all time, and his work was admirable, beyond any words of appreciation that it is possible for me to utter. For while he himself tolerated no differences of theological opinion, and would have bound all thought by his own logical chain, this nineteenth century is as

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Calvin found the commonwealth of Geneva in a condition of license bordering on anarchy: he left it a well-regulated community, which John Knox, the Reformer of Scotland, from personal observation, declared to be "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles," and which Valentin Andreae, a shining light of the Lutheran Church, likewise from personal observation, half a century after Calvin’s death, held up to the churches of Germany as a model for imitation.363 The moral discipline which Calvin introduced reflects the severity of his theology, and savors more of the spirit of the Old Testament than the spirit of the New. As a system, it has long since disappeared, but its best results remain in the pure, vigorous, and high-toned morality which distinguishes Calvinistic and Presbyterian communities. It is by the combination of a severe creed with severe self-discipline that Calvin became the father of the heroic races of French Huguenots, Dutch Burghers, English Puritans, Scotch Covenanters, and New England Pilgrims, who sacrificed the world for the liberty of conscience. "A little bit of the worlds history," says the German historian Häusser,364 "was enacted in Geneva, which forms the proudest portion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A number of the most distinguished men in France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain professed her creed; they were sturdy, gloomy souls, iron characters cast in one mould, in which there was an interfusion of Romanic, Germanic, mediaeval, and modern elements; and the national and political consequences of the new faith were carried out by them with the utmost rigor and consistency." A distinguished Scotch divine (Principal Tulloch) echoes this judgment when he says:365 "It was the spirit bred by Calvin’s discipline which, spreading into France and Holland and Scotland, maintained by its single strength the cause of a free Protestantism in all these lands. It was the same spirit which inspired the early and lived on in the later Puritans; which animated such men as Milton and Owen and Baxter; which armed the Parliament of England with strength against Charles I., and stirred the great soul of Cromwell in its proudest triumphs; and which, while it thus fed every source of political liberty in the Old World, burned undimned in the gallant crew of the ’Mayflower,’ the Pilgrim Fathers,—who first planted the seeds of civilization in the great continent of the West."366 Calvin was intolerant of any dissent, either papal or heretical, and his early followers in Europe and America abhorred religious toleration (in the sense of indifference) as a pestiferous error; nevertheless, in their conflict with reactionary Romanism and political despotism, they became the chief promoters of civil and religious liberty based upon respect for God’s law and authority. The solution of the apparent inconsistency lies in the fact that Calvinists fear God and nothing else. In their eyes, God alone is great, man is but a shadow. The fear of God makes them fearless of earthly despots.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  After speaking very highly and justly of Melanchthon and John Gerhard, Twesten thus characterizes Calvin’s Institutes: — "Mehr aus einem Gusz, als Melanchthon’s Loci, die reife Frucht eines tief religiösen und ächt wissenschaftlichen Geistes, mit groszer Klarheit, Kraft und Schönheit der Darstellung geschrieben, einfach in der Anlage, reich und gründlich in der Ausführung, verdient es neben jenen auch in unserer Kirche als eins der vorzüglichsten Werke auf dem Gebiete der dogmatischen Literatur überhaupt studirt zu werden." Paul Henry. Doctor of theology and pastor of a French Reformed Church in Berlin, author of two learned biographies of Calvin: a large one, in 3 vols. (1833–1844), which is chiefly valuable as a collection of documents, and a popular one in 1 vol. From Das Leben Johann Calvins (Hamburg and Gotha, 1846), pp. 443 sqq. "The whole tendency of Calvin was practical; learning was subordinate; the salvation of the world, the truth was to him the main thing. His spiritual tendency was not philosophical, but his dialectical bent ran principles to their utmost consequences. He had an eye to the minutest details. His former study of law had trained him for business.... He was a watchman over the whole Church.... All his theological writings excel in acuteness, dialectics, and warmth of conviction. He had great eloquence at command, but despised the art of rhetoric.... Day and night he was occupied with the work of the Lord. He disliked the daily entreaties of his colleagues to grant himself some rest. He continued to labor through his last sicknesses, and only stopped dictating a week before his death, when his voice gave out.... All sought his counsel; for God endowed him with such a happy spirit of wisdom that no one regretted to have followed his advice. How great was his erudition! How marvellous his judgment! How peculiar his kindness, which came to the aid even of the smallest and lowliest, if necessary, and his meekness and patient forbearance with the imperfections of others!" Dr. L. Stähelin. Johannes Calvin. Leben und ausgewählte Schriften. Elberfeld, 1863. Vol. II. pp. 365–393. This description of Calvin’s character as a man and as a Christian is faithful in praise and censure, but too profuse to be inserted. Dr. Stähelin emphasizes the logic of his intellect and conscience, his firm assurance of eternal election, his constant sense of the nearness of God, "the majesty" of his character, the predominance of the Old Testament feature, his resemblance to Moses and the Hebrew Prophets, his irritability, anger, and contemptuousness, relieved by genuine humility before God, his faithfulness to friends, his life of unceasing prayer, his absolute disinterestedness and consecration to God. He also quotes the remarkable testimony of Renan, that Calvin was "the most Christian man in Christendom." Dr. Friedrich Trechsel (1805–1885). Die Protestantischen Antitrinitarier. Heidelberg, 1839–1844 (I. 177). "People have often supposed that they were insulting Calvin’s memory by calling him the Pope of Protestantism!

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  From "La Réforme, de Luther à Shakespeare"(Paris, 1885), pp. 70–72. "Calvin fut done de son temps comme les papes, les empereurs et tons les rois, méme François 1er, qui brûlèrent des hérétiques, mais ceux qui ne voient dans Calvin que le meurtrier de Servet ne le connaissent pas. Ce fut une conviction, une intelligence, une des forces les plus étonnantes de ce grand siècle: pour le peser selon son mérite, il faut jeter dans la balance autre chose que nos tendresses et nos pitiés. Il faut voir tout l’homme, et le voir tel qu’il fut: ’un corps frêle et débile, sobre jusqu’à l’excès,’ rongé par des maladies et des infirmites qui devaient l’emporter avant le temps, mais acharné à sa tâche, ’ne vivant que pour le travail et ne travaillant que pour établir le royaume de Dieu sur la terre; devoué à cette cause jusqu’à lui tout sacrifier:’ le repos, la santé, la vie, plus encore: les études favorites, et avec une infatigable activité qui épouvantait ses adversaires, menant de front, à brides abattues, religion, morale, politique, législation, littérature, enseignement, prédication, pamphlets, oeuvres de longue haleine, correspondance énorme avec le roi et la reine de Navarre, la duchesse de Ferrare, le roi François 1er, avec d’autres princes encore, avec les réformateurs, les théologiens, les humanistes, les âmes travaillées et chargées, les pauvres prisonnières de Paris. Il écrivait dans l’Europe entière; deux mille Églises s’organisaient selon ses idées ou celles de ses amis; des missionnaires, animés de son souffle, partaient pour l’Angleterre, l’Écosse, les Pays-Bas, ’en remerciant Dieu et lui chantant des psaumes.’ En même temps cet homme seul, ce malade surmené s’emparait a Genève d’un peuple allègre, raisouneur, indiscipliné, le tenait dans sa main et le forçait d’obéir. Sans étre magistrat ni même citoyen (il ne le devint qu’aux dernières années de sa vie), sans mandat officiel ni titre reconnu, sans autre autorité que celle de son nom et d’une volonté inflexible, il commandait aux consciences, il gouvernait les maisons, il s’imposait, avec une foule de réfugiés venus de toute part, à une population qui n’a jamais aimé les étrangers ni les maîtres; il heurtait enfin de parti pris les coutumes, les traditions, les susceptibilités nationales et il les brisait. Non seulement il pesait sur les consciences et les opinions, mais aussi sur les moeurs, proscrivait la luxure et même le luxe, la bijouterie, la soie et le velours, les cheveux longs, les coiffures frisées, la bonne chère: toute espèce de plaisir et de distraction; cependant, malgré les haines et les colères suscitées par cette compression morale, ’le corps brisé, mais la tête haute,’ il gouverna longtemps les Genevois par l’autorité de son caractère et fut accompagné à sa tombe par le peuple tout entier. Voilà l’homme dont il est facile de rire, mais qu’il importe avant tout de connaitre.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Lyons that the Children of Geneva had offered five hundred crowns for his head.754 On his return from Paris, Perrin was capitally indicted on a charge of treason, and of intending to quarter two hundred French cavalry, under his own command, at Geneva. His excuse was that he had accepted the command of these troops with the reservation of the approval of the government of Geneva. Bonivard, the old soldier of liberty and prisoner of Chillon, took part against Perrin. The ambassadors of Bern endeavored to divert the storm from the head of Perrin to the French ambassador Maigret the Magnifique. Perrin was expelled from the Council, and the office of captain-general was suppressed, but he was released from prison, together with his wife and father-in-law, Nov. 29, 1547.755 The Libertines summoned all their forces for a reaction. They called a meeting of the Council of Two Hundred, where they expected most support. A violent scene took place on Dec. 16, 1547, in the Senate house, when Calvin, unarmed and at the risk of his life, appeared in the midst of the armed crowd and called upon them, if they designed to shed blood, to begin with him. He succeeded, by his courage and eloquence, in calming the wild storm and preventing a disgraceful carnage. It was a sublime victory of reason over passion, of moral over physical force.756 The ablest of the detractors of Calvin cannot help paying here an involuntary tribute to him and to the truth of history. This is his dramatic account. "The Council of the Two Hundred was assembled. Never had any session been more tumultuous; the parties, weary of speaking, began to appeal to arms. The people heard the appeal. Calvin appears, unattended; he is received at the lower part of the hall with cries of death. He folds his arms, and looks the agitators fixedly in the face. Not one of them dares strike him. Then, advancing through the midst of the groups, with his breast uncovered: ’If you want blood,’ says he, ’there are still a few drops here; strike, then!’ Not an arm is raised. Calvin then slowly ascends the stairway to the Council of the Two Hundred. The hall was on the point of being drenched with blood; swords were flashing on beholding the Reformer, the weapons were lowered, and a few words sufficed to calm the agitation. Calvin, taking the arm of one of the councillors, again descends the stairs, and cries out to the people that he wishes to address them. He does speak, and with such energy and feeling, that tears flow from their eyes. They embrace each other, and the crowd retires in silence. The patriots had lost the day. From that moment, it was easy to foretell that victory would remain with the Reformer.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  I only wish that I had the power, as I have the inclination, to serve the cause."1223 This noble project was defeated or indefinitely postponed by the death of Edward VI. and the martyrdom of Cranmer, but it continues to live as a pium desiderium. In opposition to a mechanical and enforced uniformity, Calvin suggested the idea of a spiritual unity with denominational variety, or of one flock in many folds under one shepherd.1224 This idea was taken up in our age by the Evangelical Alliance, the Pan-Anglican Council, the Pan- Presbyterian Alliance, the Pan-Methodist Conference, the Young Men’s Christian Associations, the Christian Endeavor Societies, and similar voluntary associations, which bring Christians of different churches and nationalities together for mutual conference and co-operation, without interfering with their separate organization and denominational preferences. A lasting monument of Calvin’s catholicity is his immense correspondence, which fills ten quarto volumes of the last edition of his works, and embraces in all no less than forty-two hundred and seventy-one letters. He left to Beza a collection of manuscripts with discretionary power to publish from it what he deemed might promote the edification of the Church of God. Accordingly, Beza edited the first collection of Calvin’s letters eleven years after his death, at Geneva, 1575. This edition was several times republished, and gradually enriched by letters discovered in various libraries by Liebe, Mosheim, Bretschneider, Crottet, Jules Bonnet, Henry, Reuss, and Herminjard. No theologian has left behind him a correspondence equal in extent, ability, and interest. In these letters Calvin discusses the profoundest topics of religion; he gives advice as a faithful pastor; administers comfort to suffering brethren; pours out his heart to his friends; solves difficult political questions, as a wise statesman, in the complications of the little Republic with Bern, Savoy, and France. Among his correspondents are all the surviving Reformers— Melanchthon, Bucer, Bullinger, Farel, Viret, Cranmer, Knox, Beza, Peter Martyr, John à Lasco; crowned heads—Queen Marguerite of Navarre, the Duchess Renée of Ferrara, King Sigismund Augustus of Poland, the Elector Otto Heinrich of the Palatinate, Duke Christopher of Würtemberg; statesmen and high officers, like Duke Somerset, the Protector of England, Prince Radziwil of Poland, Admiral Coligny of France, the magistrates of Zürich, Bern, Basel, St. Gall, and Frankfort; and humble confessors and martyrs to whom he sent letters of comfort in prison. § 160. Geneva an Asylum for Protestants from all Countries. Calvin gave to Geneva a cosmopolitan character which it retains to this day. It became, through him, as already stated, the capital of the Reformed Churches, and was called the Protestant Rome. Philip II. of Spain wrote to the French king: "Geneva is the source of all misfortune to France, the refuge of all heretics, the most terrible enemy of Rome. I am ready at any time, with all the power of my kingdom, to aid in its destruction." That city was, indeed, in the sixteenth century what North America has become, on a much larger scale, since the seventeenth century.

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  "Calvin détruisit Genève pour la refaire à son image et, en dépit de toutes les révolutions, cette reconstitution improvisée dure encore: il existe aux portes de la France une ville de strictes croyances, de bonnes études et de bonnes moeurs: une ’cité de Calvin.’ " A remarkable tribute from a scholar who was no theologian, and no clergyman, but thoroughly at home in the history, literature, manners, and society of Geneva. Marc-Monnier speaks also very highly of Calvin’s merits as a French classic, and quotes with approval the judgment of Paul Lacroix (in his ed. of select Oeuvres françoises de J. Calvin): "Le style de Calvin est un des plus grands styles du seizième siècle: simple, correct, élégant, clair, ingénieux, animé, varie de formes et de tons, il a commencé à fixer la langue française pour la prose, comme celui de Clement Marot l’avait fait pour les vers." George Bancroft. George Bancroft, the American historian and statesman, born at Worcester, Mass., 1800, died at Washington, 1891, served his country as secretary of the Navy, and ambassador at London and Berlin, with the greatest credit. "A word on Calvin, the Reformer." From his Literary and Historical Miscellanies (New York, 1855), pp. 405 sqq. "It is intolerance only, which would limit the praise of Calvin to a single sect, or refuse to reverence his virtues and regret his failings. He lived in the time when nations were shaken to their centre by the excitement of the Reformation; when the fields of Holland and France were wet with the carnage of persecution; when vindictive monarchs on the one side threatened all Protestants with outlawry and death, and the Vatican, on the other, sent forth its anathemas and its cry for blood. In that day, it is too true, the influence of an ancient, long-established, hardly disputed error, the Constant danger of his position, the intense desire to secure union among the antagonists of popery, the engrossing consciousness that his struggle was for the emancipation of the Christian world, induced the great Reformer to defend the use of the sword for the extirpation of heresy. Reprobating and lamenting his adhesion to the cruel doctrine, which all Christendom had for centuries implicitly received, we may, as republicans, remember that Calvin was not only the founder of a sect, but foremost among the most efficient of modern republican legislators. More truly benevolent to the human race than Solon, more self-denying than Lycurgus, the genius of Calvin infused enduring elements into the institutions of Geneva, and made it for the modern world the impregnable fortress of popular liberty, the fertile seed-plot of democracy. "We boast of our common schools; Calvin was the father of popular education, the inventor of the system of free schools. We are proud of the free States that fringe the Atlantic. The pilgrims of Plymouth were Calvinists; the best influence in South Carolina came from the Calvinists of France.

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  Widely as these Reformers differed in talent, temperament, and sundry points of doctrine and discipline, they were great and good men, equally honest and earnest, unselfish and unworldly, brave and fearless, ready at any moment to go to the stake for their conviction. They labored for the same end: the renovation of the Catholic Church by leading it back to the pure and perennial fountain of the perfect teaching and example of Christ. § 66. Calvin’s Place in History. 1. Calvin was, first of all, a theologian. He easily takes the lead among the systematic expounders of the Reformed system of Christian doctrine. He is scarcely inferior to Augustin among the fathers, or Thomas Aquinas among the schoolmen, and more methodical and symmetrical than either. Melanchthon, himself the prince of Lutheran divines and "the Preceptor of Germany," called him emphatically "the Theologian."359 Calvin’s theology is based upon a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures. He was the ablest exegete among the Reformers, and his commentaries rank among the very best of ancient and modern times. His theology, therefore, is biblical rather than scholastic, and has all the freshness of enthusiastic devotion to the truths of God’s Word. At the same time he was a consummate logician and dialectician. He had a rare power of clear, strong, convincing statement. He built up a body of doctrines which is called after him, and which obtained symbolical authority through some of the leading Reformed Confessions of Faith. Calvinism is one of the great dogmatic systems of the Church. It is more logical than Lutheranism and Arminianism, and as logical as Romanism. And yet neither Calvinism nor Romanism is absolutely logical. Both are happily illogical or inconsistent, at least in one crucial point: the former by denying that God is the author of sin—which limits Divine sovereignty; the latter by conceding that baptismal (i.e. regenerating or saving) grace is found outside of the Roman Church—which breaks the claim of exclusiveness.360 The Calvinistic system is popularly (though not quite correctly) identified with the Augustinian system, and shares its merit as a profound exposition of the

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  much indebted to his work as it is to that of Luther. That work constituted the world’s largest step towards democratic freedom. It set the individual man in the presence of the living God, and made the solitary soul, whether of prince or pauper, to feel its responsibility to, and dependence upon, Him alone who from eternity has decreed the sparrow’s flight or fall. Out of this logical conception of the equality of all men in the presence of Jehovah, he deduced the true republican character of the Church; a theory to which all Americans, and especially we of New England, owe our rich inheritance. He gave to the world, what it had not before, a majestic and consistent conception of a kingdom of God ruling in the affairs of men; of the beauty and the blessedness of a true Christian state; of the possibility of the city of God being one day realized in the universal subordination of human souls to divine authority...." For testimonies bearing upon Calvin’s system of discipline, see below, § 110. CHAPTER IX.

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  His last literary work was a Commentary on Joshua, which he began in great bodily infirmity and finished shortly before his death and entrance into the promised land. It was his delight to expound the Word of God from the chair and from the pulpit. Hence his theology is biblical rather than scholastic. The Commentaries on the Psalms and the Epistles of Paul are regarded as his best. He was in profound sympathy with David and Paul, and read in their history his own spiritual biography. He calls the Psalms (in the Preface) "an anatomy of all the parts of the soul; for there is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror. Or, rather, the Holy Spirit has here drawn to the life the griefs, the sorrows, the fears, the doubts, the hopes, the cares, the perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated." He adds that his own trials and conflicts helped him much to a clearer understanding of these divine compositions. He combined in a very rare degree all the essential qualifications of an exegete—grammatical knowledge, spiritual insight, acute perception, sound judgment, and practical tact. He thoroughly sympathized with the spirit of the Bible; he put himself into the situation of the writers, and reproduced and adapted their thoughts for the benefit of his age. Tholuck mentions as the most prominent qualities of Calvin’s commentaries these four: doctrinal impartiality, exegetical tact, various learning, and deep Christian piety. Winer praises his "truly wonderful sagacity in perceiving, and perspicuity in expounding, the meaning of the Apostle."783 1. Let us first look at his philological outfit. Melanchthon well says: "The Scripture cannot be understood theologically unless it be first understood grammatically."784 He had passed through the school of the Renaissance; he had a rare knowledge of Greek; he thought in Greek, and could not help inserting rare Greek words into his letters to learned friends. He was an invaluable help to Luther in his translation of the Bible, but his commentaries are dogmatical rather than grammatical, and very meagre, as compared with those of Luther and Calvin in depth and force.785 Luther surpassed all other Reformers in originality, freshness, spiritual insight, bold conjectures, and occasional flashes of genius. His commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, which he called "his wife," is a masterpiece of sympathetic exposition and forceful application of the leading idea of evangelical freedom to the question of his age. But Luther was no exegete in the proper sense of the term. He had no method and discipline. He condemned allegorizing as a mere "monkey-game" (Affenspiel), and yet he often resorted to it in Job, the Psalms, and the Canticles. He was eminently spiritual, and yet, as against Zwingli, slavishly literal in his interpretation.

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  He was the head of the French Reformation and consulted at every step. He was called as pastor to the first Protestant church in Paris, but declined. He gave to the Huguenots their creed and form of government. The Gallican Confession of 1559, also called the Confession of Rochelle, was, in its first draft, his work, and his pupil Antoine de la Roche Chandieu (also called Sadeel) brought it into its present enlarged shape, in which it was presented by Beza to Charles IX. at the Colloquy at Poissy, 1561, and signed at the Synod of La Rochelle, 1571, by the Queen Jeanne d’Albret of Navarre; her son, Prince Henry of Navarre (Henry IV.); Prince Condé; Prince Louis, Count of Nassau; Admiral Coligny; Chatillon; several nobles, and all the preachers present.1229 The history of French Protestantism down to 1564 is largely identified with Calvin’s name. He induced the Swiss Cantons and the princes of the Smalkaldian League to intercede for the persecuted Huguenots. He sent messengers and letters of comfort to the prisoners. "The reverence," says one of his biographers, "with which his name was mentioned, the boundless confidence reposed in his person, the enthusiasm of the disciples who hastened to him, or came from him, surpasses all the usual experience of men. Congregations appealed to him for preachers; princes and noblemen for decisive counsel in political complications; those in doubt for instruction; the persecuted for protection; the martyrs for exhortation and encouragement in cheerful suffering and dying. And as the eye of a father watches over his children, Calvin watched with untiring care of love over all these relations in their manifold ramifications, and sought to be the same to the great community of his brethren in France what he was to the little Republic at home."1230 Roman Catholic writers have made Calvin responsible for the civil wars in France, as they have made Luther responsible for the Peasants’ War and the Thirty Years’ War. But the Reformers preached reformation by the word and the spirit, not revolution by the sword. The chief cause of the religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the intolerance of the papacy. Bossuet charges Calvin with complicity in the conspiracy of Amboise, which was a political coup d’état to check the power of the Guises (1560). Calvin was indeed informed of the plot, but warned against it, first privately, then publicly, and predicted its disastrous failure. He constantly upheld the principle of obedience to the rightful magistrate, and opposed violent measures. "The first drop of blood," he said, "which we shed will cause streams of blood to flow. Let us rather a hundred times perish than bring such disgrace upon the

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  History furnishes no more striking example of a man of so little personal popularity, and yet such great influence upon the people; of such natural timidity and bashfulness combined with such strength of intellect and character, and such control over his and future generations. He was by nature and taste a retiring scholar, but Providence made him an organizer and ruler of churches. The three leading Reformers were of different nationality and education. Luther, the son of a German peasant, was trained in the school of monasticism and mysticism, under the influence of St. Augustin, Tauler, and Staupitz, and retained strong churchly convictions and prejudices. Zwingli, the son of a Swiss country magistrate, a republican patriot, an admiring student of the ancient classics and of Erasmus, passed through the door of the Renaissance to the Reformation, and broke more completely away from mediaevalism. Calvin, a native Frenchman, a patrician by education and taste, studied law as well as theology, and by his legal and judicial mind was admirably qualified to build up a new Christian commonwealth. Zwingli and Luther met once face to face at Marburg, but did not understand each other. The Swiss extended to the German the hand of fellowship, notwithstanding their difference of opinion on the mode of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist; but Luther refused it, under the restraint of a narrower dogmatic conscience. Calvin saw neither, but was intimate with Melanchthon, whom he met at the Colloquies of Worms and Regensburg, and with whom he kept up a correspondence till his death. He rightly placed the German Reformer, as to genius and power, above the Swiss, and generously declared that, even if Luther should call him a devil, he would still esteem Luther as a most eminent servant of God. Luther saw, probably, only two books of Calvin, his reply to Sadolet and his tract on the Lord’s Supper; the former he read, as he says, with singular delight ("cum singulari voluptate "). How much more would he have been delighted with his Institutes or Commentaries! He sent respectful greetings to Calvin through Melanchthon, who informed him that he was in high favor with the Wittenberg doctor. Calvin, in his theology, mediated between Zwingli and Luther. Melanchthon mediated between Luther and Calvin; he was a friend of both, though unlike either in disposition and temper, standing as a man of peace between two men of war. The correspondence between Calvin and Melanchthon, considering their disagreement on the deep questions of predestination and free-will, is highly creditable to their head and heart, and proves that theological differences of opinion need not disturb religious harmony and personal friendship. The co-operative friendships between Luther and Melanchthon, between Zwingli and Oecolampadius, between Farel and Calvin, between Calvin, Beza, and Bullinger, are among the finest chapters in the history of the Reformation, and reveal the hand of God in that movement.

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  For, though thousands were debtors to him, as touching knowledge of this kind, yet he to none, but only to God, the Author of that most blessed fountain, the Book of Life, and of the admirable dexterity of wit, together with the helps of other learning, which were his guides.—We should be injurious unto virtue itself, if we did derogate from them whom their industry hath made great. Two things of principal moment there are, which have deservedly procured him honor throughout the world: the one, his exceeding pains in composing the Institutions of the Christian Religion; the other, his no less industrious travails for exposition of Holy Scripture, according unto the same Institutions.... "Of what account the Master of Sentences [Peter Lombard] was in the Church of Rome; the same and more, among the preachers of Reformed Churches, Calvin had purchased; so that the perfectest divines were judged they which were skilfullest in Calvin’s writings; his books almost the very canon to judge both doctrine and discipline by." Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626). "Calvin was an illustrious person, and never to be mentioned without a preface of the highest honor." Dr. John Donne (1573–1631). Royal Chaplain and Dean of St. Paul’s, London; distinguished as a poet and divine. "St. Augustin, for sharp insight and conclusive judgment in exposition of places of Scripture, which he always makes so liquid and pervious, hath scarce been equalled therein by any of all the writers in the Church of God, except Calvin may have that honor, for whom (when it concerns not points of