Calvin had, therefore, got beyond his age and its spirit of intolerance; and, having turned his back on the Church of Rome, no shelter can be found for him in an appeal to its sanguinary principles and practice. Calvin, in a word, is inexcusable for refusing to Servetus the liberty he arrogated for himself, and for turning the city that sheltered him into a shambles for the man of whom religiousness alone had made an enemy, and persecution had driven into his power.

Servetus, however, it is said, was a heretic, a blasphemer. But what was Calvin in the eyes of those he had forsaken? The most egregious of heretics, whose teaching had led thousands from the faith of their fathers, and imperilled their salvation; a traitor, too, whose independent principles turned subjects into rebels, and tended to make despotic rule by Priest and King impossible. And this is true; for we are not to overlook the fact that it is to Calvin, with however little purpose on his part, that we mainly owe the large amount of civil and religious liberty we now enjoy.

Of Calvin, more truly perhaps than of any man that ever lived, may the dictum of the poet, where he

The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft interred with their bones,

says:

be held to be reversed. In Calvin's case it was the ill he did that died, the good that lived. With no respect for civil liberty himself, and still less for religious liberty beyond the pale of his own narrow confession of faith, Calvin must nevertheless be thought of as the real

L L

herald of modern freedom. Holding ignorance to be incompatible with the existence of a people at once religious and free, Calvin had the school-house built beside the church, and brought education within the reach of all. Nor did he overlook the higher culture. He restored the College of Geneva, founded half a century before by a pious and liberal citizen, but utterly neglected in Roman Catholic times; and as a complement to the University he founded the Academy. Forbidden to set foot on the land of his birth, he was nevertheless the genius of its religious growth, and in company with this, of its aspirations after freedom. But for the fickleness and falseness of its princes, France might have had reformed Christianity for her faith; and with the intelligence, morality, and true piety of her Huguenot sons in possession of their homes, might possibly have been spared her Grand Monarques and despotism, her Revolutions, her Buonapartes, and her wars that have drenched the soil of Europe in blood ever since Henry of Navarre proved untrue to himself and Liberty. But Scottish Presbyterianism and English Puritanism and Nonconformity in its multifarious, sturdy, selfsufficing forms, and 1688, were each and all the legitimate outcome of a system which told the world that there was no such thing in the law of God as divine right to govern wrongly ; and in asserting free-thought for itself in matters of opinion, by indefeasible logic gave a title to all to think freely.

There can be little question, in fact, that Calvinism,

or some modification of its essential principles, is the form of religious faith that has been professed in the modern world by the most intelligent, moral, industrious, and freest of mankind. If Calvinism, however, tend to make men more manly and more fit for freedom, it has also a certain hardening influence on the heart, disposing to severity. Yet has not even this been without its compensating good; for when Calvin-impersonation of relentless rigour-sent the pious Servetus to the flames, it may be said that the knell of intolerance began to toll. Persistence in consigning dissidents from the religious dogmas of the day to death was made henceforth impossible, and persecution on religious grounds to any minor issue has come by degrees to be seen not only as indefensible in principle, but immoral in fact; for it strikes at the root of the very noblest elements in the constitution of humanity-Conscience and Loyalty to Truth.

But Calvinism has had its day. The free inquiry of which it sprang has slowly, yet surely, carried all save its wilfully blind or ignorant adherents beyond the pale of their old beliefs. More than a century ago the Church of Geneva broke not only with its Confession of Faith as formulated by its founder, but with confessions of faith of every complexion; so that one of its leaders, on occasion of the late tercentenary commemoration of the death of the Reformer, could say: Nous ne sommes plus Calvinistes selon Calvin. Nor has the defection of the Swiss been singular; they

have been followed more or less closely by the Dutch, the Germans, the more advanced of the Protestant Church of France, and finally and at length by the Scotch. In the land of Knox, the very stronghold of Judaic Christianity as defined by Calvin and his great disciple, open rebellion has broken out against the narrowness of the Creed and Catechism of the Westminster Assembly of Divines so obsequiously followed until now; prelude, doubtless, to further disruption and greater change than have yet been seen; for modern criticism and exegesis, and ever advancing science, proclaim arrest at any grade in the Religious Idea yet attained by the Churches to be impossible.

CHAPTER XXI.

CALVIN'S DEFENCE IS ATTACKED.

EVEN whilst the trial was proceeding, we have seen that Calvin was not without opposition in his pursuit of Servetus. Amied Perrin, his great political rival, had striven for mercy or a minor punishment to the last; and he was not without followers in the Council. But they were outnumbered and out-voted there, so that the light of the blessed quality that is not strained' was quenched. Outside the circle of the governing body also, more than one voice was raised against the manifest aim of Calvin to have his theological opponent capitally convicted. But it was by persons of inferior note. David Bruck, among others. a man of talent and quondam minister of a congregation of Anabaptists in the North, now living privately and respected under the name of David Joris at Berne, went so far as to speak of Servetus as a pious man, and to declare that if all who differed from others in their religious views were to be put to death, the world would be turned into one sea of blood.1

1

But the writer who received most notice from

Joris's able letter in low German is given by Mosheim, op. cit., p. 421.