The History of
Protestantism |
Chapter 1 | . . . | THE DOCTOR OF ETAPLES, THE FIRST PROTESTANT
TEACHER IN FRANCE Arrival of a New Actor Central Position of France Genius of its People Tragic Interest of its Protestantism Louis XII. Perdam Babylonis Nomen, The Councils of Pisa and the Lateran Francis I. and Leo X. Jacques Lefevre His Birth and Education Appointed to a Chair in the Sorbonne His Devotions His Lives of the Saints A Discovery A Free Justification Teaches this Doctrine in the Sorbonne Agitation among the Professors A Tempest gathering. |
Chapter 2 | . . . | FAREL, BRICONNET, AND THE EARLY REFORMERS
OF FRANCE A Student from the Dauphinese Alps William Farel Enters University of Paris Becomes a Pupil Of Lefevre His Doubts Passes with Lefevre into the New Day Preaches in the Churches Retires to Switzerland William Briconnet, Bishop of Meaux Briconnet goes on a Mission to Rome State of the City His Musings on his Way back Change at Meaux The Bible What Briconnet Saw in it Begins the Reformation of his Diocese Characters of Francis I. and Margaret of Valois. |
Chapter 3 | . . . | THE FIRST PROTESTANT CONGREGATION OF
FRANCE A Bright Morning Sanguine Anticipations of the Protestants Lefevre Translates the Bible Bishop of Meaux Circulates it The Reading of it at Meaux Reformation of Manners First Protestant Flock in France Happy Days Complaints of the Tavern-keepers Murmurs of the Monks The King Incited to set up the Scaffold Refuses The "Well of Meaux." |
Chapter 4 | . . . | COMMENCEMENT OF PERSECUTION IN
FRANCE The World's Center The Kingdoms at War In the Church, Peace The Flock at Meaux Marot's Psalms of David universally Sung in France The Odes of Horace Calvin and Church Psalmody Two Champions of the Darkness, Beda and Duprat Louisa of Savoy Her Character The Trio that Governed France They Unsheathe the Sword of Persecution Briconnet's Fall. |
Chapter 5 | . . . | THE FIRST MARTYRS OF FRANCE The Flock at Meaux Denis, a "Meaux Heretic" Visited in Prison by his former Pastor, Briconnet The Interview Men Burned and yet they Live Pavane Imprisoned for the Gospel Recants His Horror of Mind Anew Confesses Christ Is Burned His the First Stake in Paris Martyrdom of the Hermit of Livry Leclerc, the Wool-comber Acts as Pastor Banished from Meaux Retires to Metz Demolishes the Images at the Chapel of Mary Procession Astonishment of Processionists Leclerc Seized Confesses His Cruel Death Bishop Briconnet. |
Chapter 6 | . . . | CALVIN: HIS BIRTH AND
EDUCATION Greater Champions about to Appear Calvin His Birth and Lineage His Appearance and Disposition His Education Appointed to a Chaplaincy The Black Death Sent to La Marche at Paris Mathurin Cordier Friendship between the Young Pupil and his Teacher Calvin Charmed by the Great Latin Writers Luther's and Calvin's Services to their respective Tongues Leaves the School of La Marche. |
Chapter 7 | . . . | CALVIN'S CONVERSION Calvin in the Montaigu His Devotions and Studies Auguries of his Teachers Calvin still in Darkness Trebly Armed Olivetan Discussions between Olivetan and Calvin Doubts Awakened Great Struggles of Soul The Priests Advise him to Confess Olivetan sends him to the Bible Opens the Book Sees the Cross Another Obstacle The "Church" Sees the Spiritual Glory of the True Church The Glory of the False Church Vanishes One of the Great Battles of the World Victory and its Fruits. |
Chapter 8 | . . . | CALVIN BECOMES A STUDENT OF LAW Gate of the New Kingdom Crowds Pressing to Enter The Few only Able to do so Lefevre and Farel Sighing for the Conversion of Francis I. A Greater Conversion Calvin Refuses to be made a Priest Chooses the Profession of Law Goes to Orleans Pierre de l'Etoile Calvin becomes his Scholar Teaching of Etoile on the Duty of the State to Punish Heterodoxy Calvin among his College Companions A Victory Calvin Studies Greek Melchior Wolmar Calvin Prepared for his Work as a Commentator His Last Mental Struggle. |
Chapter 9 | . . . | CALVIN THE EVANGELIST, AND BERQUIN THE
MARTYR. Calvin Abandons the Study of the Law Goes to Bourges Bourges under Margaret of Navarre Its Evangelisation already Commenced The Citizens entreat Calvin to become their Minister He begins to act as an Evangelist in Bourges The Work extends to the Villages and Castles around The Plottings of the Monks His Father's Death calls Calvin away A Martyr, Louis de Berquin His Youth His Conversion His Zeal and Eloquence in Spreading the Gospel Imprisoned by the Sorbonnists Set at Liberty by the King Imprisoned a Second and a Third Time Set at Liberty Erasmus' Counsel Berquin Taxes the Sorbonnists with Heresy An Image of the Virgin Mutilated Berquin consigned to the Conciergerie His Condemnation and Frightful Sentence Efforts of Budaeus Berquin on his Way to the Stake His Attire His Noble Behaviour His Death. |
Chapter 10 | . . . | CALVIN AT PARIS, AND FRANCIS NEGOTIATING
WITH GERMANY AND ENGLAND. The Death of the Martyr not the Death of the Cause Calvin at Noyon Preaches at Pont l'Eveque His Audience How they take his Sermon An Experiment Its Lessen Calvin goes to Paris Paris a Focus of Literary Light The Students at the University Their Debates Calvin to Polemics adds Piety He Evangelises in Paris Powers of the World Spain and France kept Divided How and Why The Schmalkald League holds the Balance of Power Francis I. approaches the German Protestants Failure of the Negotiation Francis turns to Henry VIII. Interview between Francis and Henry at Boulogne Fetes League between the Kings of France and England Francis's Great Error |
Chapter 11 | . . . | THE GOSPEL PREACHED IN PARIS A
MARTYR. Margaret of Navarre Her Hopes Resolves to have the Gospel Preached in France The City Churches not to be had Opens a Private Chapel in the Louvre A Large and Brilliant Assembly convenes The Preachers Paris Penitent and Reforming Agitation in the Sorbonne The Sorbonnists apply to the King The Monks occupy the Pulpits They Threaten the King Beda Banished Excitement in Paris The Populace Remain with Rome The Crisis of France The Dominican Friar, Laurent de la Croix His Conversion Preaches in France Apprehended and conducted to Paris His Torture His Condemnation His Behaviour at the Stake France makes her Choice: she will Abide with Rome. |
Chapter 12 | . . . | CALVIN'S FLIGHT FROM PARIS. Out of Paris comes the Reformer The Contrasts of History Calvin's Interview with the Queen of Navarre Nicholas Cop, Rector of the Sorbonne An Inaugural Discourse Calvin Writes and Cop Delivers it The Gospel in Disguise Rage of the Sorbonne Cop flies to Basle The Officers on their way to Arrest Calvin Calvin is let down by the Window Escapes from Paris disguised as a Vine-Dresser Arrives in Angouleme Received at the Mansion of Du Tillet Here projects the Institutes Interview with Lefevre Lefevre's Prediction. |
Chapter 13 | . . . | FIRST PROTESTANT ADMINISTRATION OF THE
LORD'S SUPPER IN FRANCE. Calvin goes to Poictiers Its Society Calvin draws Disciples round him Re-unions The Gardens of the Basses Treilles The Abbot Ponthus Calvin's Grotto First Dispensation of the Lord's Supper in France Formation of a Protestant Congregation Home Mission Scheme for the Evangelisation of France The Three First Missionaries Their Labors and Deaths Calvin Leaves Poictiers The Church of Poictiers Present State and Aspect of Poictiers. |
Chapter 14 | . . . | CATHERINE DE MEDICI. St. Paul Calvin Desire to Labor in Paris Driven from this Field Francis I. Intrigues to Outmanoeuvre Charles V. Offers the Hand of his Second Son to the Pope's Niece Joy of Clement VII. The Marriage Agreed on Catherine de Medici Rise of the House of Medici Cosmo I. His Patronage of Letters and Scholars Fiesole Descendants of Cosmo Clement VII. Birth of Catherine de Medici Exposed to Danger Lives to Mount the Throne of France Catherine as a Girl Her Fascination Her Tastes Her Morals Her Love of Power; etc. |
Chapter 15 | . . . | MARRIAGE OF HENRY OF FRANCE TO CATHERINE DE
MEDICI. The Pope sets Sail Coasts along to France Meets Francis I. at Marseilles The Second Son of the King of France Married to Catherine de Medici Her Promised Dowry The Marriage Festivities Auguries Clement's Return Voyage His Reflections His Dream of a New Era His Dream to be Read Backwards His Troubles His Death Catherine Enters France as Calvin is Driven Out Retrogression of Protestantism Death and Catherine de Medici Death's Five Visits to the Palace Each Visit Assists Catherine in her Ascent to Power Her Crimes She Gains no Real Success. |
Chapter 16 | . . . | MELANCTHON'S PLAN FOR UNITING WITTEMBERG
AND ROME. The Laborers Scattered The Cause Advances The Dread it Inspires Calvin and Catherine A Contrast The Keys and the Fleur-de-Lis The Doublings of Francis Agreement between Francis and Philip of Hesse at Bar-le-Duc Campaign Wurtemberg Restored to Christopher Francis I's Project for Uniting Lutheranism and Romanism Du Bellay's Negotiations with Bucer Melancthon Sketches a Basis of Union Bucer and Hedio add their Opinion The Messenger Returns with the Paper to Paris Sensation Council at the Louvre Plan Discussed An Evangelical Pope. |
Chapter 17 | . . . | PLAN OF FRANCIS I. FOR COMBINING
LUTHERANISM AND ROMANISM. End of Conference Francis I, takes the Matter into his own Hand Concocts a New Basis of Union Sends Copies to Germany, to the Sorbonne and the Vatican Amazement of the Protestants Alarm of the Sorbonnists They send a Deputation to the King What they Say of Lutheranism Indignation at the Vatican These Projects of Union utterly Chimerical Excuse of the Protestants of the Sixteenth Century Their Stand-point Different from Ours Storms that have Shaken the World, but Cleared the Air. |
Chapter 18 | . . . | FIRST DISCIPLES OF THE GOSPEL IN
PARIS. Calvin now the Center of the Movement Shall he enter Priest's Orders? Hazard of a Wrong Choice He walks by Faith Visits Noyon Renounces all his Preferments in the Romish Church Sells his Patrimonial Inheritance Goes to Paris Meets Servetus His Opinions Challenges Calvin to a Controversy Servetus does not Keep his Challenge State of things at Paris Beda More Ferocious than ever The Times Uncertain Disciples in Paris Bartholemew Millon His Deformity Conversion Zeal for the Gospel Du Bourg, the Draper Valeton, of Nantes Le Compte Giulio Camillo Poille, the Bricklayer Other Disciples Pantheists Calvin's Forecastings Calvin quits Paris and goes to Strasburg. |
Chapter 19 | . . . | THE NIGHT OF THE
PLACARDS. Inconstancy of Francis Two Parties in the young French Church: the Temporisers and the Scripturalists The Policy advocated by each Their Differences submitted to Farel The Judgment of the Swiss Pastors The Placard Terrific Denunciation of the Mass Return of the Messenger Shall the Placards be Published? Two Opinions Majority for Publication The Kingdom Placarded in One Night The Morning Surprise and Horror Placard on the Door of the Royal Bed-chamber Wrath of the King. |
Chapter 20 | . . . | MARTYRS AND EXILES. Plan of Morin. The Betrayer Procession of Corpus Christi Terror of Paris Imprisonment of the Protestants Atrocious Designs attributed to them Nemesis Sentence of the Disciples Execution of Bartholomew Millon Burning of Du Bourg Death of Poille His Tortures General Terror Flight of Numbers Refugees of Rank Queen of Navarre Her Preachers All Ranks Flee What France might have been, had she retained these Men Prodigious Folly. |
Chapter 21 | . . . | OTHER AND MORE DREADFUL
MARTYRDOMS. A Great Purgation Resolved on Preparations Procession The Four Mendicants Relics: the Head of St. Louis; the True Cross, etc. Living Dignitaries The Host The King on Foot His Penitence Of what Sins does he Repent? The Queen Ambassadors, Nobles, etc. Homage of the Citizens High Mass in Notre Dame Speech of the King The Oath of the King Return of Procession Apparatus of Torture Martyrdom of Nicholas Valeton More Scaffolds and Victims The King and People's Satisfaction An Ominous Day in the Calendar of France The 21st of January. |
Chapter 22 | . . . | BASLE AND THE "INSTITUTES." Glory of the Sufferers Francis I. again turns to the German Protestants They Shrink back His Doublings New Persecuting Edicts Departure of the Queen of Navarre from Paris New Day to Bearn Calvin Strasburg Calvin arrives there Bucer, Capito, etc. Calvin Dislikes their Narrowness Goes on to Basle Basle Its Situation and Environs Soothing Effect on Calvin's Mind His Interview with Erasmus Erasmus "Lays the Egg" Terrified at what Comes of it Draws back Calvin's Enthusiasm Erasmus' Prophecy Catherine Klein First Sketch of the InstitutesWhat led Calvin to undertake the Work Its Sublimity, but Onerousness. |
Chapter 23 | . . . | THE "INSTITUTES." Calvin Discards the Aristotelian Method How a True Science of Astronomy is Formed Calvin Proceeds in the same way in Constructing his Theology Induction Christ Himself sets the Example of the Inductive Method Calvin goes to the Field of Scripture His Pioneers The Schoolmen Melanchthon Zwingli The Augsburg Confession Calvin's System more Complete Two Tremendous Facts First Edition of the Institutes Successive Editions The Creed its Model Enumeration of its Principal Themes-God the Sole Fountain of all things Christ the One Source of Redemption and Salvation The Spirit the One Agent in the Application of Redemption The Church Her Worship and Government. |
Chapter 24 | . . . | CALVIN ON PREDESTINATION AND
ELECTION. Calvin's Views on the Affirmative Side God as the Author of all things Ordains all that is to come to pass The Means equally with the End comprehended in the Decree As Sovereign, God Executes all that comes to pass Calvin's Views on the Negative Side Man a Free Agent Man an Accountable Being Calvin maintained side by side God's Eternal Ordination and Man's Freedom of Action Cannot Reconcile the Two Liberty and Necessity Tremendous Difficulties confessed to Attach to Both Theories Explanations Locke and Sir William Hamilton Growth of the Institutes. |
Chapter 25 | . . . | CALVIN'S APPEAL TO FRANCIS
I. Enthusiasm evoked by the appearance of the InstitutesMarshals the Reformed into One Host Beauty of the Style of the InstitutesOpinions expressed on it by Scaliger, Sir William Hamilton, Principal Cunningham, M. Nisard The Institutes an Apology for the Reformed In scathing Indignation comparable to Tacitus Home-thrusts He Addresses the King of France Pleads for his Brethren They Suffer for the Gospel Cannot Abandon it Offer themselves to Death A Warning Grandeur of the Appeal Did Francis ever Read this Appeal? |
BOOK FIRST
FROM
RISE OF PROTESTANTISM IN FRANCE (1510) TO PUBLICATION OF THE INSTITUTES
(1536)
CHAPTER 1 Back to
Top
THE DOCTOR OF ETAPLES, THE
FIRST PROTESTANT TEACHER IN FRANCE
Arrival of a New Actor Central
Position of France Genius of its People Tragic Interest of its Protestantism
Louis XII. Perdam Babylonis Nomen, The Councils of Pisa and the Lateran
Francis I. and Leo X. Jacques Lefevre His Birth and Education Appointed to a
Chair in the Sorbonne His Devotions His Lives of the Saints A Discovery
A Free Justification Teaches this Doctrine in the Sorbonne Agitation among
the Professors A Tempest gathering.
THE area of the Reformation that great movement
which, wherever it comes, makes all things new is about to undergo enlargement.
The stage, already crowded with great actors England, Germany, Switzerland,
Sweden, Denmark is to receive another accession. The plot is deepening, the
parts are multiplying, and the issues give promise of being rich and grand
beyond conception. It is no mean actor that is now to step upon that stage on
which the nations do battle, and where, if victorious, they shall reap a future
of happiness and glory; but if vanquished, there await them decadence, and
shame, and ruin. The new nationality which has come to mingle in this great
drama is France.
At the opening of the sixteenth century, France held a
foremost place among the countries of Europe. It might not unworthy aspire to
lead in a great movement of the nations. Placed in the center of the civilized
West, it touched the other kingdoms of Christendom at a great many points. On
its south and south-east was Switzerland; on its east and north-east were
Germany and the Low Countries; on its north, parted from it only by the narrow
sea, was England At all its gates, save those that looked towards Italy and
Spain, was the Reformation waiting for admission. Will France open, and heartily
welcome it? Elevated on this central and commanding site, the beacon-lights of
Protestantism will shed their effulgence all around, making the day clearer
where the light has already dawned, and the night less dark where the shades
still linger.
The rich endowments of the people made it at once desirable
and probable that France would embrace the Reformation. The French genius is one
of marvelous adaptability. Quick, playful, trenchant, subtle, it is able alike
to concentrate itself in analytical investigations, and to spread itself out in
creations of poetic beauty and intellectual sublimity. There is no branch of
literature in which the French people have not excelled. They have shone equally
in the drama, in philosophy, in history, in mathematics, and in metaphysics.
Grafted on a genius so elegant and yet so robust, so playful and yet so
Penetrating in short, so many sided Protestantism will display itself under
a variety of new and beautiful lights, which will win converts in quarters where
the movement has not been regarded hitherto as having many attractions to
recommend it nay, rather where, it has been contemned as "a root out of a dry
ground."
We are entering on one of the grandest yet most tragic of all
the pages of our history. The movement which we now behold entering France is to
divide deeply and fiercely divide the nation; for it is a characteristic of
the French people that whatever, cause they embrace, they embrace with
enthusiasm; and whatever cause they oppose, they oppose with an equal
enthusiasm. As we pass on the scenes will be continually shifting, and the quick
alternations of hope and fear will never cease to agitate us. It is, so to
speak, a superb gallery we are to traverse; colossal forms look down upon us as
we pass along. On this hand stand men of gigantic wickedness, on that men of
equally gigantic virtue men whose souls, sublimed by piety and trust in God,
have attained to the highest pitch of endurance, of self-sacrifice, of heroism.
And then the lesson at the close, so distinct, so solemn. For we are justified
in affirming that in a sense France has glorified Protestantism more by
rejecting it than other countries have done by accepting it.
We lift the
curtain at the year 1510. On its rising we find the throne of France occupied by
Louis XII., the wisest sovereign of his time. He has just assembled a Parliament
at Tours to resolve for him the question whether it is lawful to go to war with
the Pope, who violates treaties, and sustains his injustice by levying soldiers
and fighting battles?[1] The warlike Julius II.
then occupied the chair which a Borgia had recently filled.
Ignorant of
theology, with no inclination, and just as little capacity, for the spiritual
duties of his see, Julius II. passed his whole time in camps and on
battle-fields. With so bellicose a priest at its center, Christendom had but
little rest. Among others whom the Pope disquieted was the meek and upright
Louis of France; hence the question which he put to his Parliament. The answer
of that assembly marks the moral decadence of the Papacy, and the contempt in
which the thunderbolts of the Vatican were beginning to be held. "It is lawful
for the king," said they, "not only to act defensively but offensively against
such a man"[2] Fortified by the advice of
his Parliament, Louis gave the command to his armies to march, and two years
later he indicated sufficiently his own opinion of the Papacy and its crowned
chief, when he caused a coin to be struck at Naples bearing the words, Perdan
Babylonis nomen [3] These symptoms announced
the near approach of the new times.
Other things were then being
transacted which also gave plain indication that the old age was about to close
and a new age to open. Weary of a Pope who made it his sole vocation to marshal
armies and conquer cities and provinces, who went in person to the battle-field,
but never once appeared in the pulpit, the Emperor Maximilian I. and Louis of
France agreed to convoke a Council [4] for "the Reformation of
the Church in its head and members." That Council was now sitting at Pisa. It
summoned the Pope to its bar, and when Julius II. failed to appear, the Council
suspended him from his office, and forbade all people to obey him.[5] The Pope treated the
decree of the Fathers with the same contempt which he had shown to their
summons. He convoked another Council at the Lateran, made void that of Pisa,
with all its decrees, fulminated excommunication against Louis,[6] suspended Divine worship
in France, and delivered the kingdom to whomsoever had the will and the power to
seize upon it.[7]
Thus Council met
Council, and the project of the two sovereigns for a Reformation came to
nothing, as later and similar attempts were destined to do.
For the many
evils that pressed upon the world, a Council was the only remedy that the age
knew, and at every crisis it betook itself to this device. God was about to
plant in society a new principle, which would become the germ of its
regeneration.
Julius II. was busied with his Council of the Lateran when
(1513) he died, and was succeeded in the Papal chair by Cardinal John de Medici,
Leo X.
With the new Pope came new manners at Rome. Underneath, the stream
of corruption continued steadily to flow, but on the surface things were
changed. The Vatican no longer rang with the clang of arms. Instead of soldiers,
troops of artists and musicians, crowds of masqueraders and buffoons now filled
the palace of the Pope. The talk was no longer of battles, but of, pictures and
statues and dancers. Soon Louis of France followed his former opponent, Julius
II., to the grave. He died on the 1st January, 1515, and was succeeded by his
nephew, Francis I.
The new Pope and the new king were not unlike in
character. The Renaissance had touched both, communicating to them that
refinement of outward manners, and that aesthetical rather than cultivated
taste, which it never failed to impart to all who came under its influence. The
strong, wayward, and selfish passions of the men it had failed to correct. Both
loved to surround themselves with pomps. Francis was greedy of fame, Leo was
greedy of money, and both were greedy of pleasure, and the characteristic
passions of each became in the hand of an overruling Providence the means of
furthering the great movement which now presents itself on the scene.
The
river which waters great kingdoms, and bears on its bosom the commerce of many
nations, may be traced up to some solitary fountain among the far-off hills. So
was it with that river of the Water of Life that was now to go forth to refresh
France. It had its first rise in a single soul. It is the year 1510, and the
good Louis XII. is still upon the throne. A stranger visiting Paris at that day,
more especially if of a devout turn, would hardly have failed to mark an old
man, small of stature and simple in manners, going his round of the churches
and, prostrate before their images, devoutly "repeating his hours:" This man was
destined to be, on a small scale, to the realm of France what Wicliffe had been,
on a large, to England and the world "the morning star of the Reformation."
His name was Jacques Lefevre. He was born at Etaples, a village of Picardy,[8] about the middle of the
previous century, and was now verging on seventy, but still hale and vigorous.
Lefevre had all his days been a devout Papist, and even to this hour the shadow
of Popery was still around him, and the eclipse of superstition had not yet
wholly passed from off his soul. But the promise was to be fulfilled to him, "At
evening time it shall be light." He had all along had a presentiment that a new
day was rising on the world, and that he should not depart till his eyes had
seen its light.
The man who was the first to emerge from the darkness
that covered his native land is entitled to a prominent share of our attention.
Lefevre was in all points a remarkable man. Endowed with an inquisitive and
capacious intellect, hardly was there a field of study open to those ages which
he had not entered, and in which he had not made great proficiency. The ancient
languages, the belles lettres, history, mathematics, philosophy, theology; he
had studied them all. His thirst for knowledge tempted him to try what he might
be able to learn from other lands besides France. He had visited Asia and
Africa, and seen all that the end of the fifteenth century had to show.
Returning to France he was appointed to a chair in the Sorbonne, or Theological
Hall of the great Paris University, and soon he drew around him a crowd of
admiring disciples. He was the first luminary, Erasmus tells us, in that
constellation of lights; but he was withal so meek, so amiable, so candid, and
so full of loving-kindness, that all who knew him loved him. But there were
those among his fellow-professors who envied him the admiration of which he was
the object, and insinuated that the man who had visited so many countries, and
had made himself familiar with so many subjects, and some of them so
questionable, could hardly have escaped some taint of heresy, and could not be
wholly loyal to Mother Church.
They set to watching him; but no one of
them all was so punctual and exemplary in his devotions. never was he absent
from mass; never was his place empty at the procession, and no one remained so
long as Lefevre on his knees before the saints. Nay, often might this man, the
most distinguished of all the professors of the Sorbonne, be seen decking the
statues of Mary with flowers.[9] No flaw could his enemies
find in his armor.
Lefevre, thinking to crown the saints with a fairer
and more lasting garland than the perishable flowers he had offered to their
images, formed the idea of collecting and re-writing their lives: He had already
made some progress in his task when the thought struck him that he might find in
the Bible materials or hints that would be useful to him in his work. To the
Bible the original languages of which he had studied he accordingly turned.
He had unwittingly opened to himself the portals of a new world. Saints of
another sort than those that had till this moment engaged his attention now
stood before him men who had received a higher canonisation than that of Rome,
and whose images the pen of inspiration itself had drawn. The virtues of the
real saints dimmed in his eyes the glories of the legendary ones. The pen
dropped from his hand, and he could proceed no farther in the task on which till
now he had labored with a zeal so genial, and a perseverance so
untiring.
Having opened the Bible, Lefevre was in no haste to shut it. He
saw that not only were the saints of the Bible unlike the saints of the Roman
Calendar, but that the Church of the Bible was unlike the Roman Church. From the
images of Paul and Peter, the doctor of Etaples now turned to the Epistles of
Paul and Peter, from the voice of the Church to the voice of God. The plan of a
free justification stood revealed to him. It came like a sudden revelation
like the breaking of the day. In 1512 he published a commentary, of which a copy
is extant in the Bibliotheque Royale of Paris, on the Epistles of Paul. In that
work he says, "It is God who gives us, by faith, that righteousness which by
grace alone justifies to eternal life."[10]
The day has broken.
This utterance of Lefevre assures us of that. It is but a single ray, it is
true; but it comes from Heaven, it is light Divine, and will yet scatter the
darkness that broods over France. It has already banished the gloom of monkery
from the soul of Lefevre; it will do the same for his pupils for his
countrymen, and he knows that he has not received the light to put it under a
bushel. Of all places, the Sorbonne was the most dangerous in which to proclaim
the new doctrine. For centuries no one but the schoolmen had spoken there, and
now to proclaim in the citadel and sanctuary of scholasticism a doctrine that
would explode what had received the reverence, as it had been the labor, of
ages, and promised, as was thought, eternal fame to its authors, was enough to
make the very stones cry out from the venerable walls, and was sure to draw down
a tempest of scholastic ire on the head of the adventurous innovator. Lefevre
had attained an age which is proverbially wary, if not timid; he knew well the
risks to which he was exposing himself, nevertheless he went on to teach the
doctrine of salvation by grace. There rose a great commotion round the chair
whence proceeded these unwonted sounds. With very different feelings did the
pupils of the venerable man listen to the new teaching. The faces of some
testified to the delight which his doctrine gave them. They looked like men to
whose eyes some glorious vista had been suddenly opened, or who had unexpectedly
lighted upon what they had long but vainly sought. Astonishment or doubt was
plainly written on the faces of others, while the knitted brows and flashing
eyes of some as plainly bespoke the anger that inflamed them against the man who
was razing, as they thought, the very foundations of morality.
The
agitation in the class-room of Lefevre quickly communicated itself to the whole
university. The doctors were in a flutter. Reasonings and objections were heard
on every side, frivolous in some cases, in others the fruit of blind prejudice,
or dislike of the doctrine. But some few were honest, and these Lefever made it
his business to answer, being desirous to show that his doctrine did not give a
license to sin, and that it was not new, but old; that he was not the first
preacher of it in France, that it had been taught by Irenaeus in early times,
long before the scholastic theology was heard of; and especially that this
doctrine was not his, not Irenaeus', but God's, who had revealed it to men in
his Word.
Mutterings began to be heard of the tempest that was gathering
in the distance; but as yet it did not burst, and meanwhile Lefevre, within
whose soul the light was growing clearer day by day, went on with his
work.
It is important to mark that these occurrences took place in 1512.
Not yet, nor till five years later, was the name of Luther heard of in France.
The monk of Wittemberg had not yet nailed his Theses against indulgences to the
doors of the Schloss-kirk. From Germany then, most manifest it is, the
Reformation which we now see springing up on French soil did not
come.
Even before the strokes of Luther's hammer in Wittemberg are heard
ringing the knell of the old times, the voice of Lefevre is proclaiming beneath
the vaulted roof of the Sorbonne in Paris the advent of the new age. The
Reformation of France came out of the Bible as really as the light which kindles
mountain and plain at daybreak comes out of heaven. And as it was in France so
was it in all the countries of the Reform. The Word of God, like God himself, is
light; and from that enduring and inexhaustible source came forth that welcome
clay which, after a long and protracted night, broke upon the nations in the
morning of the sixteenth century.
CHAPTER 2
Back to
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FAREL, BRICONNET, AND
THE EARLY REFORMERS OF FRANCE
A Student from the Dauphinese Alps
William Farel Enters University of Paris Becomes a Pupil Of Lefevre His
Doubts Passes with Lefevre into the New Day Preaches in the Churches
Retires to Switzerland William Briconnet, Bishop of Meaux Briconnet goes on
a Mission to Rome State of the City His Musings on his Way back Change at
Meaux The Bible What Briconnet Saw in it Begins the Reformation of his
Diocese Characters of Francis I. and Margaret of Valois.
AMONG the youth whom we see gathered round the chair
of the aged Lefevre, there is one who specially attracts our notice. It is easy
to see that between the scholar and his master there exists an attachment of no
ordinary kind. There is no one in all that crowd of pupils who so hangs upon the
lips of his teacher as does this youth, nor is there one on whom the eyes of
that teacher rest with so kindly a light. This youth is not a native of France.
He was born among the Alps of Dauphine, at Gap, near Grenoble, in 1489. His name
is William Farel.
His parents were eminently pious, measured by the
standard of that age. Never did morning kindle into glory the white mountains,
in the midst of which their dwelling was placed, but the family was assembled,
and the bead-roll duly gone over; and never did evening descend, first
enkindling then paling the Alps, without the customary hymn to the Virgin. The
parents of the youth, as he himself informs us, believed all that the priests
told them; and he, in his turn, believed all that his parents told
him.
Thus he grew up till he was about the age of twenty the grandeurs
of nature in his eye all hours of the day, but the darkness of superstition
deepening year by year in his soul. The two the glory of the Alps and the
glory of the Church seemed to blend and become one in his mind. It would have
been as hard for him to believe that Rome with her Pope and holy priests, with
her rites and ceremonies, was the mere creation of superstition, as to believe
that the great mountains around him, with their snows and their pine-forests,
were a mere illusion, a painting on the sky, which but mocked the senses, and
would one day dissolve like an unsubstantial though gorgeous exhalation. "I
would gnash my teeth like a furious wolf," said he, speaking of his blind
devotion to Rome at this period of his life, "when I heard any one speaking
against the Pope."
It was his father's wish that he should devote himself
to the profession of arms, but the young Farel aspired to be a scholar. The fame
of the Sorbonne had reached him in his secluded native valley, and he thirsted
to drink at that renowned well of learning. Probably the sublimities amid which
he daily moved had kept alive the sympathies of a mind naturally ardent and
aspiring. He now (1510) set out for Paris, presented himself at the gates of its
university, and was enrolled among its students.
It was here that the
young Dauphinese scholar became acquainted with the doctor of Etaples. There
were but few points to bring them together, one would have thought, and a great
many to keep them apart. The one was young, the other old; the one was
enthusiastic, the other was timid; but these differences were on the surface
only. The two were kindred in their souls, both were noble, unselfish, devout,
and in an age of growing skepticism and dissoluteness the devotion of both was
as sincere as it was ardent. This was the link that bound them together, and the
points of contrast instead of weakening only tended the more firmly to cement
their friendship. The aged master and the young disciple might often be seen
going their rounds in company, and visiting the same shrines, and kneeling
before the same images.
But now a change was commencing in the mind of
Lefevre which must part the two for ever, or bind them together yet more
indissolubly. The spiritual dawn was breaking in the soul of the doctor of
Etaples; would his young disciple be able to enter along with him into that new
world into which the other was being translated? In his public teaching Lefevre
now began to let fall at times crumbs of the new knowledge he had gleaned from
the Bible. "Salvation is of grace," would the professor say to his
pupils.
"The Innocent One is condemned and the criminal is acquitted."
"It is the cross of Christ alone that openeth the gates of heaven and shutteth
the gates of hell."[1] Farel started as these
words fell upon his ear. What did they import, and where would they lead him?
Were then all his visits to the saints, and the many hours on his knees before
their images, to no purpose prayers flung into empty space? The teachings of
his youth, the sanctities of his home, nay, the grandeurs of the mountains which
were associated in his mind with the beliefs he had learned at their feet, rose
up before him, and appeared to frown upon him, and he wished he were back again,
where, encompassed by the calm majesty of the hills, he might no longer feel
these torturing doubts.
Farel had two courses before him, he must either
press forward with Lefevre into the light, or abjuring his master as a heretic,
plunge straightway into deeper darkness. Happily God had been preparing him for
the crisis. There had been for some time a tempest in the soul of the young
student. Farel had lost his peace, and the austerities he had practiced with a
growing rigor had failed to restore it. What Scripture so emphatically terms
"the terrors of death and the pains of hell" had taken hold upon him. It was
while he was in this state, feeling that he could not save himself, and
beginning to despair of ever being saved, that the words were spoken in his
hearing, "The cross of Christ alone openeth the gates of heaven." Farel felt
that this was the only salvation to suit him, that if ever he should be saved it
must be "of grace," "without money and without price," and so he immediately
pressed in at the portal which the words of Lefevre had opened to him, and
rejoined his teacher in the new world into which that teacher himself had so
recently entered.[2] The tempest was at an end:
he was now in the quiet haven. "All things," said he, "appear to me under a new
light. Scripture is cleared up." "Instead of the murderous heart of a ravening
wolf, he came back," he tells us, "quietly like a meek and harmless lamb, having
his heart entirely withdrawn from the Pope and given to Jesus Christ."[3]
For a brief space
Jacques Lefevre and Guillaume Farel shone like twin stars in the morning sky of
France. The influence of Lefevre was none the less efficient that it was quietly
put forth, and consisted mainly in the dissemination of those vital truths from
which Protestantism was to spring among the young and ardent minds that were
gathered round his chair, and by whom the new doctrine was afterwards to be
published from the pulpit, or witnessed for on the scaffold. "Lefevre was the
man," says Theodore Beza, "who boldly began the revival of the pure religion of
Jesus Christ, and as in ancient times the school of Socrates sent forth the best
orators, so from the lecture-room of the doctor of Etaples issued many of the
best men of the age and of the Church."[4] Peter Robert Olivetan, the
translator of the first French Bible from the version of Lefevre, is believed to
have been among the number of those who received the truth from the doctor of
Etaples, and who, in his turn, was the means of enlisting in the service of
Protestantism the greatest champion whom France, or perhaps any other country,
ever gave to it.
While Lefevre scattered the seed in his lecture-room,
Farel, now fully emancipated from the yoke of the Pope, and listening to no
teaching but that of the Bible, went forth and preached in the temples. He was
as uncompromising and bold in his advocacy of the Gospel as he had aforetime
been zealous in behalf of Popery. "Young and resolute," says Felice, "he caused
the public places and temples to resound with his voice of thunder."[5] He labored for a short
time in Meaux,[6] where Protestantism reaped
its earliest triumphs: and when the gathering storm of persecution drove him
from France, which happened soon thereafter, Farel directed his steps towards
those grand mountains from which lie had come, and preaching in Switzerland with
a courage which no violence could subdue, and an eloquence which drew around him
vast crowds, he introduced the Reformation into his native land. He planted the
standard of the cross on the shores of the lake of Neuchatel and on those of the
Leman, and eventually carried it within the gates of Geneva, where we shall
again meet him. He thus became the pioneer of Calvin.
We have marked the
two figures Lefevre and Farel that stand out with so great distinctness in
this early dawn. A third now appears whose history possesses a great although a
melancholy interest. After the doctor of Etaples no one had so much to do with
the introduction of Protestantism into France as the man whom we now bring upon
the stage.[7] He is William Briconnet,
Count of Montbrun, and Bishop of Meaux, a town about eight leagues east of
Paris, and where Bossuet, another name famous in ecclesiastical annals, was
also, at an after-period, bishop. Descended from a noble family, of good
address, and a man of affairs, Briconnet was sent by Francis I. on a mission to
Rome. The most magnificent of all the Popes Leo X. was then in the Vatican,
and Briconnet's visit to the Eternal City gave him an opportunity of seeing the
Papacy in the noon of its glory, if now somewhat past the meridian of its
power.
It was the same Pope to whom the Bishop of Meaux was now sent as
ambassador to whom the saying is ascribed, "What a profitable affair this fable
of Christ has been to us!" To Luther in his cell, alone with his sins and his
conscience, the Gospel was a reality; to Leo, amidst the statues and pictures of
the Vatican, his courtiers, buffoons and dancers, the Gospel was a fable. But
this "fable" had done much for Rome. It had filled it no one said with virtues
but with golden dignities, dazzling honors, and voluptuous delights. This
fable clothed the ministers of the Church in purple, seated them every day at
sumptuous tables, provided for them splendid equipages drawn by prancing steeds,
and followed by a long train of liveried attendants: while couches of down were
spread for them at night on which to rest their wearied frames worn out, not
with watching or study, or the care of souls, but with the excitements of the
chase or the pleasures of the table. The viol, the tabret, and the harp were
never silent in the streets of Rome. Her citizens did not need to toil or spin,
to turn the soil or plough the main, for the corn and oil, the silver and the
gold of all Christendom flowed thither. They shed copiously the juice of the
grape in their banquets, and not less copiously the blood of one another in
their quarrels. The Rome of that age was the chosen home of pomps and revels, of
buffooneries and villanies, of dark intrigues and blood-red crimes.[8] "Enjoy we the Papacy,"
said Leo, when elected, to his nephew Julian de Medici, "since God has given it
to us."
But the master-actor on this strange stage was Religion, or the
"Fable" as the Pontiff termed it. All day long the bells tolled; even at night
their chimes ceased not to be heard, telling the visitor that even then prayer
and praise were ascending from the oratories and shrines of Rome. Churches and
cathedrals rose at every few paces: images and crucifixes lined the streets:
tapers and holy signs sanctified the dwellings: every hour processions of shorn
priest, hooded monk, and veiled nun swept along, with banners, and chants, and
incense. Every new day brought a new ceremony or festival, which surpassed in
its magnificence and pomp that of the day before. What an enigma was presented
to the Bishop of Meaux! What a strange city was Rome how full of religion, but
how empty of virtue! Its ceremonies how gorgeous, but its worship how cold; its
priests how numerous, and how splendidly arrayed! It wanted only that their
virtues should be as shining as their garments, to make the city of the Pope the
most resplendent in the universe. Such doubtless were the reflections of
Briconnet during his stay at the court of Leo.
The time came that the
Bishop of Meaux must leave Rome and return to France. On his way back to his own
country he had a great many more things to meditate upon than when on his
journey southward to the Eternal City. As he climbs the lower ridges of the
Apennines, and casts a look behind on the fast-vanishing cluster of towers and
domes, which mark the site of Rome on the bosom of the Campagna, we can imagine
him saying to himself, "May not the Pope have spoken infallibly for once, and
may not that which I have seen enthroned amid so much of this world's pride and
power and wickedness be, after all, only a 'fable'?" In short, Briconnet, like
Luther, came back from Rome much less a son of the Church than he had been
before going thither.[9]
New scenes awaited
him on his return, and what he had seen in Rome helped to prepare him for what
he was now to witness in France. On getting back to his diocese the Bishop of
Meaux was astonished at the change which had passed in Paris during his absence.
There was a new light in the sky of France: a new influence was stirring in the
minds of men. The good bishop thirsted to taste the new knowledge which he saw
was transforming the lives and gladdening the hearts of all who received it. He
had known Lefevre before going to Rome, and what so natural as that he should
turn to his old friend to tell him whence had come that influence, so silent yet
so mighty, which was changing the world? Lefevre put the Bible into his hands:
it was all in that book. The bishop opened the mysterious volume, and there he
saw what he had missed at Rome a Church which had neither Pontifical chair nor
purple robes, but which possessed the higher splendor of truth and holiness. The
bishop felt that this was the true Spouse of Christ.
The Bible had
revealed to Briconnet, Christ as the Author of a free salvation, the Bestower of
an eternal life, without the intervention of the "Church," and this knowledge
was to him as "living water," as "heavenly food." "Such is its sweetness," said
he, "that it makes the mind insatiable, the more we taste of it the more we long
for it. What vessel is able to receive the exceeding fullness of this
inexhaustible sweetness?"[10]
Briconnet's letters
are still preserved in MS.; they are written in the mazy metaphorical style
which disfigured all the productions of an age just passing from the flighty and
figurative rhetoric of the schoolmen to the chaster models of the ancients, but
they leave us in no doubt as to his sentiments. He repudiates works as the
foundation of the sinner's justification, and puts in their room Christ's
finished work apprehended by faith, and, laying little stress on external
ceremonies and rites, makes religion to consist in love to God and personal
holiness. The bishop received the new doctrine without experiencing that severe
mental conflict which Farel had passed through. He found the gate not strait,
and entered in somewhat too easily perhaps and took his place in the little
circle of disciples which the Gospel had already gathered round it in France
Lefevre, Farel, Roussel, and Vatable, all four professors in the University of
Paris although, alas! he was not destined to remain in that holy society to
the close.
Of the five men whom Protestantism had called to follow it in
this kingdom, the Bishop of Meaux, as regarded the practical work of
Reformation, was the most powerful. The whole of France he saw needed
Reformation; where should he begin? Unquestionably in his own diocese. His
rectors and cures walked in the old paths. They squandered their revenues in the
dissolute gaieties of Paris, while they appointed ignorant deputies to do duty
for them at Meaux. In other days Briconnet had looked on this as a matter of
course: now it appeared to him a scandalous and criminal abuse. In October,
1520, he published a mandate, proclaiming all to be "traitors and deserters who,
by abandoning their flocks, show plainly that what they love is their fleece and
their wool." He interdicted, moreover, the Franciscans from the pulpits of his
diocese. At the season of the grand fetes these men made their rounds, amply
provided with new jests, which put their hearers in good humor, and helped the
friars to fill their stomachs and their wallets. Briconnet forbade the pulpits
to be longer desecrated by such buffooneries. He visited in person, like a
faithful bishop, all his parishes; summoned the clergy and parishioners before
him: inquired into the teaching of the one and the morals of the other: removed
ignorant cures, that is, every nine out of ten of the clergy, and replaced them
with men able to teach, when such could be found, which was then no easy matter.
To remedy the great evil of the time, which was ignorance, he instituted a
theological seminary at Meaux, where, under his own eye, there might be trained
"able ministers of the New Testament;" and meanwhile he did what he could to
supply the lack of laborers, by ascending the pulpit and preaching himself, "a
thing which had long since gone quite out of fashion."[11]
Leaving Meaux now,
to come back to it soon, we return to Paris. The influence of Briconnet's
conversion was felt among the high personages of the court, and the literary
circles of the capital, as well as amidst the artizans and peasants of the
diocese of Meaux. The door of the palace stood open to the bishop, and the
friendship he enjoyed with Francis I. opened to Briconnet vast opportunities of
spreading Reformed views among the philosophers and scholars whom that monarch
loved to assemble round him. One high-born, and wearing a mitre, was sure to be
listened to where a humbler Reformer might in vain solicit audience. The court
of France was then adorned by a galaxy of learned men Budaeus, Du Bellay, Cop,
the court physician, and others of equal eminence to all of whom the bishop
made known a higher knowledge than that of the Renaissance.[12] But the most illustrious
convert in the palace was the sister of the king, Margaret of Valois. And now
two personages whom we have not met as yet, but who are destined to act a great
part in the drama on which we are entering, make their appearance.
The
one is Francis I., who ascended the throne just as the new day was breaking over
Europe; the other is his sister, whom we have named above, Margaret of
Angouleme. The brother and sister, in many of their qualities, resembled each
other. Both were handsome in person, polished in manners, lively in disposition,
and of a magnanimous and generous character. Both possessed a fine intellect,
and both were fond of letters, which they had cultivated with ardor: Francis,
who was sometimes styled the Mirror of Knighthood, embodied in his person the
three characteristics of his age valor, gallantry, and letters; the latter
passion had, owing to the Renaissance, become a somewhat fashionable one.
"Francis I.," says Guizot, "had received from God all the gifts that can adorn a
man: he was handsome, and tall, and strong; his amour, preserved in the Louvre,
is that of a man six feet high; his eyes were brilliant and soft, his smile was
gracious, his manners were winning."[13]
Francis aspired to
be a great king, but the moral instability which tarnished his many great
qualities forbade the realization of his idea. It was his fate, after starting
with promise in every race, to fall behind before reaching the goal. The young
monarch of Spain bore away from him the palm in arms. Despite his great
abilities, and the talents he summoned to his aid, he was never able to achieve
for France in politics any but a second place. He chased from his dominions the
greatest theological intellect of his age, and the literary glory with which he
thought to invest his name and throne passed over to England. He was
passionately fond of his sister, whom he always called his "darling;" and
Margaret was not less devoted in affection for her brother. For some time the
lives, as the tastes, of the two flowed on together; but a day was to come when
they would be parted. Amid the frivolities of the court, in which she mingled
without defiling herself with its vices, the light of the Gospel shone upon
Margaret, and she turned to her Savior. Francis, after wavering some time
between the Gospel and Rome, between the pleasures of the world and the joys
that are eternal, made at last his choice, but, alas! on the opposite side to
that of his lovely and accomplished sister. Casting in his lot with Rome, and
staking crown, and kingdom, and salvation upon the issue, he gave battle to the
Reformation.
We turn again to Margaret, whose grace and beauty made her
the ornament of the court, as her brilliant qualities of intellect won the
admiration and homage of all who came in contact with her.[14] This accomplished
princess, nevertheless, began to be unhappy. She felt a heaviness of the heart
which the gaieties around her could not dispel. She was in this state, ill at
ease, yet not knowing well what it was that troubled her, when Briconnet met her
(1521).[15] He saw at once to the
bottom of her heart and her griefs. He put into her hand what Lefevre had put
into his own the Bible; and after the eager study of the Word of God, Margaret
forgot her fears and her sins in love to her Savior. She recognized in him the
Friend she had long sought, but sought in vain, in the gay circles in which she
moved, and she felt a strength and courage she had not known till now. Peace
became an inmate of her bosom. She was no longer alone in the world. There was
now a Friend by her side on whose sympathy she could cast herself in those dark
hours when her brother Francis should frown, and the court should make her the
object of its polished ridicule.
In the conversion of Margaret a merciful
Providence provided against the evil days that were to come. Furious storms were
at no great distance, and although Margaret was not strong enough to prevent the
bursting of these tempests, she could and did temper their bitterness. She was
near the throne. The sweetness of her spirit was at times a restraint upon the
headlong passions of her brother. With quiet tact she would defeat the plot of
the monk, and undo the chain of the martyr, and not a few lives, which other
wise would have perished on the scaffold, were through her interposition saved
to the Reformation.
CHAPTER 3
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THE FIRST PROTESTANT
CONGREGATION OF FRANCE
A Bright Morning Sanguine Anticipations of
the Protestants Lefevre Translates the Bible Bishop of Meaux Circulates it
The Reading of it at Meaux Reformation of Manners First Protestant Flock in
France Happy Days Complaints of the Tavern-keepers Murmurs of the Monks
The King Incited to set up the Scaffold Refuses The "Well of
Meaux."
A MORNING without clouds was rising on France, and
Briconnet and Lefevre believed that such as the morning had been so would be the
day, tranquil and clear, and waxing ever the brighter as it approached its noon.
Already the Gospel had entered the palace. In her lofty sphere Margaret of
Valois shone like a star of soft and silvery light, clouded at times, it is
true, from the awe in which she stood of her brother and the worldly society
around her, but emitting a sweet and winning ray which attracted the eye of many
a beholder.
The monarch was on the side of progress, and often made the
monks the butt of his biting satire. The patrons of literary culture were the
welcome guests at the Louvre. All things were full of promise, and, looking down
the vista of coming years, the friends of the Gospel beheld a long series of
triumphs awaiting it the throne won, the ancient superstition overturned, and
France clothed with a new moral strength becoming the benefactress of
Christendom. Such was the future as it shaped itself to the eyes of the two
chief leaders of the movement. Triumphs, it is true, glorious triumphs was the
Gospel to win in France, but not exactly of the kind which its friends at this
hour anticipated. Its victories were to be gained not in the lettered conflicts
of scholars, nor by the aid of princes; it was in the dungeon and at the stake
that its prowess was to be shown. This was the terrible arena on which it was to
agonize and to be crowned. This, however, was hidden from the eyes of Briconnet
and Lefevre, who meanwhile, full of faith and courage, worked with all their
might to speed on a victory which they regarded as already half won.
The
progress of events takes us back to Meaux. We have already noted the Reformation
set on foot there by the bishop, the interdict laid on the friars, who
henceforward could neither vent their buffooneries nor fill their wallets, the
removal of immoral and incapable cures, and the founding of a school for the
training of pastors. Briconnet now took another step forward; he hastened to
place the Reform upon a stable basis to open to his people access to the great
fountain of light, the Bible.
It was the ambition of the aged Lefevre, as
it had been that of our own Wicliffe, to see before he died every man in France
able to read the Word of God in his mother tongue. With this object he began to
translate the New Testament.[1] The four Gospels in French
were published on the 30th October, 1522; in a week thereafter came the
remaining books of the New Testament, and on the 12th October, 1524, the whole
were published in one volume at Meaux.[2] The publication of the
translated Bible was going on contemporaneously in Germany. Without the Bible in
the mother tongues of France and Germany, the Reformation must have died with
its first disciples; for, humanly speaking, it would have been impossible
otherwise to have found for it foothold in Christendom in face of the tremendous
opposition with which the powers of the world assailed it. The bishop,
overjoyed, furthered with all his power the work of Lefevre. He made his steward
distribute copies of the four Gospels to the poor gratis.[3] "He spared," says Crespin,
"neither gold nor silver," and the consequence was that the New Testament in
French was widely circulated in all the parishes of his diocese.
The wool
trade formed the staple of Meaux, and its population consisted mainly of
wool-carders, spinners, weavers.[4] Those in the surrounding
districts were peasants and vine-dressers. In town and country alike the Bible
became the subject of study and the theme of talk. The artizans of Meaux
conversed together about it as they plied the loom or tended the spindle. At
meal-hours it was read in the workshops. The laborers in the vineyards and on
the corn-fields, when the noontide came and they rested from toil, would draw
forth the sacred volume, and while one read, the rest gathered round him in a
circle and listened to the words of life. They longed for the return of the
meal-hour, not that they might eat of the bread of earth, but that they might
appease their hunger for the bread whereof he that eateth shall never die.[5]
These men had grown
suddenly learned, "wiser than their teachers," to use the language of the book
they were now so intently perusing. They were indeed wiser than the tribe of
ignorant cures, and the army of Franciscan monks, whose highest aim had been to
make their audience gape and laugh at their jests. Compared with the husks on
which these men had fed them, this was the true bread, the heavenly manna. "Of
what use are the saints to us?" said they. "Our only Mediator is Christ."[6] To offer any formal
argument to them that this book was Divine, they would have felt to be absurd.
It had opened heaven to them. It had revealed the throne of God, and their way
to it by the one and only Savior. Whose book, then, could this be but God's? and
whence could it have come but from the skies?
And well it was that their
faith was thus simple and strong, for no less deep a conviction of the Gospel's
truth would have sufficed to carry them through what awaited them. All their
days were not to be passed in the peaceful fold of Meaux. Dark temptations and
fiery trials, of which they could not at this hour so much as form a conception,
were to test them at no distant day. Could they stand when Briconnet should
fall? Some of these men were at a future day to be led to the stake. Had their
faith rested on no stronger foundation than a fine logical argument had their
conversion been only a new sentiment and not a new nature had that into which
they were now brought been a new system merely and not a new world they could
not have braved the dungeon or looked death in the face. But these disciples had
planted their feet not on Briconnet, not on Peter, but on "the Rock," and that
"Rock" was Christ: and so not all the coming storms of persecution could cast
them down. Not that in themselves they could not be shaken they were frail and
fallible, but their "Rock" was immovable; and standing on it they were
unconquerable unconquerable alike amid the dark smoke and bitter flames of the
Place de Greve as amid the green pastures of Meaux.
But as yet these
tempests are forbidden to burst, and meanwhile let us look somewhat more closely
at this little flock, to which there attaches this great interest, that it was
the first Protestant congregation on the soil of France. They were the
workmanship, not of Briconnet, but of the Spirit, who by the instrumentality of
the Bible had called them to the "knowledge of Christ," and the "fellowship of
the saints." Let us mark them at the close of the day. Their toil ended, they
diligently repaired from the workshop, the vineyard, the field, and assembled in
the house of one of their number. They opened and read the Holy Scriptures; they
conversed about the things of the Kingdom; they joined together in prayer, and
their hearts burned within them. Their numbers were few, their sanctuary was
humble, no mitred and vested priest conducted their services, no choir or
organ-peal intoned their prayers; but ONE was in the midst of them greater than
the doctor of the Sorbonne, greater than any King of France, even he who has
said, "Lo, I am with you alway" and where he is, there is the
Church.
The members of this congregation belonged exclusively to the
working class. Their daily bread was earned in the wool-factory or in the
vineyard. Nevertheless a higher civilization had begun to sweeten their
dispositions, refine their manners, and ennoble their speech, than any that the
castles of their nobility could show. Meek in spirit, loving in heart, and holy
in life, they presented a sample of what Protestantism would have made the whole
nation of France, had it been allowed full freedom among a people who lacked but
this to crown their many great qualities.
By-and-by the churches were
opened to them. Their conferences were no longer held in private dwellings: the
Christians of Meaux now met in public, and usually a qualified person expounded
to them, on these occasions, the Scriptures. Bishop Briconnet took his turn in
the pulpit, so eager was he to hold aloft "that sweet, mild, true, and only
light," to use his own words, "which dazzles and enlightens every creature
capable of receiving it; and which, while it enlightens him, raises him to the
dignity of a son of God."[7] These were happy days. The
winds of heaven were holden that they might not hurt this young vine; and time
was given it strike its roots into the soil before being overtaken by the
tempest.
A general reformation of manners followed the entrance of
Protestantism into Meaux. No better evidence could there be of this than the
complaints preferred by two classes of the community especially the
tavern-keepers and the monks. The topers in the wine-shops were becoming fewer,
and the Begging Friars often returned from their predatory excursions with empty
sacks. Images, too, if they could have spoken, would have swelled the murmurs at
the ill-favored times, for few now bestowed upon them either coin or candles.
But images can only wink, and so they buried their griefs in the inarticulate
silence of their own bosoms. Blasphemies and quarrellings ceased to be heard;
there were now quiet on the streets and love in the dwellings of the little
town.
But now the first mutterings of the coming storm began to be heard
in Paris; even this brought at first only increased prosperity to the Reformed
Church at Meaux. It sent to the little flock new and greater teachers. The
Sorbonne that ancient and proud champion of orthodoxy knew that these were
not times to slumber: it saw Protestantism rising in the capital; it beheld the
flames catching the edifice of the faith. It took alarm: it called upon the king
to put down the new opinions by force. Francis did not respond quite so
zealously as the Sorbonne would have liked. He was not prepared to patronize
Protestantism, far from it; but, at the same time, he had no love for monks, and
was disposed to allow a considerable margin to "men of genius," and so he
forbade the Sorbonne to set up the scaffold.
Still little reliance could
be placed upon the wavering and pleasure-loving king, and Lefevre, on whom his
colleagues of the Sorbonne had contrived to fasten a quarrel, might any hour be
apprehended and thrown into prison. "Come to Meaux," said Briconnet to Lefevre
and Farel, "and take part with me in the work which is every day developing into
goodlier proportions"[8] They accepted the
invitation; quitting the capital they went to live at Meaux, and thus all the
Reformed forces were collected into one center.
The glory which had
departed from Paris now rested upon this little provincial town. Meaux became
straightway a light in the darkness of France, and many eyes were turned towards
it. Far and near was spread the rumor of the "strange things" that were taking
place there, and many came to verify with their own eyes what they had heard.
Some had occasion to visit its wool markets; and others, laborers from Picardy
and more distant places, resorted to it in harvest time to assist in reaping its
fields; these visitors were naturally drawn to the sermons of the Protestant
preachers moreover, French New Testaments were put into their hands, and when
they returned to their homes many of them carried with them the seeds of the
Gospel, and founded churches in their own districts,[9] some of which, such as Landouzy in the department of
Aisne, still exist.[10] Thus Meaux became a mother
of Churches: and the expression became proverbial in the first half of the
sixteenth century, with reference to any one noted for his Protestant
sentiments, that "he had drunk at the well of Meaux."[11]
We love to linger
over this picture, its beauty is so deep and pure that we are unwilling to tear
ourselves from it. Already we begin to have a presentiment, alas! to be too
sadly verified hereafter, that few such scenes will present themselves in the
eventful but tempestuous period on which we are entering. Amid the storms of the
rough day coming it may solace us to look back to this delicious daybreak. But
already it begins to overcast. Lefevre and Farel have been sent away from the
capital. The choice that Paris has made, or is about to make, strikes upon our
ear as the knell of coming evil. The capital of France has already missed a high
honor, even that of harboring within her walls the first congregation of French
Protestants. This distinction was reserved for Meaux, though little among the
many magnificent cities of France. Paris said to the Gospel, "Depart. This is
the seat of the Sorbonne; this is the king's court; here there is no room for
you; go, hide thee amid the artizans, the fullers and wool-combers of Meaux."
Paris knew not what it did when it drove the Gospel from its gates. By the same
act it opened them to a long and dismal train of woes faction, civil war,
atheism, the guillotine, siege, famine, death.
CHAPTER 4
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COMMENCEMENT OF
PERSECUTION IN FRANCE
The World's Center The Kingdoms at War In
the Church, Peace The Flock at Meaux Marot's Psalms of David universally
Sung in France The Odes of Horace Calvin and Church Psalmody Two Champions
of the Darkness, Beda and Duprat Louisa of Savoy Her Character The Trio
that Governed France They Unsheathe the Sword of Persecution Briconnet's
Fall.
THE Church is the center round which all the affairs
of the world revolve. It is here that the key of all politics is to be found.
The continuance and advance of this society is a first principle with him who
sits on the right hand of Power, and who is at once King of the Church and King
of the Universe; and, therefore, from his lofty seat he directs the march of
armies, the issue of battles, the deliberation of cabinets, the decision of
kings, and the fate of nations, so as best to further this one paramount end of
his government. Here, then, is the world's center; not in a throne that may be
standing to-day, and in the dust to-morrow, but in a society a kingdom
destined to outlast all the kingdoms of earth, to endure and flourish throughout
all the ages of time.
It cannot but strike one as remarkable that at the
very moment when a feeble evangelism was receiving its birth, needing, one
should think, a fostering hand to shield its infancy, so many powerful and
hostile kingdoms should start up to endanger it. Why place the cradle of
Protestantism amid tempests? Here is the powerful Spain; and here, too, is the
nearly as powerful France. Is not this to throw Protestantism between the upper
and the nether mill-stones? Yet he "who weigheth the mountains in scales, and
the hills in a balance," permitted these confederacies to spring up at this
hour, and to wax thus mighty. And now we begin to see a little way into the
counsels of the Most High touching these two kingdoms. Charles of Spain carries
off the brilliant prize of the imperial diadem from Francis of France. The
latter is stung to the quick; from that hour they are enemies; war breaks out
between them; their ambition drags the other kingdoms of Europe into the arena
of conflict; and the intrigues and battles that ensue leave to hostile princes
but little time to persecute the truth. They find other uses for their
treasures, and other enterprises for their armies. Thus the very tempests by
which the world was devastated were as ramparts around that new society that was
rising up on the ruins of the old. While outside the Church the roar of battle
never ceased, the song of peace was heard continually ascending within her. "God
is our refuge and strength, a very present help in time of trouble. Therefore,
will not we fear, although the earth be removed, and though the mountains be
carried into the midst of the sea. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be
removed."
From this hasty glance at the politics of the age, which had
converted the world into a sea with the four winds warring upon it, we come back
to the little flock at Meaux. That flock was dwelling peacefully amid the green
pastures and by the living waters of truth. Every day saw new converts added to
their number, and every day beheld their love and zeal burning with a purer
flame. The good Bishop Briconnet was going in and out before them, feeding with
knowledge and understanding the flock over which, not Rome, but the Holy Ghost
had made him overseer. Those fragrant and lovely fruits which ever spring up
where the Gospel comes, and which are of a nature altogether different from, and
of a quality infinitely superior to, those which any other system produces, were
appearing abundantly here. Meaux had become a garden in the midst of the desert
of France, and strangers from a distance came to see this new thing, and to
wonder at the sight. Not unfrequently did they carry away a shoot from the
mother plant to set it in their own province, and so the vine of Meaux was
sending out her branches, and giving promise, in the opinion of some, at no
distant day of filling the land with her shadow.
At an early stage of the
Reformation in France, the New Testament, as we have related in the foregoing
chapter, was translated into the vernacular of that country. This was followed
by a version of the Psalms of David in 1525, the very time when the field of
Pavia, which cost France so many lives, was being stricken. Later, Clement
Marot, the lyrical poet, undertook at the request of Calvin, it is believed
the task of versifying the Psalms, and accordingly thirty of them were rendered
into metre and published in Paris in 1541, dedicated to Francis I [1] Three years afterwards
(1543), he added twenty others, and dedicated the collection, "to the ladies of
France." In the epistle dedicatory the following verses occur:
The prophecy of the poet was fulfilled. The combined
majesty and sweetness of the old Hebrew Psalter took: captive the taste and
genius of the French people. In a little while all France, we may say, fell to
singing the Psalms. They displaced all other songs, being sung in the first
instance to the common ballad music. "This holy ordinance," says Quick, "charmed
the ears, heart, and affections of court and city, town and country. They were
sung in the Louvre, as well as in the Pres des Clercs, by the ladies, princes,
yea, by Henry II. himself. This one ordinance alone contributed mightily to the
downfall of Popery and the propagation of the Gospel. It took so much with the
genius of the nation that all ranks and degrees of men practiced it, in the
temples and in their families. No gentleman professing the Reformed religion
would sit down at his table without praising God by singing. It was an especial
part of their morning and evening worship in their several houses to sing God's
praises."
This chorus of holy song was distasteful to the adherents of
the ancient worship. Wherever they turned, the odes of the Hebrew monarch,
pealed forth in the tongue of France, saluted their ears, in the streets and the
highways, in the vineyards and the workshops, at the family hearth and in the
churches. "The reception these Psalms met with," says Bayle, "was such as the
world had never seen."[3] To strange uses were they
put on occasion. The king, fond of hunting, adopted as his favorite Psalm, "As
pants the hart for water-brooks," etc. The priests, who seemed to hear in this
outburst the knell of their approaching downfall, had recourse to the expedient
of translating the odes of Horace and setting them to music, in the hope that
the pagan poet would supplant the Hebrew one [4] The rage for the Psalter
nevertheless continued unabated, and a storm of Romish wrath breaking out
against Marot, he fled to Geneva, where, as we have said above, he added twenty
other Psalms to the thirty previously published at Paris, making fifty in all.
This enlarged Psalter was first published at Geneva, with a commendatory preface
by Calvin, in 1543. Editions were published in Holland, Belgium, France, and
Switzerland, and so great was the demand that the printing, presses could not
meet it. Rome forbade the book, but the people were only the more eager on that
account to possess it.
Calvin, alive to the mighty power of music to
advance the Reformation, felt nevertheless the incongruity and indelicacy of
singing such words to profane airs, and used every means in his power to rectify
the abuse. He applied to the most eminent musicians in Europe to furnish music
worthy of the sentiments. William Franc, of Strasburg, responding to this call,
furnished melodies for Marot's Psalter; and the Protestants of France and
Holland, dropping the ballad airs, began now to sing the Psalms to the noble
music just composed. Now, for the first time, was heard the "Old Hundredth," and
some of the finest tunes still in use in our Psalmody.
After the death of
Mater (1544) Calvin applied to his distinguished coadjutor, Theodore Beza, to
complete the versification of the Psalms. Beza, copying the style and spirit of
Marot, did so,[5] and thus Geneva had the
honor of giving to Christendom the first whole book of Psalms ever rendered into
the metre of any living language.
This narration touching the Psalms in
French has carried us a little in advance of the point of time we had reached in
the history. We retrace our steps.
A storm was brewing at Paris. There
were two men in the capital, sworn champions of the darkness, holding high
positions. The one was Noel Beda, the head of the Sorbonne. His chair second
only, in his own opinion, to that of the Pope himself bound him to guard most
sacredly from the least heretical taint that orthodoxy which it was the glory of
his university to have preserved hitherto wholly uncontaminated. Beda was a man
of very moderate attainments, but he was moderate in nothing else. He was
bustling, narrow-minded, a worshipper of scholastic forms, a keen disputant, and
a great intriguer. "In a single Beda," Erasmus used to say, "there are three
thousand monks." Never did owl hate the day more than Beda did the light. He had
seen with horror some rays struggle into the shady halls of the Sorbonne, and he
made haste to extinguish them by driving from his chair the man who was the
ornament of the university the doctor of Etaples.
The other truculent
defender of the old orthodoxy was Antoine Duprat. Not that he cared a straw for
othodoxy in itself, for the man had neither religion nor morals, but it fell in
with the line of his own political advancement to affect a concern for the
faith. A contemporary Roman Catholic historian, Beaucaire de Peguilhem, calls
him "the most vicious of bipeds." He accompanied his master, Francis I., to
Bologna, after the battle of Marignano, and aided at the interview at which the
infamous arrangement was effected, in pursuance of which the power of the French
bishops and the rights of the French Church were divided between Leo X. and
Francis I. This is known in history as the Concordat of Bologna; it abolished
the Pragmatic Sanction the charter of the liberties of the Gallican Church
and gave to the king the power of presenting to the vacant sees, and to the Pope
the right to the first-fruits. A red hat was the reward of Duprat's treachery.
His exalted office he was Chancellor of France added to his personal
qualities made him a formidable opponent. He was able, haughty, overbearing, and
never scrupled to employ violence to compass his ends. He was, too, a man of
insatiable greed. He plundered on a large scale in the king's behoof, by putting
up to sale the offices in the gift of the crown; but he plundered on a still
larger scale in his own, and so was enormously rich. By way of doing a
compensatory act he built a few additional wards to the Maison de Dieu, on which
the king, whose friendship he shared without sharing his esteem, is said to have
remarked "that they had need to be large if they were to contain all the poor
the chancellor himself had made."[6] Such were the two men who
now rose up against the Gospel.[7]
They were set on by
the monks of Meaux. Finding that their dues were diminishing at an alarming rate
the Franciscans crowded to Paris, and there raised the cry of heresy. Bishop
Briconnet, they exclaimed, had become a Protestant, and not content with being
himself a heretic, he had gathered round him a company of even greater heretics
than himself, and had, in conjunction with these associates, poisoned his
diocese, and was laboring to infect the whole of France; and unless steps were
immediately taken this pestilence would spread over all the kingdom, and France
would be lost. Duprat and Beda were not the men to listen with indifferent ears
to these complaints.
The situation of the kingdom at that hour threw
great power into the hands of these men. The battle of Pavia the Flodden of
France had just been fought. The flower of the French nobility had fallen on
that field, and among the slain was the Chevalier Bayard, styled the Mirror of
Chivalry. The king was now the prisoner of Charles V. at Madrid. Pending the
captivity of Francis the government was in the hands of his mother, Louisa of
Savoy. She was a woman of determined spirit, dissolute life, and heart inflamed
with her house's hereditary enmity to the Gospel, as shown in its persecution of
the Waldensian confessors. She had the bad distinction of opening in France that
era of licentious gallantry which has so long polluted both the court and the
kingdom, and which has proved one of the most powerful obstacles to the spread
of the pure Gospel. It must be added, however, that the hostility of Louisa was
somewhat modified and restrained by the singular sweetness and piety of her
daughter, Margaret of Valois. Such were the trio the dissolute Louisa, regent
of the kingdom; the avaricious Duprat, the chancellor; and the bigoted Beda,
head of the Sorbonne into whose hands the defeat at Pavia had thrown, at this
crisis, the government of France. There were points on which their opinions and
interests were in conflict, but all three had one quality in common they
heartily detested the new opinions.
The first step was taken by Louisa.
In 1523 she proposed the following question to the Sorbonne: "By what means can
the damnable doctrines of Luther be chased and extirpated from this most
Christian kingdom?" The answer was brief, but emphatic: "By the stake;" and it
was added that if the remedy were not soon put in force, there would result
great damage to the honor of the king and of Madame Louisa of Savoy. Two years
later the Pope earnestly recommended rigor in suppressing "this great and
marvelous disorder, which proceeds from the rage of Satan;"[8] otherwise, "this mania
will not only destroy religion, but all principalities, nobilities, laws,
orders, and ranks besides."[9] It was to uphold the
throne, preserve the nobles, and maintain the laws that the sword of persecution
was first unsheathed in France!
The Parliament was convoked to strike a
blow while yet there was time. The Bishop of Meaux was summoned before it.
Briconnet was at first firm, and refused to make any concession, but at length
the alternative was plainly put before him abandon Protestantism or go to
prison. We can imagine the conflict in his soul. He had read the woe denounced
against him who puts his hand to the plough and afterwards withdraws it. He
could not but think of the flock he had fed so lovingly, and which had looked up
to him with an affection so tender and so confiding. But before him was a prison
and mayhap a stake. It was a moment of supreme suspense. But now the die is
cast. Briconnet declines the stake the stake which in return for the life of
the body would have given him life eternal. On the 12th of April, 1523, [10] he was condemned to pay a
fine, and was sent back to his diocese to publish three edicts, the first
restoring public prayers to the Virgin and the saints, the second forbidding any
one to buy or read the books of Luther, while the third enjoined silence on the
Protestant preachers.
What a stunning blow to the disciples at Meaux!
They were dreaming of a brilliant day when this dark storm suddenly came and
scattered them. The aged Lefevre found his way, in the first instance, to
Strasburg, and ultimately to Nerac. Farel turned his steps toward Switzerland,
where a great work awaited him. Of the two Roussels, Gerard afterwards
powerfully contributed to the progress of the Reformation in the kingdom of
Navarre.[11] Martial Mazurier went the
same road with Briconnet, and was rewarded with a canonry at Paris.[12] The rest of the flock, too
poor to flee, had to abide the brunt of the tempest.
Briconnet had saved
his mitre, but at what a cost! We shall not judge him. Those who joined the
ranks of Protestantsism at a later period did so as men "appointed unto death,"
and girded themselves for the conflict which they knew awaited them. But at this
early stage the Bishop of Meaux had not those examples of self-devotion before
him which the martyr-roll of coming years was to furnish. He might reason
himself into the belief that he could still love his Savior in his heart, though
he did not confess him with the mouth: that while bowing before Mary and the
saints he could inwardly look up to Christ, and lean for salvation on the
Crucified One: that while ministering at the altars of Rome he could in secret
feed on other bread than that which she gives to her children. It was a hard
part which Briconnet put upon himself to act; and, without saying how far it is
possible, we may ask how, if all the disciples of Protestantism had acted this
part, could we ever have had a Reformation?
CHAPTER 5
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THE FIRST MARTYRS OF FRANCE
The Flock
at Meaux Denis, a "Meaux Heretic" Visited in Prison by his former Pastor,
Briconnet The Interview Men Burned and yet they Live Pavane Imprisoned
for the Gospel Recants His Horror of Mind Anew Confesses Christ Is
Burned His the First Stake in Paris Martyrdom of the Hermit of Livry
Leclerc, the Wool-comber Acts as Pastor Banished from Meaux Retires to
Metz Demolishes the Images at the Chapel of Mary Procession Astonishment
of Processionists Leclerc Seized Confesses His Cruel Death Bishop
Briconnet.
Briconnet had recanted: but if the shepherd had
fallen the little ones of the flock stood their ground. They continued to meet
together for prayer and the reading of the Scriptures, the garret of a
wool-comber, a solitary hut, or a copse serving as their place of rendezvous.[1] This congregation was to
have the honor of furnishing martyrs whose blazing stakes were to shine like
beacons in the darkness of France, and afford glorious proof to their countrymen
that a power had entered the world which, braving the terror of scaffolds and
surmounting the force of armies, would finally triumph over all
opposition.
Let us take a few instances. A humble man named Denis, one of
the "Meaux heretics," was apprehended; and in course of time he was visited in
his prison by his former pastor, Briconnet. His enemies at times put tasks of
this sort upon the fallen prelate, the more thoroughly to humiliate him. When
the bishop made his unexpected appearance in the cell of the poor prisoner,
Denis opened his eyes with surprise, Briconnet hung his with embarrassment. The
bishop began with stammering tongue, we may well believe, to exhort the
imprisoned disciple to purchase his liberty by a recantation. Denis listened for
a little space, then rising up and steadfastly fixing his eyes upon the man who
had once preached to him that very Gospel which he now exhorted him to abjure,
said solemnly, "'Whosoever shall deny me before men, him shall I also deny
before my Father who is in heaven!'" Briconnet reeled backwards and staggered
out of the dungeon. The interview over, each took his own way: the bishop
returned to his palace, and Denis passed from his cell to the stake.[2]
That long and
terrible roll on which it was so hard, yet so glorious, to write one's name, was
now about to be unfolded. This was no roll of the dead: it was a roll of the
living; for while their contemporaries disappeared in the darkness of the tomb
and were seen and heard of no more on earth, those men whose names were written
there came out into the light, and shone in glory un-dimmed as the ages rolled
past, telling that not only did they live, but their cause also, and that it
should yet triumph in the land which they watered with their blood. This was a
wondrous and great sight, men burned to ashes and yet living.
We select
another from this band of pioneers. Pavane, a native of Boulogne and disciple of
Lefevre, was a youth of sweetest disposition, but somewhat lacking in
constitutional courage. He held a living in the Church, though he was not as yet
in priest's orders. Enlightened by the truth, he began to say to his neighbors
that the Virgin could no more save them than he could, and that there was but
one Savior, even Jesus Christ. This was enough: he was apprehended and brought
to trial. Had he blasphemed Christ only, he would have been forgiven: he had
blasphemed Mary, and could have no forgiveness. He must make a public
recantation or, hard alternative, go to the stake. Terrified at death in this
dreadful form, Pavane consented to purge himself from the crime of having spoken
blasphemous words against the Virgin. On Christmas Eve (1524) he was required to
walk through the streets bare-headed and barefooted, a rope round his neck and a
lighted taper in his hand, till he came to the Church of Notre Dame. Standing
before the portals of that edifice, he publicly begged pardon of "Our Lady" for
having spoken disparagingly of her. This act of penitence duly performed, he was
sent back to his prison.
Returned to his dungeon, and left to think on
what he had done, he found that there were things which it was more terrible to
face than death. He was now alone with the Savior whom he had denied. A horror
of darkness fell upon his soul. No sweet promise of the Bible could he recall:
nothing could he find to lighten the sadness and heaviness that weighed upon
him. Rather than drink this bitter cup he would a hundred times go to the stake.
He who turned and looked on Peter spoke to Pavane, and reproved him for his sin.
His tears flowed as freely as Peter's did. His resolution was taken. His
sighings were now at an end: he anew made confession of his faith in Christ. The
trial of the "relapsed heretic" was short; he was hurried to the stake. "At the
foot of the pile he spoke of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper with such force
that a doctor said, 'I wish Pavane had not spoken, even if it had cost the
Church a million of gold.'"[3] The fagots were quickly
lighted, and Pavane stood with unflinching courage amid the flames till he was
burned to ashes.
This was the first stake planted in the capital of
France, or indeed within the ancient limits of the kingdom. We ask in what
quarter of Paris was it set up? In the Place de Greve. Ominous spot! In the
Place de Greve were the first French martyrs of the Reformation burned. Nearly
three hundred years pass away; the blazing stake is no longer seen in Paris, for
there are now no longer martyrs to be consumed. But there comes another visitant
to France, the Revolution namely, bringing with it a dreadful instrument of
death; and where does the Revolution set up its guillotine? In the same Place de
Greve, at Paris. It was surely not of chance that on the Place de Greve were the
first martyrs of the Reformation burned, and that on the Place de Greve were the
first victims of the Revolution guillotined.
The martyrdom of Pavane was
followed, after a short while, by that of the Hermit of Livry, as he was named.
Livry was a small burgh on the road to Meaux. This confessor was burned alive
before the porch of Notre Dame. Nothing was wanting which his persecutors could
think of that might make the spectacle of his death terrible to the on-lookers.
The great bell of the temple of Notre Dame was rung with immense violence, in
order to draw out the people from all parts of Paris. As the martyr passed along
the street, the doctors told the spectators that this was one of the damned who
was on his way to the fire of hell. These things moved not the martyr; he walked
with firm step and look undaunted to the spot where he was to offer up his
life.[4]
One other martyrdom
of these early times must we relate. Among the disciples at Meaux was a humble
wool-comber of the name of Leclerc. Taught of the Spirit, he was "mighty in the
Scriptures," and being a man of courage as well as knowledge, he came forward
when Briconnet apostatised, and took the oversight of the flock which the bishop
had deserted. Leclerc had received neither tonsure nor imposition of hands, but
the Protestant Church of France had begun thus early to act upon the doctrine of
a universal spiritual priesthood. The old state of things had been restored at
Meaux. The monks had re-captured the pulpits, and, with jubilant humor, were
firing off jests and reciting fables, to the delight of such audiences as they
were able to gather round them.[5] This stirred the spirit of
Leclerc; so one day he affixed a placard to the door of the cathedral, styling
the Pope the Antichrist, and predicting the near downfall of his kingdom.
Priests, monks, and citizens gathered before the placard, and read it with
amazement. Their amazement quickly gave place to rage. Was it to be borne that a
despicable wool-carder should attack the Pontiff? Leclerc was seized, tried,
whipped through the streets on three successive days, and finally branded on the
forehead with a hot iron, and banished from Meaux. While enduring this cruel and
shameful treatment, his mother stood by applauding his constancy.[6]
The wool-comber
retired to Metz, in Lorraine. Already the light had visited that city, but the
arrival of Leclerc gave a new impulse to its evangelisation. He went from house
to house preaching the Gospel; persons of condition, both lay and clerical,
embraced the Reformed faith; and thus were laid in Metz, by the humble hands of
a wool-carder, the foundations of a Church which afterwards became flourishing.
Leclerc, arriving in Metz with the brand of heretic on his brow, came
nevertheless with courage unabashed and zeal unabated; but he allowed these
qualities, unhappily, to carry him beyond the limits of prudence.
A
little way outside the gates of the city stood a chapel to Mary and the saints
of the province. The yearly festival had come round, and to-morrow the
population of Metz would be seen on their knees before these gods of stone.
Leclerc pondered upon the command, "Thou shalt break down their images," and
forgot the very different circumstances of himself and of those to whom it was
originally given. At eve, before the gates were shut, he stole out of the city
and passed along the highway till he reached the shrine. He sat down before the
images in mental conflict. "Impelled," says Beza, "by a Divine afflatus,"[7] he arose, dragged the
statues from their pedestals, and, having broken them in pieces, strewed their
fragments in front of the chapel. At daybreak he re-entered Metz.
All
unaware of what had taken place at the chapel, the procession marshalled at the
usual hour, and moved forward with crucifixes and banners, with flaring tapers
and smoking incense. The bells tolled, the drums were beat, and with the music
there mingled the chant of the priest.
And now the long array draws nigh
the chapel of Our Lady. Suddenly drum and chant are hushed; the banners are cast
on the ground, the tapers are extinguished, and a sudden thrill of horror runs
through the multitude. What has happened? Alas! the rueful sight. Strewn over
the area before the little temple lie the heads, arms, legs of the deities the
processionists had come to worship, all cruelly and sacrilegiously mutilated and
broken. A cry of mingled grief and rage burst forth from the
assembly.
The procession returned to Metz with more haste and in less
orderly fashion than it had come. The suspicions of all fell on Leclerc. He was
seized, confessed the deed, speedy sentence of condemnation followed, and he was
hurried to the spot where he was to be burned. The exasperation of his
persecutors had prepared for him dreadful tortures. As he had done to the images
of the saints so would they do to him. Unmoved he beheld these terrible
preparations. Unmoved he bore the excruciating agonies inflicted upon him. He
permitted no sign of weakness to tarnish the glory of his sacrifice. While his
foes were lopping off his limbs with knives, and tearing his flesh with red-hot
pincers, the martyr stood with calm and intrepid air at the stake, reciting in a
loud voice the words of the Psalm
If Leclerc's zeal had been indiscreet, his courage
was truly admirable. Well might his death be called "an act of faith." He had by
that faith quenched the violence of the fire nay, more, he had quenched the
rage of his persecutors, which was fiercer than the flames that consumed him.
"The beholders," says the author of the Acts of the Martyrs, "were astonished,
nor were they untouched by compassion," and not a few retired from the spectacle
to confess that Gospel for which they had seen the martyr, with so serene and
noble a fortitude, bear witness at the burning pile.[9]
We must pause a
moment to contemplate, in contrasted lights, two men the bishop and the
wool-comber. "How hardly shall they who have riches enter the kingdom of
heaven!" was the saying of our Lord at the beginning of the Gospel dispensation.
The saying has seldom been more mournfully verified than in the case of the
Bishop of Meaux. "His declension," says D'Aubigne, "is one of the most memorable
in the history of the Church."
Had Briconnet been as the wool-carder, he
might have been able to enter into the evangelical kingdom; but, alas! he
presented himself at the gate, carrying a great burden of earthly dignities, and
while Leclerc pressed in, the bishop was stopped on the threshold. What
Briconnet's reflections may have been, as he saw one after another of his former
flock go to the stake, and from the stake to the sky, we shall not venture to
guess. May there not have been moments when he felt as if the mitre, which he
had saved at so great a cost, was burning his brow, and that even yet he must
needs arise and leave his palace, with all its honors, and by the way of the
dungeon and the stake rejoin the members of his former flock who had preceded
him, by this same road, and inherit with them honors and delights higher far
than any the Pope or the King of France had to bestow crowns of life and
garlands that never fade? But whatever he felt, and what ever at times may have
been his secret resolutions, we know that his thoughts and purposes never
ripened into acts. He never surrendered his see, or cast in his lot with the
despised and persecuted professors of those Reformed doctrines, the Divine
sweetness of which he appeared to have once so truly relished, and which
aforetime he labored to diffuse with a zeal apparently so ardent and so sincere.
In communion with Rome he lived to his dying day. His real character remains a
mystery. Is it forbidden to hope that in his last hours the gracious Master, who
turned and looked on Peter and Pavane, had compassion on the fallen prelate, and
that, the blush of godly shame on his face, and the tears of unfeigned and
bitter sorrow streaming from his eyes, he passed into the presence of his
Savior, and was gathered to the blessed company above now the humblest of them
all with whom on earth he had so often taken sweet counsel as they walked
together to the house of God?
CHAPTER 6
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CALVIN: HIS BIRTH AND
EDUCATION
Greater Champions about to Appear Calvin His Birth and
Lineage His Appearance and Disposition His Education Appointed to a
Chaplaincy The Black Death Sent to La Marche at Paris Mathurin Cordier
Friendship between the Young Pupil and his Teacher Calvin Charmed by the Great
Latin Writers Luther's and Calvin's Services to their respective Tongues
Leaves the School of La Marche.
THE young vine just planted in France was bending
before the tempest, and seemed on the point of being uprooted. The enemies of
the Gospel, who, pending the absence of the king, still a prisoner at Madrid,
had assumed the direction of affairs, did as it pleased them. Beda and Duprat,
whom fear had made cruel, were planing stake after stake, and soon there would
remain not one confessor to tell that the Gospel had ever entered the kingdom of
France. The Reformation, which as yet had hardly commenced its career, was
already as good as burned out. But those who so reasoned overlooked the power of
Him who can raise up living witnesses from the ashes of dead ones. The men whom
Beda had burned filled a comparatively narrow sphere, and were possessed of but
humble powers; mightier champions were about to step upon the stage, whom God
would so fortify by his Spirit, and so protect by his providence, that all the
power of France should not prevail against them, and from the midst of the
scaffolds and blazing stakes with which its enemies had encompassed it,
Protestantism would come forth to fill Christendom with disciples and the world
with light.
The great leader of the Reformation in Germany stepped at
once upon the scene. No note sounded his advent and no herald ushered him upon
the stage. From the seclusion of his monastery at Erfurt came Luther startling
the world by the suddenness of his appearing, and the authority with which he
spoke. But the coming of the great Reformer of France was gradual. If Luther
rose on men like a star that blazes suddenly forth in the dark sky, Calvin's
coming was like that of day, sweetly and softly opening on the mountain-tops,
streaking the horizon with its silver, and steadily waxing in brightness till at
last the whole heavens are filled with the splendor of its light.
Calvin,
whose birth and education we are now briefly to trace, was born in humble
condition, like most of those who have accomplished great things for God in the
world. He first saw the light on the 10th of July, 1509, at Noyon in Picardy.[1] His family was of Norman
extraction.[2] His grandfather was still
living in the small town of Pont l'Eveque, and was a cooper by trade. His
father, Gerard, was apostolic notary and secretary to the bishop, through whom
he hoped one day to find for his son John preferment in the Church, to which,
influenced doubtless by the evident bent of his genius, he had destined him.
Yes, higher than his father's highest dream was the Noyon boy to rise in the
Church, but in a more catholic Church than the Roman.
Let us sketch the
young Calvin. We have before us a boy of about ten years. He is of delicate
mould, small stature, with pale features, and a bright burning eye, indicating a
soul deeply penetrative as well as richly emotional. There hangs about him an
air of timidity and shyness [3] , a not infrequent
accompaniment of a mind of great sensibility and power lodged in a fragile
bodily organisation. He is thoughtful beyond his years; devout, too, up to the
standard of the Roman Church, and beyond it; he is punctual as stroke of clock
in his religious observances.[4] Nor is it a mere
mechanical devotion which he practices. The soul that looks forth at those eyes
can go mechanically about nothing. As regards his morals he has been a Nazarite
from his youth up: no stain of outward vice has touched him. This made the young
Calvin a mystery in a sort to his companions. By the beauty of his life, if not
by words, he became their unconscious reprover.[5] From his paternal home the
young Calvin passed to the stately mansion of the Mommors, the lords of the
neighborhood. The hour that saw Calvin cross this noble threshold was a not
uneventful one to him. He was not much at home in the stately halls that now
opened to receive him, and often, he tells us, he was fain to hide in some shady
corner from the observation of the brilliant company that filled them. But the
discipline he here underwent was a needful preparation for his life's work.
Educated with the young Mommors, but at his father's cost,[6] he received a more
thorough classical grounding, and acquired a polish of manners to which he must
ever have remained a stranger had he grown up under his father's humble roof. He
who was to be the counsellor of princes, a master in the schools, and a
legislator in the Church, must needs have an education neither superficial nor
narrow.
The young Calvin mastered with wonderful ease what it cost his
class-fellows much labor and time to acquire. His knowledge seemed to come by
intuition. While yet a child he loved to pray in the open air, thus giving proof
of expansiveness of soul. The age could not think of God but as dwelling in
"temples made with hands." Calvin sublimely realized him as One whose presence
fills the temple of the universe. In this he resembles the young Anselm, who,
lifting his eyes to the grand mountains that guard his native valley of Aosta,
believed that if he could climb to their summit he would be nearer him who has
placed his throne in the sky. At this time the chaplaincy of a small church in
the neighborhood, termed La Gesine, fell vacant, and Gerard Chauvin, finding the
expense of his son's education too much for him, solicited and obtained (1521)
from the bishop the appointment for his son John.[7] Calvin was then only
twelve years of age; but it was the manner of the times for even younger persons
to hold ecclesiastical offices of still higher grade to have a bishop's
crozier, or a cardinal's hat, before they were well able to understand what
these dignities meant.[8] The young Chaplain of
Gesine had his head solemnly shorn by the bishop on the eve of Corpus Christi,[9] and although not yet
admitted into priest's orders, he became by this symbolic act a member of the
clergy, and a servant of that Church of which he was to become in after-life,
without exception, the most powerful opponent, and the foe whom of all others
she dreaded the most.
Two years more did the young Chaplain of La Gesine
continue to reside in his native town of Noyon, holding his title, but
discharging no duties, for what functions could a child of twelve years perform?
Now came the Black Death to Noyon. The pestilence, a dreadful one, caused great
terror in the place, many of the inhabitants had already been carried off by it,
and the canons petitioned the chapter for leave to live elsewhere during its
ravages. Gerard Chauvin, trembling for the safety of his son, the hope of his
life, also petitioned the chapter to give the young chaplain "liberty to go
wherever he pleased, without loss of his allowance." The records of the chapter
show, according to the Vicar-General Desmay, and the Canon Levasseur, that this
permission was granted in August, 1523. [10] The young Mommors were
about to proceed to Paris to prosecute their studies, and Gerard Chauvin was but
too glad of the opportunity of sending his son along with his fellow-students
and comrades, to study in the capital. At the age of fourteen the future
Reformer quitted his father's house. "Flying from one pestilence," say his
Romish historians, "he caught another."
At Paris, Calvin entered the
school or college of La Marche. There was at that time in this college a very
remarkable man, Mathurin Cordier, who was renowned for his exquisite taste, his
pure Latinity, and his extensive erudition.[11] These accomplishments
might have opened to Cordier a path to brilliant advancement, but he was one of
those who prefer pursuing their own tastes, and retaining their independence, to
occupying a position where they should to some extent have to sacrifice both. He
devoted his whole life to the teaching of youth, and his fame has come down to
our own days in connection with one of his books still used in some schools
under the title of Cordier's Colloquies.
One day Mathurin Cordier saw a
scholar, about fourteen years of age, fresh from the country, enter his school.
His figure was slender, his features were sallow, but his eye lent such
intelligence and beauty to his face that the teacher could not help remarking
him. Cordier soon saw that he had a pupil of no ordinary genius before him, and
after the first few days the scholar of fourteen and the man of fifty became
inseparable. At the hour of school dismissals it was not the play-ground, but
his loving, genial instructor, who grew young again in the society of his pupil,
that Calvin sought. Such was the great teacher whom God had provided for the yet
greater scholar.
Mathurin Cordier was not the mere linguist. His mind was
fraught with the wisdom of the ancients. The highest wisdom, it is true, he
could not impart, for both master and pupil were still immersed in the darkness
of superstition, but the master of La Marche initiated his pupil into the spirit
of the Renaissance, which like a balmy spring was chasing away the winter of the
Middle Ages, and freshening the world with the rich verdure and attractive
blossoms of ancient civilization. The severe yet copious diction of Cicero, the
lofty thoughts and deep wisdom of this and of other great masters of Roman
literature, the young Calvin soon learned to appreciate and to admire. He saw
that if he aspired to wield influence over his fellowmen, he must first of all
perfect himself in the use of that mighty instrument by which access is gained
to the heart and its deep fountains of feeling, and its powerful springs of
action touched and set in motion language, namely, and especially written
language. From this hour the young student began to graft upon his native tongue
of France those graces of style, those felt cities of expression, that
flexibility, terseness, and fire, which should fit it for expressing with equal
ease the most delicate shade of sentiment or the most powerful burst of
feeling.
It is remarkable surely that the two great Reformers of Europe
should have been each the creator of the language of his native country. Calvin
was the father of the French tongue, as Luther was the father of the German.
There had been a language in these countries, doubtless, since the days of their
first savage inhabitants, a "French" and a "German" before there was a Calvin
and a Luther, just as there was a steam-engine before James Watt. But it is not
more true that Watt was the inventor of the steam-engine, by making it a really
useful instrument, than it is true that Luther and Calvin were the creators of
their respective tongues as now spoken and written.
Calvin found French,
as Luther had found German, a coarse, meager speech of narrow compass, of
small adaptability, and the vehicle of only low ideas. He breathed into it a new
life. A vastly wider compass, and an infinitely finer flexibility, did he give
it. And, moreover, he elevated and sanctified it by pouring into it the
treasures of the Gospel, thereby enriching it with a multitude of new terms, and
subliming it with the energies of a celestial fire. This transformation in the
tongue of France the Reformer achieved by the new thinking and feeling he taught
his countrymen; for a language is simply the outcome of the life of the people
by whom it is spoken.
"Under a lean and attenuated body," says one of his
enemies, "he displayed already a lively and vigorous spirit, prompt at repartee,
bold to attack; a great faster, either on account of his health, and to stop the
fumes of the headache which assaulted him continually, or to have his mind more
free for writing, studying, and improving his memory. He spoke but little, but
his words were always full of gravity, and never missed their aim: he was never
seen in company, but always in retirement."[12] How unlike the poetic halo
that surrounds the youth of Luther! "But," asks Bungener, "is there but one
style of poetry, and is there no poetry in the steady pursuit of the good and
true all through the age of pleasure, illusion, and disorder?"[13]
That Calvin was the
father of French Protestantism is, of course, admitted by all; but we less often
hear it acknowledged that he was the father of French literature. Yet this
service, surely a great one, ought not to be passed over in silence. It is hard
to say how much the illustrious statesmen and philosophers, the brilliant
historians and poets, who came after him, owed to him. They found in the
language, which he had so largely helped to make fit for their use, a suitable
vehicle for the talent and genius by which they made themselves and their
country famous. Their wit, their sublimity, and their wisdom would have been
smothered in the opaque, undramatic, poverty-stricken, and inharmonious
phraseology to which they would have been forced to consign them. Than language
there is no more powerful instrumentality for civilising men, and there is no
more powerful instrumentality for fashioning language than the
Gospel.
"Luther," says Bossuet, "triumphed orally, but the pen of Calvin
is the more correct. Both excelled in speaking the language of their country."
"To Calvin," says Etienne Pasquier, "our tongue is greatly indebted." "No one of
those who preceded him excelled him in writing well," says Raemond, "and few
since have approached him in beauty and felicity of language."
Calvin
fulfilled his course under Cordier, and in 1526 he passed to the College of
Montaigu, one of the two seminaries in Paris the Sorbonne being the other for
the training of priests. His affection for his old master of La Marche, and his
sense of benefit received from him, the future Reformer carried with him to the
new college nay, to the grave. In after-years he dedicated to him his
Commentary on the First Epistle to the Thessalonians. In doing so he takes
occasion to attribute to the lessons of Cordier all the progress he had made in
the higher branches of study, and if posterity, he says, derives any fruit from
his works, he would have it known that it is indebted for it, in part at least,
to Cordier.
CHAPTER 7
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CALVIN'S
CONVERSION
Calvin in the Montaigu His Devotions and Studies
Auguries of his Teachers Calvin still in Darkness Trebly Armed Olivetan
Discussions between Olivetan and Calvin Doubts Awakened Great Struggles of
Soul The Priests Advise him to Confess Olivetan sends him to the Bible
Opens the Book Sees the Cross Another Obstacle The "Church" Sees the
Spiritual Glory of the True Church The Glory of the False Church Vanishes
One of the Great Battles of the World Victory and its
Fruits.
ON crossing the threshold of La Montaigu, Calvin felt
himself in a new but not a better atmosphere. Unlike that of La Marche, which
was sunny with the free ideas of Republican Rome, the air of Montaigu was musty
with the dogmas of the school-men. But as yet Calvin could breathe that air. The
student with the pale face, and the grave and serious deportment, did not fail
to satisfy the most scholastic and churchy of the professors at whose feet he
now sat. His place was never empty at mass; no first did he ever profane by
tasting forbidden dish; and no saint did he ever affront by failing to do due
honor to his or her fete-day.
The young student; was not more punctual in
his devotions than assiduous in his studies. So ardent was he in the pursuit of
knowledge that often the hours of meal passed without his eating. Long after
others were locked in sleep he was still awake; he would keep poring over the
page of schoolman or Father till far into the morning. The inhabitants of that
quarter of Paris were wont to watch a tiny ray that might be seen streaming from
a certain window of a certain chamber Calvin's of the college after every
other light had been extinguished, and long after the midnight hour had passed.
His teachers formed the highest hopes of him.
A youth of so fine parts,
of an industry so unflagging, and who was withal so pious, was sure, they said,
to rise high in the Church. They prognosticated for him no mere country curacy
or rectorship, no mere city diocese, nothing less was in store for such a
scholar than the purple of a cardinal. He who was now the pride of their
college, was sure in time to become one of the lights of Christendom. Yes! one
of the lights of Christendom, the student with the pale face and the burning eye
was fated to become. Wide around was his light to beam; nor was it the nations
of Europe only, sitting meanwhile in the shadow of Rome, that Calvin was to
enlighten, but tribes and peoples afar off, inhabiting islands and continents
which no eye of explorer had yet discovered, and no keel of navigator had yet
touched, and of which the Christendom of that hour knew nothing.
But the
man who had been chosen as the instrument to lead the nations out of their
prison-house was meanwhile shut up in the same doleful captivity, and needed,
first of all, to be himself brought out of the darkness. The story of his
emancipation his struggles to break his chain is instructive as it is
touching. Calvin is made to feel what Scripture so emphatically terms "the power
of darkness," the strength of the fetter, and the helplessness of the poor
captive, that "remembering the gall and the wormwood" he may be touched with
pity for the miseries of those he is called to liberate, and may continue to
toil in patience and faith till their fetters are broken.
The Reformation
was in the air, and the young student could hardly breathe without inhaling
somewhat of the new life; and yet he seemed tolerably secure against catching
the infection. He was doubly, trebly armed. In the first place, he lived in the
orthodox atmosphere of the Montaigu; he was not likely to hear anything there to
corrupt his faith: secondly, his head had been shorn; thus he stood at the
plough of Rome, and would he now turn back? Then, again, his daily food were the
schoolmen, the soundly nutritious qualities of whose doctrines no one in the
Montaigu questioned. Over and above his daily and hourly lessons, the young
scholar fortified himself against the approaches of heresy by the rigid
observance of all outward rites. True, he had a mind singularly keen,
penetrating, and inquisitive; but this did not much help the matter; for when a
mind of that caste takes hold of a system like the Papacy, it is with a tenacity
that refuses again to let it go; the intellect finds both pleasure and pride in
the congenial work of framing arguments for the defense of error, till at last
it becomes the dupe of its own subtlety. This was the issue to which the young
Calvin was now tending. Every day his mind was becoming more one-sided; every
day he contemplated the Papacy more and more, not as it was in fact, but as
idealised and fashioned in his own mind; a few years more and his whole
thinking, reasoning, and feeling would have been intertwined and identified with
the system, every avenue would have been closed and barred against light, and
Calvin would have become the ablest champion that ever enrolled himself in the
ranks of the Roman Church. We should, at this day, have heard much more of
Calvin than of Bellarmine.
But God had provided an opening for the arrow
to enter in the triple armor in which the young student was encasing himself.
Calvin's cousin, Olivetan, a disciple of Lefevre's, now came to Paris. Living in
the same city, the cousins were frequently in each other's company, and the new
opinions, which were agitating Paris, and beginning to find confessors in the
Place de Greve, became a topic of frequent converse between them.[1] Nay, it is highly probable
that Calvin had witnessed some of the martyrdoms we have narrated in a previous
chapter. The great bell of Notre Dame had summoned all Paris and why not
Calvin? to see how the young Pavane and the hermit of Livry could stand with
looks undismayed at the stake. Olivetan and Calvin are not of one mind on the
point, and the debates wax warm. Olivetan boldly assails, and Calvin as boldly
defends, the dogmas of the Church. In this closet there is a great battlefield.
There are but two combatants before us, it is true; but on the conflict there
hang issues far more momentous than have depended on many great battles in which
numerous hosts have been engaged. In this humble apartment the Old and the New
Times have met. They struggle the one with the other, and as victory shall
incline so will the New Day rise or fade on Christendom. If Olivetan shall be
worsted and bound again to the chariot-wheel of an infallible Church, the world
will never see that beautiful version of the New Testament in the vernacular of
France, which is destined to accomplish so much in the way of diffusing the
light. But if Calvin shall lower his sword before his cousin, and yield himself
up to the arguments of Lefevre's disciple, what a blow to Rome! The scholar on
whose sharp dialectic weapon her representatives in Paris have begun to lean in
prospect of coming conflict, will pass over to the camp of the enemy, to lay his
brilliant genius and vast acquirements at the feet of Protestantism.
The
contest between the two cousins is renewed day by day. These are the battles
that change the world not those noisy affairs that are fought with cannons and
sabres, but those in which souls wrestle to establish or overthrow great
principles. "There are but two religions in the world," we hear Olivetan saying.
"The one class of religions are those which men have invented, in all of which
man saves himself by ceremonies and good works; the other is that one religion
which is revealed in the Bible, and which teaches man to look for salvation
solely from the free grace of God." "I will have none of your new doctrines,"
Calvin sharply rejoins; "think you that I have lived in error all my days?" But
Calvin is not so sure of the matter as he looks. The words of his cousin have
gone deeper into his heart than he is willing to admit even to himself; and when
Olivetan has taken farewell for the day, scarce has the door been closed behind
him when Calvin, bursting into tears, falls upon his knees, and gives vent in
prayer to the doubts and anxieties that agitate him.
The doubts by which
his soul was now shaken grew in strength with each renewed discussion. What
shall he do? Shall he forsake the Church? That seems to him like casting himself
into the gulf of perdition. And yet can the Church save him? There is a new
light breaking in upon him, in which her dogmas are melting away; the ground
beneath him is sinking. To what shall he cling? His agitation grew anon into a
great tempest. He felt within him "the sorrows of death," and his closet
resounded with sighs and groans, as did Luther's at Erfurt. This tempest was not
in the intellect, although doubtless the darkness of his understanding had to do
with it; its seat was the soul the conscience. It consisted in a sense of
guilt, a consciousness of vileness, and a shuddering apprehension of wrath. So
long as he had to do merely with the saints, creatures like himself, only a
little holier it might be, it was all well. But now he was standing in the
presence of that infinitely Holy One, with whom evil cannot dwell. He was
standing there, the blackness and vileness of his sin shown in the clear light
of the Divine purity; he was standing there, the transgressor of a law that
says, "The soul that sinneth shall die" that death how awful, yet that award
how righteous! he was standing there, with all in which he had formerly
trusted saints, rites, good works swept clean away, with nothing to protect
him from the arm of the Lawgiver. He had come to a Judge without an advocate. It
did not occur to him before that he needed an advocate, at least other than Rome
provides, because before he saw neither God's holiness nor his own guilt; but
now he saw both.
The struggle of Calvin was not the perplexity of the
skeptic unable to make up his mind among conflicting systems, it was the agony
of a soul fleeing from death, but seeing as yet no way of escape. It was not the
conflict of the intellect which has broken loose from truth, and is tossed on
the billows of doubt and unbelief a painful spectacle, and one of not infrequent
occurrence in our century; Calvin's struggle was not of this sort; it was the
strong wrestlings of a man who had firm hold of the great truths of Divine
revelation, although not as yet of all these truths, and who saw the terrible
realities which they brought him face to face with, and who comprehended the
dreadful state of his case, fixed for him by his own transgressions on the one
hand, and the irrevocable laws of the Divine character and government on the
other.[2] A struggle this of a much
more terrific kind than any mere intellectual one, and of this latter sort was
the earnestness of the sixteenth century. Not knowing as yet that "there is
forgiveness with God," because as yet he did not believe in the "atonement,"
through which there cometh a free forgiveness, Calvin at this hour stood looking
into the blackness of eternal darkness. Had he doubted, that doubt would have
mitigated his pain; but he did not and could not doubt; he saw too surely the
terrible reality, and knew not how it was to be avoided. Here was himself, a
transgressor; there was the law, awarding death, and there was the Judge ready
nay, bound to inflict it: so Calvin felt.
The severity of Calvin's
struggle was in proportion to the strength of his self-righteousness. That
principle had been growing within him from his youth upwards. The very
blamelessness of his life, and the punctuality with which he discharged all the
acts of devotion, had helped to nourish it into rigor and strength; and now
nothing but a tempest of surpassing force could have beaten down and laid in the
dust a pride which had been waxing higher and stronger with every rite he
performed, and every year that passed over him. And till his pride had been laid
in the dust it was impossible that he could throw himself at the feet of the
Great Physician.
But meanwhile, like King Joram, he went to physicians
"who could not heal him of his disease;" mere empirics they were, who, gave him
beads to count and relics to kiss, instead of the "death" that atones and the
"blood" that cleanses. "Confess!"[3] cried the doctors of the
Montaigu, who could read in his dimmed eye and wasting form the agony that was
raging in his soul, and too surely divined its cause. "Confess, confess!" cried
they, in alarm, for they saw that they were on the point of losing their most
promising pupil, on whom they had built so many hopes. Calvin went to his
confessor; he told him not all but as much as he durst, and the Father gave
him kindly a few anodynes from the Church's pharmacopoeia to relieve his pain.
The patient strove to persuade himself that his trouble was somewhat assuaged,
and then he would turn again to the schoolmen, if haply he might forget, in the
interest awakened by their subtleties and speculations, the great realities that
had engrossed him. But soon there would descend on him another and fiercer burst
of the tempest, and then groans louder even than before would echo through his
chamber, and tears more copious than he had yet shed would water his couch.[4]
One day, while the
young scholar of the Montaigu was passing through these struggles, he chanced to
visit the Place de Greve, where he found a great crowd of priests, soldiers, and
citizens gathered round a stake at which a disciple of the new doctrines was
calmly yielding up his life. He stood till the fire had done its work, and a
stake, an iron collar and chain, and a heap of ashes were the only memorials of
the tragedy he had witnessed. What he had seen awakened a train of thoughts
within him.
"These men," said he to himself, "have a peace which I do not
possess. They endure the fire with a rare courage. I, too, could brave the fire,
but were death to come to me, as it comes to them, with the sting of the
Church's anathema in it, could I face that as calmly as they do? Why is it that
they are so courageous in the midst of terrors that are as real as they are
dreadful, while I am oppressed and tremble before apprehensions and forebodings?
Yes, I will take my cousin Olivetan's advice, and search the Bible, if haply I
may find that 'new way' of which he speaks, and which these men who go so
bravely through the fire seem to have found." He opened the Book which no one,
says Rome, should open unless the Church be by to interpret. He began to read,
but the first effect was a sharper terror. His sins had never appeared so great,
nor himself so vile as now.[5]
He would have shut
the Book, but to what other quarter could he turn? On every side of him abysses
appeared to be opening. So he continued to read, and by-and-by he thought he
could discern dimly and afar off what seemed a cross, and One hanging upon it,
and his form was like the Son of God. He looked again, and the vision was
clearer for now he thought he could read the inscription over the head of the
Sufferer: "He was wounded for our iniquities, he was bruised for our
transgressions; the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes
we are healed." A ray now shone through his darkness; he thought he could see a
way of escape a shelter where the black tempest that lowered over him would no
longer beat upon his head; already the great burden that pressed upon him was
less heavy, it seemed as if about to fall off, and now it rolled down as he kept
gazing at the "Crucified." "O Father," he burst out it was no longer the
Judge, the Avenger "O Father, his sacrifice has appeased thy wrath; his blood
has washed away my impurities; his cross has borne my curse; his death has
atoned for me!" In the midst of the great billows his feet had touched the
bottom: he found the ground to be good: he was upon a rock.
Calvin,
however, was not yet safe on shore and past all danger. One formidable obstacle
he had yet to surmount, and one word expresses it the Church. Christ had said,
"Lo, I am with you alway." The Church, then, was the temple of Christ, and this
made unity unity in all ages and in all lands one of her essential
attributes. The Fathers had claimed this as a mark of the true Church. She must
be one, they had said.
Precisely so; but is this unity outward and
visible, or inward and spiritual? The "Quod semper, quod ubique et ab omnibus,"
if sought in an outward, realization, can be found only in the Church of Rome.
How many have fallen over this stumbling-block and never risen again; how many
even in our own age have made shipwreck here! This was the rock on which Calvin
was now in danger of shipwreck. The Church rose before his eyes, a venerable and
holy society; he saw her coming down from ancient times, covering all lands,
embracing in her ranks the martyrs and confessors of primitive times, and the
great doctors of the Middle Ages, with the Pope at their head, the Vicar of
Jesus Christ. This seemed truly a temple of God's own building. With all its
faults it yet was a glorious Church, Divine and heavenly. Must he leave this
august society and join himself to a few despised disciples of the new opinions?
This seemed like a razing of his name from the Book of Life. This was to invoke
excommunication upon his own head, and write against himself a sentence of
exclusion from the family of God nay, from God himself! This was the great
battle that Calvin had yet to fight.
How many have commenced this battle
only to lose it! They have been beaten back and beaten down by the pretended
Divine authority of "the Church," by the array of her great names and her great
Councils, and though last, not least, by the terror of her anathemas. It is not
possible for even the strongest minds, all at once, to throw off the spell of
the great Enchantress Nor would even Calvin have conquered in this sore battle
had he not had recourse to the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.
Ever and anon he came back to the Bible; he sought for the Church as she is
there shown a spiritual society, Christ her Head, the Holy Spirit her life,
truth her foundation, and believers her members and in proportion as this
Church disclosed her beauty to him, the fictitious splendor and earthly
magnificence which shone around the Church of Rome waned, and at last vanished
outright.
"There can be no Church," we hear Calvin saying to himself,
"where the truth is not. Here, in the Roman Communion, I can find only fables,
silly inventions, manifest falsehoods, and idolatrous ceremonies. The society
that is founded on these things cannot be the Church. If I shall come back to
the truth, as contained in the Scriptures, will I not come back to the Church?
and will I not be joined to the holy company of prophets and apostles, of saints
and martyrs? And as regards the Pope, the Vicar of Jesus Christ, let me not be
awed by a big word. If without warrant from the Bible, or the call of the
Christian people, and lacking the holiness and humility of Christ, the Pope
place himself above the Church, and surround himself with worldly pomps, and
arrogate lordship over the faith and consciences of men, is he therefore
entitled to homage, and must I bow down and do obeisance? The Pope," concluded
Calvin, "is but a scarecrow, dressed out in magnificences and fulminations. I
will go on my way without minding him."
In fine, Calvin concluded that
the term "Church" could not make the society that monopolized the term really
"the Church." High-sounding titles and lofty assumptions could give neither
unity nor authority; these could come from the Truth alone; and so he abandoned
"the Church" that he might enter the Church the Church of the
Bible.
The victory was now complete. The last link of Rome's chain had
been rent from his soul; the huge phantasmagoria which had awed and terrified
him had been dissolved, and he stood up in the liberty wherewith Christ had made
him free. Here truly was rest after a great fight a sweet and blessed dawn
after a night of thick darkness and tempest.
Thus was fought one of the
great battles of the world. When one thinks of what was won for mankind upon
this field, one feels its issues important beyond all calculation, and would
rather have conquered upon it than have won all the victories and worn all the
laurels of Caesar and Alexander. The day of Calvin's conversion is not known,
but the historian D'Aubigne, to whose research the world is indebted for its
full and exact knowledge of the event, has determined the year, 1527; and the
place, Paris that city where some of the saints of God had already been put to
death, and where, in years to come, their blood was to be poured out like water.
The day of Calvin's conversion is one of the memorable days of
time.
CHAPTER 8
Back to
Top
CALVIN BECOMES A STUDENT OF
LAW
Gate of the New Kingdom Crowds Pressing to Enter The Few only
Able to do so Lefevre and Farel Sighing for the Conversion of Francis I. A
Greater Conversion Calvin Refuses to be made a Priest Chooses the Profession
of Law Goes to Orleans Pierre de l'Etoile Calvin becomes his Scholar
Teaching of Etoile on the Duty of the State to Punish Heterodoxy Calvin among
his College Companions A Victory Calvin Studies Greek Melchior Wolmar
Calvin Prepared for his Work as a Commentator His Last Mental
Struggle.
THE Reformation has come, and is setting up anew the
kingdom of the Gospel upon the earth. Flinging wide open its portals, and
stationing no sentinel on the threshold, nor putting price upon its blessings,
it bids all enter. We see great multitudes coming up to the gate, and making as
if they would press in and become citizens of this new State. Great scholars and
erudite divines are groping around the door, but they are not able to become as
little children, and so they cannot find the gate. We see ecclesiastics of every
grade crowding to that portal; there stands the purple cardinal, and there too
is the frocked friar, all eagerly inquiring what they may do that they may
inherit eternal life; but they cannot part with their sins or with their
self-righteousness, and so they cannot enter at a gate which, however wide to
the poor in spirit, is strait to them. Puissant kings, illustrious statesmen,
and powerful nations come marching up, intent seemingly on enrolling themselves
among the citizens of this new society. They stand on the very threshold;
another step and all will be well; but, alas! they hesitate; they falter; it is
a moment of terrible suspense. What blinds them so that they cannot see the
entrance? It is a little word, a potent spell, which has called up before them
all imposing image that looks the impersonation of all the ages, and the
embodiment of all apostolic virtues and blessings "the Church." Dazzled by
this apparition, they pause they reel backwards the golden moment passes;
and from the very gates of evangelical light, they take the downward road into
the old darkness. The broad pathway is filled from side to side by men whose
feet have touched the very threshold of the kingdom, but who are now returning,
some offended by the simplicity of the infant Church; others scared by the
scaffold and the stake; others held back by their love of ease or their love of
sin. A few only are able to enter in and earn the crown, and even these, enter
only after sore rightings and great agonies of soul. It was here that the
Reformation had its beginning not in the high places of the world, amid the
ambitions of thrones and the councils of cabinets. It struggled into birth in
the low places of society, in closets, and the bosoms of the penitent, amid
tears and strong cries and many groans.
Paris was not one of those cities
that were destined to be glorified by the light of Protestantism, nevertheless
it pleased God, as narrated in the last chapter, to make it the scene of a great
conversion.[1] Lefevre and Farel were
sighing to enrol among the disciples of the Gospel a great potentate, Francis I.
If, thought they, the throne can be gained, will not the preponderance of power
on the side of the Gospel infallibly assure its triumph in France? But God,
whose thoughts are not as man's thoughts, was meanwhile working for a far
greater issue, the conversion even of a pale-faced student in the College of
Montaigu, whose name neither Lefevre nor Farel had ever happened to hear, and
whose very existence was then unknown to them. They little dreamed what a
conflict was at that very hour going on so near to them in a small chamber in an
obscure quarter of Paris. And, although they had known it, they could as little
have conjectured that when that young scholar had bowed to the force of the
truth, a mightier power would have taken its place at the side of the Gospel
than if Francis and all his court had become its patrons and champions. Light
cannot be spread by edict of king, or by sword of soldier. It is the Bible,
preached by the evangelist, and testified to by the martyr, that is to bid the
Gospel, like the day, shine forth and bless the earth.
From the hour of
Calvin's conversion he became the center of the Reformation in France, and
by-and-by the center of the Reformation in Christendom: consequently in tracing
the several stages of his career we are chronicling the successive developments
of the great movement of Protestantism. His eyes were opened, and he saw the
Church of Rome disenchanted of that illusive splendor that pseudo-Divine
authority which had aforetime dazzled and subdued him. Where formerly there
stood a spiritual building, the House of God, the abode of truth, as he
believed, there now rose a temple of idols. How could he minister at her altars?
True, his head had been shorn, but he had not yet received that indelible
character which is stamped on all who enter the priesthood, and so it was not
imperative that he should proceed farther in that path. He resolved to devote
himself to the profession of law. This mode of retreat from the clerical ranks
would awaken no suspicion.
It is somewhat remarkable that his father had
come, at about the same time, to the same resolution touching the future
profession of his son, and thus the young Calvin had his parent's full consent
to his new choice a coincidence which Beza has pointed out as a somewhat
striking one. The path on which Gerard Chauvin saw his son now entering was one
in which many and brilliant honors were to be won: and not one of those prizes
was there which the marvelous intellect and the rare application of that son did
not bid fair to gain. Already Gerard in fancy saw him standing at the foot of
the throne, and guiding the destinies of France. Has Calvin then bidden a final
adieu to theology, and are the courts of law and the offices of State henceforth
to claim him as their own? No! he has turned aside but for a little while, that
by varying the exercise of his intellect he may bring to the great work that
lies before him a versatility of power, all amplitude of knowledge, and a range
of sympathy not otherwise attainable. Of that work he did not at this hour so
much as dream, but He who had "called him from the womb, and ordained him a
prophet to the nations," was leading him by a way he knew not.
The young
student his face still pale, but beaming with that lofty peace that succeeds
such tempests as those which had beat upon him crosses for the last time the
portal of the Montaigu, and, leaving Paris behind him, directs his steps to
Orleans, the city on the banks of the Loire which dates from the days of
Aurelian, its founder. In that city was a famous university, and in that
university was a famous professor of law, Pierre de l'Etoile, styled the Prince
of Jurists.[2] It was the light of this;
"star" that attracted the young Calvin to Orleans.
The science of
jurisprudence now became his study. And one of the maxims to which he was at
times called to listen, as he sat on the benches of the class-room, enables us
to measure the progress which the theory of liberty had made in those days. "It
is the magistrate's duty," would "Peter of the Star" say to his scholars, "to
punish offenses against religion as well as crimes against the State." "What!"
he would exclaim, with the air of a man who was propounding an incontrovertible
truth, "What! shall we hang a thief who robs us of our purse, and not burn a
heretic who steals from us heaven!" So ill understood was then the distinction
between the civil and the spiritual jurisdictions, and the acts falling under
their respective cognisance. Under this code of jurisprudence were Calvin and
that whole generation of Frenchmen reared. It had passed in Christendom for a
thousand years as indisputably sound, serving as the cornerstone of the
Inquisition, and yielding its legitimate fruit in those baleful fires which
mingled their lurid glare with the dawn of the New Times. Under no other maxim
was it then deemed possible for nations to flourish or piety to be preserved;
nor was it till a century and a half after Calvin's time that this maxim was
exploded, for of all fetters those are the hardest to be rent which have been
forged by what wears the guise of justice, and have been imposed to protect what
professes to be religion.
The future Reformer now sits at the feet of the
famous jurist of Orleans, and, by the study of the law, whets that wonderful
intellect which in days to come was to unravel so many mysteries, and dissolve
the force of so many spells which had enchained the soul. What manner of man, we
ask, was Calvin at Orleans? He had parted company with the schoolmen; he had
bidden the Fathers of the Montaigu adieu, and he had turned his face, as he
believed, towards the high places of the world. Did his impressions of Divine
things pass away, or did the grandeurs of time dim to his eye those of eternity?
No; but if his seriousness did not disappear, his shyness somewhat did. His
loving sympathies and rich genialities of heart, like a secret gravitation for
they were not much expressed in words drew companions around him, and his
superiority of intellect gave him, without his seeking it, the lead amongst
them. His fellow-students were a noisy, pleasure-loving set, and their revels
and quarrels woke up, rather rudely at times, the echoes of the academic hall,
and broke in upon the quiet of the streets; but the high-souled honor and purity
of Calvin, untouched by soil or stain amidst the pastimes and Bacchanalian riots
that went on around him, joined to his lofty genius, made him the admiration of
his comrades.
The nation of Picardy for the students were classified
into nations according to the provinces they came from elected the young
Calvin as their proctor, and in this capacity he was able, by his legal
knowledge, to recover for his nation certain privileges of which they had been
deprived.
There have been more brilliant affairs than this triumph over
the local authority who had trenched upon academic rights, but it was noisily
applauded by those for whom it was won, and to the young victor this petty
warfare was all earnest of greater battles to be fought on a wider arena, and of
prouder victories to be won over greater opponents. The future Chancellor of the
Kingdom of France for no inferior position had Gerard Chauvin elected for his
son to fill had taken his first step on the road which would most surely
conduct him to this high dignity. Step after step to his genius how easy!
would bring him to it; and there having passed life in honorable labor, he would
leave his name inscribed among those of the legislators and philosophers of
France, while his bust would adorn the Louvre, or the Hall of Justice, and his
bones, inurned in marble, would sleep in some cathedral aisle of Paris. Such was
the prospect that opened out before the eye of his father, and, it is possible,
before his own also at this period of his life. Very grand it was, but not
nearly so grand as that which ended in a simple grave by the Rhone, marked only
by a pine-tree, with a name like the brightness of the firmament, that needed no
chiselled bust and no marble cenotaph to keep it in remembrance. Calvin next
went to Bourges. He was attracted to this city by the fame of Alciati of Milan,
who was lecturing on law in its university. The Italian loved a good table, and
a well-filled purse, but he had the gift of eloquence, and a rare genius for
jurisprudence. "Andrew Alciat," says Beza, "was esteemed the most learned and
eloquent of all the jurisconsults of his time."[3] The eloquence of Alciati
kindled anew Calvin's enthusiasm for the study of law. The hours were then
early; but Calvin, Beza informs us, sat up till midnight, and, on awakening in
the morning, spent an hour in bed recalling to memory what he had learned the
evening previous. At Bourges was another distinguished man, learned in a wisdom
that Alciati knew not, and whose prelections, if less brilliant, were more
useful to the young student. Melchior Wolmar, a German, taught the Greek of
Homer, Demosthenes, or Sophocles, "but less publicly," says Bungener, "though
with small attempts at concealment, the Greek of another book far mightier and
more important."[4]
When Calvin arrived
in Bourges he knew nothing of Greek. His Latinity he had received at Paris from
Mathurin Cordier, whose memory he ever most affectionately cherished; but now he
was to be initiated into the tongue of ancient Greece. This service was rendered
him by Melchior Wolmar,[5] who had been a pupil of
the celebrated Budaeus.
Calvin now had access to the Oracles of God in
the very words in which inspired men had written them an indispensable
qualification surely in one who was to be the first great interpreter, in modern
times, of the New Testament. He could more exactly know the mind of the Spirit
speaking in the Word, and more fully make known to men the glory of Divine
mysteries; said the commentaries of Calvin are perhaps unsurpassed to this day
in the combined qualities of clearness, accuracy, and depth. They were in a sort
a second giving of the Oracles of God to men. Their publication was as when, in
the Apocalypse, "the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in
his temple the ark of his testament."
Before leaving Orleans his
spiritual equipment for his great work had been completed. The agony he had
endured in Paris returned in part. He may have contracted from his law studies
some of the dross of earth, and he was sent back to the furnace for the last
time. Doubts regarding his salvation began again to agitate him; the "Church"
rose up again before him in all her huge fascination and enchantment. These were
the very foes he had already vanquished, and left dead, as he believed, on the
battle-field.
Again they stood like menacing spectres in his path, and he
had to recommence the fight, and as at Paris, so again in Orleans he had to wage
it in the sweat of his face, in the sweat of his heart. "I am in a continual
battle," he writes; "I am assaulted and shaken, as when an armed man is forced
by a violent blow to stagger a few steps backward."[6] Grasping once more the
sword of the Spirit, he put his foes to flight, and when the conflict was over
Calvin found himself walking in a clearer light than he had ever before enjoyed;
and that light continued all the way even to his life's end. There gathered
often around him in after-days the darkness of outward trial, but nevermore was
there darkness in his soul.
CHAPTER 9 Back to Top
CALVIN THE EVANGELIST, AND BERQUIN
THE MARTYR.
Calvin Abandons the Study of the Law Goes to Bourges
Bourges under Margaret of Navarre Its Evangelisation already Commenced The
Citizens entreat Calvin to become their Minister He begins to act as an
Evangelist in Bourges The Work extends to the Villages and Castles around
The Plottings of the Monks His Father's Death calls Calvin away A Martyr,
Louis de Berquin His Youth His Conversion His Zeal and Eloquence in
Spreading the Gospel Imprisoned by the Sorbonnists Set at Liberty by the
King Imprisoned a Second and a Third Time Set at Liberty Erasmus' Counsel
Berquin Taxes the Sorbonnists with Heresy An Image of the Virgin Mutilated
Berquin consigned to the Conciergerie His Condemnation and Frightful Sentence
Efforts of Budaeus Berquin on his Way to the Stake His Attire His Noble
Behaviour His Death.
EMERGING from the furnace "purified seven times,"
Calvin abandons the study of the law, casts behind him the great honors to which
it invited him, turns again to the Church not her whose head is on the Seven
Hills and puts his hand to the Gospel plough, never to take it away till death
should withdraw it. Quitting Orleans he goes to Bourges.
With Bourges two
illustrious conquerors of former days had associated their names: Caesar had
laid it in ashes; Charlemagne had raised it up from its ruins; now a greater
hero than either enters it, to begin a career of conquests which these warriors
might well have envied, destined as they were to eclipse in true glory and far
outlast any they had ever achieved. It was here that Calvin made his first essay
as an evangelist.
Bourges was situated in the province of Berry, and as
Margaret, whom we have specially mentioned in former chapters, as the disciple
and correspondent of Briconnet and Lefevre, had now become Queen of Navarre and
Duchess of Berry, Bourges was under her immediate jurisdiction. Prepared to
protect in others the Gospel which she herself loved, Bourges presented an
opening for Protestantism which no other city in all France at that time did.
Under Margaret it became a center of the evangelisation. For some time previous
no little religious fermentation had been going on among its population.[1] The new doctrines had
found their way thither; they were talked of in its social gatherings; they had
begun even to be heard in its pulpits; certain priests, who had come to a
knowledge of the truth, were preaching it with tolerable clearness to
congregations composed of lawyers, students, and citizens. It was at this crisis
that Calvin arrived at Bourges.
His fame had preceded him. The
Protestants gathered round him and entreated him to become their teacher. Calvin
was averse to assume the office of the ministry. Not that he shrunk from either
the labors or the perils of the work, but because he cherished a deep sense of
the greatness of the function, and of his own unworthiness to fill it. "I have
hardly learned the Gospel myself," he would say, "and, lo! I am called to teach
it to others."
Not for some time did Calvin comply with these
solicitations. His timidity, his sense of responsibility, above all his love of
study, held him back. He sought a hiding-place where, safe from intrusion, he
might continue the pursuit of that wisdom which it delighted him with each
studious day to gather and hive up, but his friends surprised him in his
concealment, and renewed their entreaties. At last he consented. "Wonderful it
is," he said, "that one of so lowly an origin should be exalted to so great a
dignity."[2]
But how
unostentatious the opening of his career! The harvests of the earth spring not
in deeper silence than does this great evangelical harvest, which, beginning in
the ministry of Calvin, is destined to cover a world. Gliding along the street
might be seen a youth of slender figure and sallow features. He enters a door;
he gathers round him the family and, opening the Bible, he explains to them its
message. His words distil as the dew and as the tender rain on the grass.
By-and-by the city becomes too narrow a sphere of labor, and the young
evangelist extends his efforts to the hamlets and towns around Bourges.[3] One tells another of the
sweetness of this water, and every day the numbers increase of those who wish to
drink of it. The castle of the baron is opened as well as the cottage of the
peasant, and a cordial welcome is accorded the missionary in both. His doctrine
is clear and beautiful, and as refreshing to the soul as light to the eye after
long darkness. And then the preacher is so modest withal, so sweet in his
address, so earnest in his work, and altogether so unlike any other preacher the
people had ever known! "Upon my word," said the Lord of Lignieres to his wife,
"Master John Calvin seems to me to preach better than the monks, and he goes
heartily to work too."[4]
The monks looked
with but small favor on these doings. The doors open to the young evangelist
were shut against themselves. If they plotted to stop the work by casting the
workman into prison, in a town under Margaret's jurisdiction this was not so
easy. The design failed, if it was ever entertained, and the evangelist went on
sowing the seed from which in days to come a plentiful harvest was to spring.
The Churches whose foundations are now being laid by the instrumentality of
Calvin will yield in future years not only confessors of the truth, but martyrs
for the stake.
In the midst of these labors Calvin received a letter from
Noyon, his native town, saying that his father was dead.[5] These tidings stopped his
work, but it is possible that they saved him from prison. He had planted, but
another must water; and so turning his face towards his birth-place, he quits
Bourges not again to return to it. But the work he had accomplished in it did
not perish. A venerable doctor, Michel Simon, came forward on Calvin's
departure, and kept alive the light in Bourges which the evangelist had
kindled.
On his journey to Noyon, Calvin had to pass through Paris. It so
happened that the capital at that time (1529) was in a state of great
excitement, another stake having just been planted in it, whereat one of the
noblest of the early martyrs of France was yielding up his life. Providence so
ordered it that the pile of the martyr and the visit of the Reformer came
together. God had chosen him as the champion by whom the character of his
martyrs was to be vindicated and their blood avenged on the Papacy, and
therefore it was necessary that he should come very near, if not actually stand
beside their stake, and be the eye-witness of the agonies, or rather the
triumph, of their dying moments. Before tracing farther the career of Calvin let
us turn aside to the Place de Greve, and see there "the most learned of the
nobles of France" dying as a felon.
Louis de Berquin was descended of a
noble family of Artois.[6] Unlike the knights of
those days, who knew only to mount their horse, to handle their sword, to follow
the hounds, or to figure in a tournament, Berquin delighted in reading and was
devoted to study. Frank, courteous, and full of alms-deeds, he was beloved by
all. His morals were as pure as his manners were polished: he had now reached
the age of forty without calumny finding occasion to breathe upon him. He often
went to court., and was specially welcomed by a prince who delighted to see
around him men of intellectual accomplishments and tastes. Touching the religion
of Rome, Berquin was blameless, having kept himself pure from his youth up. "He
was," says Crespin, "a great follower of the Papistical constitutions, and a
great hearer of masses and sermons." All the Church's rites he strictly
observed, all the Church's saints he duly honored, and he crowned all his other
virtues by holding Lutheranism in special abhorrence.[7]
But it pleased God
to open his eyes. His manly and straightforward character made the maneuvers and
intrigues of the Sorbonne specially detestable to him. Besides, it chanced to
him to have a dispute with one of its doctors on a scholastic subtlety, and he
opened his Bible to find in it proofs to fortify his position. Judge of his
amazement when he perceived there, not the doctrines of Rome, but the doctrines
of Luther. His conversion was thorough. His learning, his eloquence, and his
influence were from that hour all at the service of the Gospel. He labored to
spread the truth among his tenantry in the country, and among his acquaintances
in the city and at the court. He panted to communicate his convictions to all
France. Many looked to him as the destined Reformer of his native land; and
certainly his position and gifts made him the most considerable person at that
time on the side of the Reform in France. "Berquin would have been a second
Luther," said Beza, "had he found in Francis I. a second Elector."[8]
The Sorbonne had
not been unobservant; their alarm was great, and their anger was in proportion
to their alarm. "He is worse than Luther," they exclaimed. Armed with the
authority of Parliament the Sorbonne seized and imprisoned Berquin (1523). There
was nothing but a stake for the man whose courage they could not daunt, and
whose eloquence they could not silence, and all whose wit and learning were
employed in laughing at their ignorance and exposing their superstition. But the
king, who loved him, set him at liberty.
A second time the monks of the
Sorbonne seized Berquin. A second time the king came to his rescue, advising him
to be more prudent in future; but such strong convictions as those of Berquin
could not be suppressed. A third time Berquin was seized, and the Sorbonnists
thought that this time they had made sure of their prey. The king was a prisoner
at Madrid: Duprat and Louisa of Savoy were all-powerful at Paris. But no: an
order from Francis I., dated 1st April, 1526, arrived, enjoining them to suspend
proceedings till his return; and so Berquin was again at
liberty.
Berquin's courage and zeal grew in proportion as the plots of
his enemies multiplied. Erasmus, who was trying to swim between two streams,
foreseeing how the unequal contest must end, warned Berquin in these
characteristic words: "Ask to be sent as ambassador to some foreign country; go
and travel in Germany. You know Beda and such as he he is a thousand-headed
monster darting venom on every side. Your enemies are named legion. Were your
cause better than that of Jesus Christ, they will not let you go till they have
miserably destroyed you. Do not trust too much to the king's protection. At all
events, do not compromise me with the faculty of theology."[9]
Berquin did not
listen to the counsel of the timid scholar. He resolved to stand no longer on
the defensive, but to attack. He extracted from the writings of Beda and his
colleagues twelve propositions, which he presented to the king, and which he
charged with being opposed to the Bible and, by consequence, heretical.[10]
The Sorbonnists
were confounded. That they, the pillars of the Church, and the lights of France,
should be taxed with heresy by a Lutheran was past endurance. The king, however,
not sorry to have an opportunity of humbling these turbulent doctors, requested
them to disprove Berquin's allegations from Scripture. This might have been a
hard task; the affair was taking an ugly turn for the Sorbonne. Just at that
time an image of the Virgin, at the corner of one of the streets, was mutilated.
It was a fortunate incident for the priests. "These are the fruits of the
doctrines of Berquin," it was exclaimed; "all is about to be overthrown
religion, the laws, the throne itself by this Lutheran conspiracy." War to the
knife was demanded against the iconoclasts: the people and the monarch were
frightened; and the issue was that Berquin was apprehended (March, 1529) and
consigned to the Conciergerie.[11]
A somewhat
remarkable occurrence furnished Berquin's enemies with unexpected advantage
against him in the prosecution. No sooner was he within the walls of his prison
than the thought of his books and papers flashed across his mind. He saw the use
his persecutors would make of them, and he sat down and wrote instantly a note
to a friend begging him to destroy them. He gave the note to a domestic, who hid
it under his clothes and departed.[12]
The man, who was
not a little superstitious, trembled at the thought of the message which he
carried, but all went well till he came to the Pont du Change, where, his
superstition getting the better of his courage, he swooned and fell before the
image of "Our Lady." The passers-by gathered round him, and, unbuttoning his
doublet that he might breathe the more freely, found the letter underneath. It
was opened and read. "He is a heretic," said they: "Our Lady has done it. It is
a miracle." The note was given to one of the bystanders, at whose house the monk
then preaching the Lent sermons was that day to dine, who, perceiving its
importance, carried it to Berquin's judges.[13] His books were straightway
seized and examined by the twelve commissioners appointed to try him. On the
16th April, 1529, the trial was finished, and at noon Berquin was brought into
court, and had his sentence read to him. He was condemned to make a public
abjuration in the following manner: He was to walk bare-headed, with a lighted
taper in his hand, to the Place de Greve, and there he was to see his books
burned; from the Place de Greve he was to pass to the front of the Church of
Notre Dame, and there he was to do penance "to God and his glorious mother, the
Virgin." After that his tongue, "that instrument of unrighteousness," was to be
pierced; and, lastly, he was to be taken back to prison, and shut up for life
within four walls of stone, and to have neither books to read, nor pen and ink
to write.[14] Berquin, stunned by the
atrocity of the sentence, at first remained silent, but recovering in a few
minutes his composure, said, "I appeal to the king." This was his way of saying,
I refuse to abjure.
Among his twelve judges was the celebrated Hellenist,
Budaeus, the intimate friend of Berquin, and a secret favourer of the new
doctrines. Budaeus hastened after him to the prison, his object being to
persuade him to make a recantation, and thereby save his life. In no other way
he knew could Berquin escape, for already a second sentence stood drafted by his
judges, consigning him to the stake should he refuse to do public penance.
Budaeus threw himself at Berquin's feet, and implored him with tears not to
throw away his life, but to reserve himself for the better times that were
awaiting the Reformation in France. This was the side on which to attack such a
man. But the prisoner was inflexible. Again and again Budaeus returned to the
Conciergerie, and each time he renewed his importunities with greater
earnestness. He painted the grand opportunities the future would bring, and did
not hesitate to say that Berquin would incur no small guilt should he sacrifice
himself.[15]
The strong man
began to bow. "The power of the Holy Ghost was extinguished in him for a
moment," says one. He gave his consent to appear in the court of the Palace of
Justice, and ask pardon of God and the king. Budaeus, overjoyed, hastened back
to tell the Sorbonne that Berquin was ready to withdraw his appeal and make his
recantation. How fared it the while with Berquin in the prison? His peace had
forsaken him that same hour. He looked up to God, but the act which aforetime
had ever brought joy and strength into his heart filled him with terror. This
darkness was his true prison, and not the stone walls that enclosed him. Could
the Sorbonne deliver him from that prison, and was this the sort of life that he
was reserving for the Reformation? Verily he would do great things with a soul
lettered by fear and bound down by a sense of guilt! No, he could not live thus.
He could die die a hundred times, but to appear before the Sorbonne and to say
of the Gospel, "I renounce it," and of the Savior, "I know him not," that he
could not do.[16] And so when Budseus
returned, there was an air in the face of the prisoner which told its own tale
before Berquin had had time to speak. He had weighed the two recantation and
the stake; and he had chosen the better part though Budaeus hardly deemed it
so the stake.
The king, who it was possible might interpose at the last
moment and save Berquin, was not indeed in Paris at this moment, but he was no
farther away than at Blois. The Sorbonne must despatch their victim before a
pardon could arrive from Blots.
A week's delay was craved in the
execution of the sentence. "Not a day," said Beda.[17] But the prisoner has
appealed to the royal prerogative. "Quick," responded his persecutors, "and let
him be put to death." That same day, April 22nd, 1529, at noon, was Berquin led
forth to die. The ominous news had already circulated through Paris, from every
street came a stream of spectators, and a dense crowd gathered and surged round
the prison, waiting to see Berquin led to execution. The clock struck the hour:
the gates of the Conciergerie were flung open with a crash, and the melancholy
procession was seen to issue forth.
The passage of that procession
through the streets was watched with looks of pity on the part of some, of
wonder and astonishment on the part of others. It amazed not a few to find that
the chief actor in that dismal tragedy was one of the first nobles of France.
But the most radiant face in all that great concourse of men was that of Berquin
himself. He was going we had almost said to the stake, but of the stake he
thought not he was going to the palace of the sky; and what though a wretched
tumbril was bearing him on his way? a better chariot whose brightness it would
have blinded the beholder to look upon stood waiting to carry him upward as
soon as he had passed through the fire; and what mattered it if those who knew
not what he was going to, hooted or pitied him as he passed along? how soon
would the look of pity and the shout of derision be forgotten in the presence of
the "Blessed!"
The cart in which Berquin was placed moved forward at a
slow pace. The crowd was great, and the streets of the Paris of those days were
narrow, but the rate of progress enabled the multitude all the better to observe
the way in which the martyr bore himself. As he rode along, escorted by a band
of 600 bowmen, the spectators said one to another, as they marked the serenity
of his looks and the triumph of his air, "He is like one who sits in a temple
and meditates on holy things."[18]
"And see," said
they, "how bravely he is arrayed! He is liker one who is going to a bridal
banquet than one who is going to be burned." And, indeed, it was so. Berquin had
that morning dressed himself in his finest clothes. He wore no weeds; sign of
mourning or token of woe would have belied him, as if he bewailed his hard lot,
and grieved that his life should be given in the cause of the Gospel. He had
attired himself in pleasant and even gay apparel. A citizen of Paris, who wrote
a journal of these events, and who probably saw the martyr as he passed through
the streets, tells us that "he wore a cloak of velvet, a doublet of satin and
damask, and golden hose."[19] This was goodly raiment
for the fire. "But am I not," said Berquin, "to be this day presented at court
not that of Francis, but that of the Monarch of the Universe?"
Arrived at
the Place de Greve, he alighted from the vehicle and stood beside the stake. He
now essayed to speak a few words to the vast assembly which he found gathered at
the place of execution. But the monks who stood near, dreading the effect on the
multitude of what he might say, gave the signal to their creatures, and
instantly the shout of voices, and the clash of arms, drowned the accents of the
martyr. "Thus," says Felice, "the Sorbonne of 1529 set the populace of 1793 the
base example of stifling on the scaffold the sacred words of the dying."[20]
What though the
roll of drums drowned the last words of Berquin? It was his DEATH that must
speak. And it did speak: it spoke to all France; and this, the most eloquent and
powerful of all testimonies, no clamours could stifle.
The fire had done
its work, and where a few minutes before stood the noble form of Berquin there
was now only a heap of ashes. In that heap lay entombed the Reformation in
France so did both friend and foe deem. The Sorbonnists were overjoyed: the
Protestants were bowed down under a weight of sorrow. There was no sufficient
reason for the exultation of the one or the dejection of the other. Berquin's
stake was to be, in some good measure, to France what Ridley's was to England
a candle which, by God's grace, would not be put out, but would shine through
all that realm.[21]
CHAPTER
10 Back to
Top
CALVIN AT PARIS, AND FRANCIS
NEGOTIATING WITH GERMANY AND ENGLAND.
The Death of the Martyr not the
Death of the Cause Calvin at Noyon Preaches at Pont l'Eveque His Audience
How they take his Sermon An Experiment Its Lessen Calvin goes to Paris
Paris a Focus of Literary Light The Students at the University Their Debates
Calvin to Polemics adds Piety He Evangelises in Paris Powers of the World
Spain and France kept Divided How and Why The Schmalkald League holds the
Balance of Power Francis I. approaches the German Protestants Failure of the
Negotiation Francis turns to Henry VIII. Interview between Francis and Henry
at Boulogne Fetes League between the Kings of France and England Francis's
Great Error
BERQUIN, the peer of France, and, greater still, the
humble Christian and zealous evangelist, was no more. Many thought they saw in
him that assemblage of intellectual gifts and evangelical virtues which fitted
him for being the Reformer of his native land. However, it was not so to be. His
light had shone brightly but, alas! briefly; it was now extinguished. Of Berquin
there remained only a heap of ashes, over which the friends of Protestantism
mourned, while its enemies exulted. But it was the ashes of Berquin merely, not
of his cause, that lay around the stake. When the martyr went up in the chariot
which, unseen by the crowd, waited to carry him to the sky, his mantle fell on
one who was standing near, and who may be said to have seen him as he ascended.
From the burning pile in the Place de Greve, the young evangelist of Bourges,
whose name, destined to fill Christendom in years to come, was then all but
unknown, went forth, endowed with a double portion of Berquin's spirit, to take
up the work of him who had just fallen, and to spread throughout France and the
world that truth which lived when Berquin died.
How Calvin came to be in
Paris at this moment we have already explained. Tidings that his father had died
suddenly called him to Noyon. It cost him doubtless a wrench to sever himself
from the work of the Gospel which he was preaching, not in vain, in the capital
of Berry and the neighboring towns; still, he did not delay, but set out at
once, taking Paris in his way. The journey from Paris to Noyon was performed, we
cannot but think, in great weariness of heart. Behind him was the stake of
Berquin, in whose ashes so many hopes lay buried; before him was the home of his
childhood, where no father now waited to welcome him; while all round, in the
horizon of France, the clouds were rolling up, and giving but too certain augury
that the Reformation was not to have so prosperous a career in his native land
as, happily, at that hour it was pursuing in the towns of Germany and amid the
hills of the Swiss. But God, he tells us, "comforted him by his
Word."
Calvin had quitted Noyon a mere lad; he returns to it on the verge
of manhood (1529), bringing back to it the same pale face and burning eye which
had marked him as a boy. Within, what a mighty change! but that change his
townsmen saw not, nor did even he himself suspect its extent; for as yet he had
not a thought of leaving the communion of Rome. He would cleanse and rebuttress
the old fabric, by proclaiming the truth within it. But an experiment which he
made on a small scale at Noyon helped doubtless to show him that the tottering
structure would but fall in pieces in his hands should he attempt restoration
merely.
The fame of the young scholar had reached even these northern
parts of France, and the friends and companions of his youth wanted to hear him
preach. If a half-suspicion of heresy had reached their ears along with the
rumor of his great attainments, it only whetted their eagerness to hear
him.
The Church of Pont l'Eveque, where his ancestors had lived, was
opened to him. When the day came, quite a crowd, made up of his own and his
father's acquaintances, and people from the neighboring towns, filled the
church, all eager to see and hear the cooper's grandson. Calvin expounded to
them the Scriptures.[1] The old doctrine was new
under that roof and to those ears. The different feelings awakened by the sermon
in different minds could be plainly read on the faces clustered so thickly
around the pulpit. Some beamed with delight as do those of thirsty men when they
drink and are refreshed. This select number embraced the leading men of the
district, among whom were Nicholas Picot. On that day he tasted the true bread,
and never again turned to the husks of Rome. But the faces of the most part
expressed either indifference or anger. Instead of a salvation from sin, they
much preferred what the "Church" offered, a salvation in sin. And as regarded
the priestly portion of the audience, they divined but too surely to what the
preacher's doctrine tended, the overthrow namely of the "Church's" authority,
and the utter drying-up of her revenues.
Many a rich abbacy and broad
acre, as well as ghostly assumption, would have to be renounced if that doctrine
should be embraced. Noyon had given a Reformer to Christendom, but she refused
to accept him for herself. The congregation at Pont l'Eveque was a fair specimen
of the universal Roman community, and the result of the sermon must have gone
far to convince the preacher that the first effect of the publication of the
truth within the pale of the "Church" would be, not the re-edification, but the
demolition of the old fabric, and that his ultimate aim must point to the
rearing of a new edifice.
After a two months' stay Calvin quitted his
native place. Noyon continued to watch the career of her great citizen, but not
with pride. In after-days, when Rome was trembling at his name, and Protestant
lands were pronouncing it with reverence, Noyon held it the greatest blot upon
her escutcheon that she had the misfortune to have given birth to him who bore
that name. Calvin had to choose anew his field of labor, and he at once decided
in favor of Paris. Thither accordingly he directed his steps.
France in
those days had many capitals, but Paris took precedence of them all. Besides
being the seat of the court, and of the Sorbonne, and the center of influences
which sooner or later made themselves felt to the extremities of the country,
Paris had just become a great focus of literary light. Francis I., while
snubbing the monks on the one hand, and repelling the Protestants on the other,
kneeled before the Renaissance, which was in his eye the germ of all
civilization and greatness. He knew the splendor it had lent to the house of
Medici, and he aspired to invest his court, his kingdom, and himself with the
same glory. Accordingly he invited a number of great scholars to his capital:
Budaeus was already there; and now followed Danes and Vatable, who were skilled,
the former in Greek and the latter in Hebrew,[2] the recovery of which
formed by far the most precious of all the fruits of the Renaissance. A false
faith would have shunned such a spot: it was the very fact of the light being
there that made Calvin hasten to Paris with the Gospel.
A great
fermentation, at that moment, existed among the students at the university.
Their study of the original tongues of the Bible had led them, in many
instances, to the Bible itself. Its simplicity and sublimity had charms for many
who did not much relish its holiness: and they drew from it an illumination of
the intellect, even when they failed to obtain from it a renovation of the
heart. A little proud it may be of their skill in the new learning, and not
unwilling to display their polemical tact, they were ready for battle with the
champions of the old orthodoxy wherever they met them, whether in the courts of
the university or on the street. In fact, the capital was then ringing with a
warfare, partly literary, partly theological; and Calvin found he had done well,
instead of returning to Bourges and gathering up the broken thread of his
labors, in coming to a spot where the fields seemed rapidly ripening unto
harvest.
And, indeed, in one prime quality, at all times essential to
work like his, but never more so than at the birth of Protestantism, Calvin
excelled all others. In the beautiful union of intellect and devotion which
characterised him he stood alone. He was as skillful a controversialist as any
of the noisy polemics who were waging daily battle on the streets, but he was
something higher. He fed his intellect by daily prayer and daily perusal of the
Scriptures, and he was as devoted an evangelist as he was a skillful debater. He
was even more anxious to sow the seed of the Kingdom in the homes of the
citizens of Paris, than he was to win victories over the doctors of the
Sorbonne. We see him passing along on the shady side of the street. He drops in
at a door. He emerges after awhile, passes onward, enters another dwelling,
where he makes another short stay, and thus he goes on, his unobtrusiveness his
shield, for no one follows his steps or suspects his errand. While others are
simply silencing opponents, Calvin is enlightening minds, and leaving traces in
the hearts of men that are imperishable. In this we behold the beginnings of a
great work a work that is to endure and fill the earth, when all the
achievements of diplomacy, all the trophies of the battle-field, and all the
honors of the school shall have passed away and been forgotten.
Leaving
the evangelist going his rounds in the streets and lanes of Paris, let us return
for a little to the public stage of the world, and note the doings of those who
as the possessors of thrones, or the leaders of armies, think that they are the
masters of mankind, and can mould at will the destinies of the world. They can
plant or they can pluck up the Reformation so they believe. And true it is,
emperors and warriors and priests have a part assigned them which they are to do
in this great work. The priests by their scandals shook the hierarchy: the kings
by their ambitions and passions pulled down the Empire; thus, without the world
owing thanks to either Pope or Kaiser, room was prepared for a Kingdom that
cannot be removed. The greatest monarchy of the day was Spain, which had shot up
into portentous growth just as the new times were about to appear. The union of
some, dozen of kingdoms under its scepter had given it measureless territory;
the discovery of America had endowed it with exhaustless wealth, and its
success; in the field had crowned its standards with the prestige of invincible
power. At the head of this vast Empire was a prince of equal sagacity and
ambition, and who was by turns the ally and the enemy of the Pope, yet ever the
steady champion of the Papacy, with which he believed the union of his Empire
and the stability of his power were bound up. Charles V., first and chiefly, the
Protestants had cause to dread.
But a counterpoise had been provided.
France, which was not very much less powerful than Spain, was made to weigh upon
the arm of Charles, in order to deaden the blow should he strike at
Protestantism. He did wish to strike at Protestantism, and sought craftily to
persuade Francis to hold back the while. In the spring of 1531 he sent his
ambassador Noircarmes to poison the ear of the King of France. Do you know what
Lutheranism is? said Noircarmes to Francis one day. It means, concisely, three
things, he continued the first is the destruction of the family, the second is
the destruction of property, and the third is the destruction of the monarchy.
Espouse this cause, said the Spanish ambassador, in effect, and you "let in the
deluge."[3] If Noircarmes had
substituted "Communism" for "Lutheranism," he might have been regarded as
foretelling what France in these latter days has verified.
And now we
begin to see the good fruits reaped by Christendom from the disastrous battle of
Pavia. It came just in time to counteract the machinations of Charles with the
French monarch. The defeat of Francis on that field, and the dreary imprisonment
in Madrid that followed it, planted rivalries and dislikes between the two
powerful crowns of France and Spain, which kept apart two forces that if united
would have crushed the Reformation. Inspired by hatred and dread of the Emperor
Charles, not only had the insinuations of his ambassador the less power with
Francis, but he cast his eyes around if haply he might discover allies by whose
help he might be able to withstand his powerful rival on the other side of the
Pyrenees. Francis resolved on making advances to the Protestant princes of
Germany. He was all the more strengthened in this design by the circumstance
that these princes, who saw a tempest gathering, had just formed themselves into
a league of defense. In March, 1531, the representatives of the Protestant
States met at Schmalkald, in the Electorate of Hesse, and, as we have elsewhere
related, nine princes and eleven cities entered into an alliance for six years
"to resist all who should try to constrain them to forsake the Word of God and
the truth of Christ."
The smallest of all the political parties in
Christendom, the position of the Schmalkalders gave them an influence far beyond
their numbers; they stood between the two mighty States of France and Spain. The
balance of power was in their hands, and, so far at least, they could play off
the crowns of Spain and France against one another.
Accordingly next year
Francis sent an ambassador it was his second attempt to negotiate an
alliance with them. His first ambassador was a fool,[4] his second was a wise man,
Du Bellay,[5] brother to the Archbishop
of Paris, than whom there was no more accomplished man in all France.
Du
Bellay did what diplomatists only sometimes do, brought heart as well as head to
his mission, for he wished nothing so much as to see his master and his kingdom
of France cast off the Pope, and displaying their colors alongside those of
Protestant Germany, sail away on the rising tide of Protestantism. Du Bellay
told the princes that he had his master's express command to offer them his
assistance in their great enterprise, and was empowered "to arrange with them
about the share of the war expenses which his majesty was ready to pay." This
latter proposal revealed the cloven foot. What was uppermost in the mind of the
King of France was to avenge the defeat at Pavia; hence his eagerness for war.
The League of Schmalkald bound the German princes to stand on the defensive
only; they were not to strike unless Charles or some other should first strike
at them. Luther raised his powerful voice against the proposed alliance. He
hated political entanglements, mistrusted Francis, had a just horror of spilling
blood, and he protested with all his might that the Protestants must rest the
triumph of their cause on spiritual and not on carnal weapons; that the Gospel
was not to be advanced by battles, and that the Almighty did not need that the
princes of earth should vote him succors in order to the effectual completion of
his all-wise and Divine plan. The issue was that the stipulation which Du Bellay
carried back to Paris could not serve the purposes of his
master.
Repulsed on the side of Germany, the King of France turned now to
England. This was a quarter in which he was more likely to succeed. Here he had
but one man to deal with, Henry VIII. To Henry, Protestantism was a policy
merely, not a faith. He had been crossed in his matrimonial projects by the
Pope, and so had his special quarrel with Clement VII., as Francis had his with
Charles V. The French king sent a messenger across the Channel to feel the pulse
of his "good brother" of England, and the result was that an interview was
arranged between the two sovereigns Henry crossing the sea with a brilliant
retinue, and Francis coming to meet him with a train not less courtly. Taking up
their quarters at the Abbot's Palace at Boulogne (October, 1532), the two
monarchs unbosomed to each other their grievances and displeasures, and
concerted together a joint plan for humiliating those against whom they bore a
common grudge. While Francis and Henry were closeted for hours on end, amusement
was found for their courtiers. Balls, masquerades, and other pastimes common in
that age occupied that gay assemblage, and helped to conceal the real business
which was proceeding all the while in the royal closet. That business eventually
found issue in a league between the Kings of France and England, in which they
engaged to raise an army of 50,000 men, ostensibly to attack the Turk; but in
reality to begin a campaign against the emperor and the Pope.[6] Now, thought Francis, I
shall wipe out the disgrace of Pavia; and I, said Henry, shall chastise the
insolence of Clement. But both were doomed to disappointment. This league which
looked so big, and promised so much, came to nothing. Had this great army been
assembled it would have shed much blood, but it would have enlightened no
consciences, nor won any victories for truth. It might have humbled the Pope, it
would have left the Papacy as strong as ever.
While Francis I. was
looking so anxiously around him for allies, and deeming it a point of wisdom to
lean on the monarch who could bring the largest army into the field, there was
one power, the strength of which he missed seeing. That power had neither fleets
nor armies at its service, and so Francis shunned rather than courted its
alliance. It was fated, in his opinion, to go to the abyss, and should he be so
imprudent as to link his cause With it, it would drag him down into the same
destruction with itself. This was a natural but, for Francis, a tremendous
mistake. The invisible forces are ever the strongest, and these were all on the
side of Protestantism. But it is the eye of faith only that can see these.
Francis looked with the eye of sense and could see nothing; and, therefore,
stood aloof from a cause which, as it seemed to him, had so few friends, and so
many and so powerful enemies. Francis and France lost more than Protestantism
did.
CHAPTER
11 Back to
Top
THE GOSPEL PREACHED IN PARIS A
MARTYR.
Margaret of Navarre Her Hopes Resolves to have the Gospel
Preached in France The City Churches not to be had Opens a Private Chapel in
the Louvre A Large and Brilliant Assembly convenes The Preachers Paris
Penitent and Reforming Agitation in the Sorbonne The Sorbonnists apply to
the King The Monks occupy the Pulpits They Threaten the King Beda Banished
Excitement in Paris The Populace Remain with Rome The Crisis of France
The Dominican Friar, Laurent de la Croix His Conversion Preaches in France
Apprehended and conducted to Paris His Torture His Condemnation His
Behaviour at the Stake France makes her Choice: she will Abide with
Rome.
LEAVING princes to intrigue for their own ends, under
cover of advancing religion, let us turn to the work itself, and mark how it
advances by means of instrumentalities far different from those which kings know
to employ. This brings before us, once more, a lady illustrious for her rank,
and not less illustrious for her piety Margaret, the sister of the king, and
now Queen of Navarre. She saw her brother holding out his hand to the
Protestants of Germany, and the King of England, and permitted herself to
believe that the hour had at last come when Francis and his kingdom would place
themselves on the path of the Reform, and that in the martyrdom of Berquin,
which had filled her soul with so profound a sorrow, she had seen the last blood
that would ever be sprit on the soil of France, and the last stake that would
ever blaze in the Place de Greve for the cause of the Gospel. Full of these
hopes, her zeal and courage grew stronger every day.
Reflecting that she
stood near the throne, that thousands in all parts of Reformed Christendom
looked to her to stand between the oppressor and his victim, and that it became
her to avert, as far as was in her power, the guilt of innocent blood from her
house and the throne of her brother, she girded herself for the part which it
became her to act. The Gospel, said this princess, shall be preached in France,
in the very capital, nay, in the very bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. The
moment was opportune. The Carnival of 1533 was just ended. Balls and banquets
had for weeks kept the court in a whirl and Paris in continual excitement, and,
wearied with this saturnalia, Francis had gone to Picardy for repose. Margaret
thus was mistress of the situation. She summoned Roussel to her presence, and
told him that he must proclaim the "great tidings" to the population of Paris
from its pulpits. The timid evangelist shook like aspen when this command was
laid upon him. He remonstrated: he painted the immense danger: he acknowledged
that it was right that the Gospel should be preached, but he was not the man;
let Margaret find some more intrepid evangelist. The queen, however, persisted.
She issued her orders that the churches of Paris should be opened to Roussel.
But she had reckoned without her host. The Sorbonne lifted its haughty head and
commanded that the doors of the churches should be kept closed. The queen and
the Sorbonne were now in conflict, but the latter carried the day. These
Sorbonnists could be compared only to some of old, who professed to be the
door-keepers of the kingdom of heaven, but would neither go in themselves, nor
permit those that would to enter.
Margaret now bethought her of an
expedient which enabled her to turn the flank of the doctors. She was resolved
to have the Gospel preached in the capital of France, and to have it preached
now; it might be the turning-point of its destiny, and surely it was a likelier
way to establish the Reform than that of diplomatists, who were seeking to do so
by leagues and battles, if the Sorbonnists were masters in the city, Margaret
was mistress in the palace. She accordingly extemporised a chapel in the Louvre,
and told Roussel that he must preach in it. This was a less formidable task than
holding forth in the city pulpits. The queen publicly announced that each day at
a certain hour a sermon would be preached under the royal roof, and that all
would be welcome from the peer downwards. The Parisians opened their eyes in
wonder. Here was something till now unheard of the king's palace turned into a
Lutheran conventicle! When the hour came a crowd of all ranks was seen streaming
in at the gates of the Louvre, climbing its staircase, and pressing on through
the antechambers to the saloon, where, around Roussel, sat the King and Queen of
Navarre, and many of the grandees of France. The preacher offered a short
prayer, and then read a portion of Scripture, which he expounded with clearness
and great impressiveness. The result bore testimony to the wisdom of Roussel and
the power of the truth. A direct assault on the Papacy would but have excited
the combative faculties of his hearers, the exposition of the truth awakened
their consciences.
Every day saw a greater crowd gathering in the chapel.
The saloon could no longer contain the numbers that came, and antechambers and
corridors had to be thrown open to give enlarged space to the multitude. The
assembly was as brilliant as it was numerous. Nobles, lawyers, men of letters,
and wealthy merchants were mingled in the stream of bourgeoisie and artisans
that each day, at the appointed hour, flowed in at the royal gates, and devoutly
listened under the gorgeous roof of the Louvre to preaching so unwonted. Verily,
he would have been a despondent man who, at that hour, would have doubted the
triumph of the good cause in France.
Margaret, emboldened by the success
which had attended her experiment, returned to her first idea, which was to get
possession of the churches, turn out the monks, and for their ribald harangues
substitute the pure Gospel. She wrote to her brother, who was still absent, and
perhaps not ill-pleased to be so, making request to have the churches placed at
her disposal. Francis granted her wish to the extent of permitting her the use
of two of the city churches. He was willing to do Protestantism this service,
being shrewd enough to see that his negotiations with English and German
Protestants would speed none the worse, and that it might equally serve his
purpose to terrify the Pope by the possible instant defection of France from its
"obedience" to the "Holy See." One of the churches was situated in the quarter
of St. Denis, and Margaret sent the Augustine monk Courault to occupy it, around
whom there daily assembled a large and deeply impressed congregation gathered
from the district. Berthaud, also an Augustine, occupied the pulpit of the other
church put by Francis at Margaret's disposal.[1] A fountain of living water
had the Queen of Navarre opened in this high place; inexpressible delight filled
her soul as she thought that soon this refreshing stream would overflow all
France, and convert the parched and weary land into a very garden. It was the
season of Easter, and never had Lent like this been kept in Paris. The city,
which so lately had rung from one end to the other with the wild joy and guilty
mirth of the Carnival, was now not only penitent, but evangelical. "The churches
were filled," says the historian Crespin, "not with formal auditors, but with
men who received the glad tidings with great joy.
Drunkards had become
sober, the idle industrious, the disorderly peaceful, and libertines had grown
chaste." Three centuries and more have rolled over Paris since then. Often, in
the course of that time, has that city been moved, excited, stricken, but never
in such sort as now. The same Spirit which, in the days of Noah's preaching,
strove with the antediluvians, then shut up, as in prison, under the doom of the
coming deluge, unless they repented, was manifestly striving, at this hour, with
the men of Paris and of France, shut up, as in a prison, under a sentence which
doomed them, unless they escaped by the door that Protestantism opened to them,
to sink beneath the fiery billows of war and revolution.
What, meanwhile,
were the doctors of the Sorbonne about? Were they standing by with shut mouths
and folded arms, quietly looking on, when, as it must have seemed to them, the
bark of Peter was drifting to destruction? Did they slumber on their
watch-tower, not caring that France was becoming Lutheran? Far from it. They
gave a few days to the hearing of the report of their spies, and then they
raised the alarm. A flood of heresy, like the flood of waters that drowned the
old world, was breaking in on France. They must stop it; but with what? The
stake. "Let us burn Roussel," said the fiery Beda, "as we burned Berquin."[2] The king was applied to
for permission; for powerful as was the Sorbonne, it hardly dared drag the
preacher from the Queen of Navarre's side without a warrant from Francis. The
king would interfere neither for nor against.
They applied to the
chancellor. The chancellor referred them to the archbishop, Du Bellay. He too
refused to move. There remained a fourth party to whom they now resolved to
carry their appeal the populace. If they could carry the population of Paris
with them they should yet be able to save Rome. With this object an agitation
was commenced, in which every priest and monk had to bear his part. They sent
their preachers into the pulpits. Shouting and gesticulating these men awoke,
now the anger, now the horror of their fanatical hearers, by the odious epithets
and terrible denunciations which they hurled against Lutheranism. They poured a
host of mendicants into the houses of the citizens. These, as instructed
beforehand, while they filled their wallets, dropped seditious hints that "the
Pope was above the king," adding that if matters went on as they were doing the
crown would not long adorn the head of Francis.
Still further to move the
people against the queen's preachers, processions were organized in the streets.
For nine days a crowd of penitents, with sackcloth on their loins and ashes on
their heads, were seen prostrate around the statue of St. James, loudly
imploring the good saint to stretch out his staff, and therewith smite to the
dust the hydra that was lifting up its abhorred head in France.
Nor did
the doctors of the Sorbonne agitate in vain. The excitable populace were
catching fire. Fanatical crowds, uttering revolutionary cries, paraded the
streets, and the Queen of Navarre and her Protestant coadjutors, seeing the
matter growing serious, sent to tell the king the state of the
capital.
The issue, in the first instance, was a heavy blow to the
agitators. The king's pride had been touched by the attack which the Romanists
had made on the prerogative, and he ordered that Beda, and the more inflammatory
spirits who followed him, should be sent into banishment.[3]
It was a trial of
strength, not so much between Evangelism and Romanism as between the court and
the university, and the Sorbonne had to bow its proud head. But the departure of
Beda did not extinguish the agitation; the fire he had kindled continued to burn
after he was gone. Not in a day were the ignorance and fanaticism, which had
been ages a-growing, to be extirpated: fiery placards were posted on the houses;
ribald ballads were sung in the streets.
"To the stake! to the stake! the
fire is their home; As God hath commanded, let justice be done,"
was the
refrain of one of these unpolished but cruel productions. Disputations, plots,
and rumors kept the city in a perpetual ferment. The Sorbonnists held daily
councils; leaving no stone unturned; they worked upon the minds of the leading
members of the Parliament of Paris, and by dint of persistency and union, they
managed to rally to their standard all the ignorant, the fanatical, and the
selfish that is, the bulk of the population of the capital. The Protestant
sermons were confirmed for some time; many conversions took place, but the
masses remained on the side of Rome.
This was the CRISIS of France the
day of its special visitation. More easily than ever before or since might
France have freed its soul from the yoke of Rome, and secured for all coming
time the glorious heritage of Protestant truth and liberty. This was, in fact,
its second day of visitation.
The first had occurred under Lefevre and
Farel. That day had passed, and the golden opportunity that came with it had
been lost. A second now returned, for there in the midst of Paris were the feet
of them that "publish peace," and that preach "the opening of the prison to them
that are bound." What all auspicious and blessed achievement if Margaret had
been able to win the population of Paris to the Gospel! Paris won, France would
have followed. It needed but this to crown its many happy qualities, and make
France one of the most delightful lands on earth a land full of all
terrestrial good things; ennobled, moreover, by genius, and great in art as in
arms. But Paris was deaf as adder to the voice of the charmer, and from that
hour the destiny of France was changed. A future of countless blessings was
fatally transformed into a future of countless woes. We behold woe on woe rising
with the rising centuries, we had almost said with the rising years. If for a
moment its sun looks forth, lo! there comes another tempest from the abyss,
black as night, and bearing on its wings the fiery shower to scorch the
miserable land. The St. Bartholomew massacre and civil wars of the sixteenth
century, the dragonnades of the seventeenth, the revolution of the eighteenth,
and the communism of the nineteenth are but the more notable outbursts of that
revolving storm which for 300 years has darkened the heavens and devastated the
land of France.
Paris had made its choice. And as in old time when men
joined hands and entered into covenant they ratified the transaction by
sacrifice, Paris sealed its engagement to abide by the Pope in the blood of a
disciple of the Gospel. Had the Sorbonne been more completely master of the
situation, Roussel would have been selected as the sacrifice; but he was too
powerfully protected to permit the priests venturing on burning him, and a
humbler victim had to be found. A Dominican friar, known by the name of Laurent
de la Croix, had come to the knowledge of the Gospel in
Paris.
Straightway he threw off his cowl and cloak and monkish name, and
fled to Geneva, where Farel received him, and more perfectly instructed him in
the Reformed doctrines. To great natural eloquence he now added a clear
knowledge and a burning zeal. Silent he could not remain, and Switzerland was
the first scene of his evangelizing efforts. But the condition of poor France
began to lie heavy on his heart, and though he well knew the perils he must
brave, he could not restrain his yearnings to return and preach to his
countrymen that Savior so dear to himself. Crossing the frontier, and taking the
name of Alexander, he made his way to Lyons. Already Protestantism had its
disciples in the city of Peter Waldo, and these gave a warm welcome to the
evangelist. He began to preach, and his power to move the hearts of men was
marvelous. In Lyons, the scene of Irenaeus' ministry, and the seat of a Church
whose martyrs were amongst the most renowned of the primitive age, it seemed as
if the Gospel, which here had lain a thousand years in its sepulcher, were
rising from the dead. Alexander preached every day, this hour in one quarter of
the city and the next in the opposite.[4] It began to be manifest
that some mysterious influence was acting on the population. The agents of the
priests were employed to scent it out; but it seemed as if the preacher, whoever
he was, to his other qualities added that of invisibility. His pursuers, in
every case, arrived to find the sermon ended, and the preacher gone, they knew
not whither. This success in baffling pursuit made his friends in time less
careful. Alexander was apprehended. Escorted by bowmen, and loaded with chains,
he was sent to Paris.
The guard soon saw that the prisoner they had in
charge was like no other that had ever before been committed to their keeping.
Before Paris was reached, the captain of the company, as well as several of its
members, had, as the result of their prisoner's conversation with them, become
converts to the Gospel. As he pursued his journey in bonds, Alexander preached
at the inns and villages where they halted for the night. At every stage of the
way he left behind him trophies of the Protestant faith.
The prisoner was
comforted by the thought that his Master had turned the road to the stake into a
missionary progress, and if in a few days he should breathe his last amid the
flames, others would rise from his ashes to confess the truth when he could no
longer preach it.
Arrived in Paris, he was brought before the Parliament.
The prisoner meekly yet courageously confessed the Reformed faith. He was first
cruelly tortured. Putting his limbs in the boot, the executioners drove in the
wedges with such blows that his left leg was crushed. Alexander groaned aloud.
"O God," he exclaimed, says Crespin, "there is neither pity nor mercy in these
men! Oh, that I may find both in thee!" "Another blow," said the head
executioner. The martyr seeing Budaeus among the assessors, and turning on him a
look of supplication, said, "Is there no Gamaliel here to moderate the cruelty
they are practicing on me?"[5]
Budaeus, great in
the schools, but irresolute in the matters of the Gospel, fixing an eye of pity
on Alexander, said, "It is enough: his torture is too much: forbear." His words
took effect. "The executioners," says Crespin, "lifted up the martyr, and
carried him to his dungeon, a cripple."[6] He was condemned to be
burned alive. In the hope of daunting him, his sentence, contrary to the then
usual practice, was pronounced in his presence; but they who watched his face,
instead of fear, saw a gleam of joy shoot, at the instant, athwart it. He was
next made to undergo the ceremony of degradation. They shaved his crown, scraped
his fingertips, and tore off his robe. "If you speak a word," said they, "we
will cut out your tongue;" for about this time, according to the historian
Crespin, this horrible barbarity began to be practiced upon the confessors of
the truth. Last of all they brought forth the rob de fol. When Alexander saw
himself about to be arrayed in this dress, he could not, says Crespin, refrain
from speaking. "O God," said he, "is there any higher honor than to receive the
livery which thy Son received in the house of Herod?"
The martyr was now
attired for the fire. Unable to walk to the place of execution, for one of his
legs had been sorely mangled in the boot, they provided a cart, one usually
employed to convey away rubbish, and placed the martyr in it. As he passed along
from the Conciergerie to the Place Maubert he managed to stand up, and resting
his hands on the sides of the cart and leaning over, he preached to the crowds
that thronged the streets, commending to them the Savior for whom he was about
to die, and exhorting them to flee from the wrath to come. The smile which his
sentence had kindled on his face had not yet gone off it; nay, it appeared to
glow and brighten the nearer he drew to the stake. "He is going to be burned,"
said the onlookers, "and yet no one seems so, happy as he."
Being come to
the place of execution they lifted him out of the cart, placed him against the
stake, and bound him to it with chains. He begged, before they should kindle the
pile, that he might be permitted to say a few more last words to the people.
Leave was given, and breaking into an ecstasy he again extolled that Savior for
whom he was now to lay down his life, and again commended him to those around.
The executioners, as they waited to do their office, gazed with mingled wonder
and fear on this strange criminal. The spectators, among whom was a goodly
number of monks, said, "Surely there is nothing worthy of death in this man,"
and smiting on their breasts, and bewailing his fate, with plenteous tears,
exclaimed, " If this man is not saved, who of the sons of men can be so?"[7] Well might the martyr, as
he saw them weeping, have said, "Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves." A
few sharp pangs, and to him would come joy for ever; but for them, alas! and for
their children, the cry of the blood of the martyr, and of thousands more yet to
be slain, was to be answered in a future dark with woes.
Now that we find
ourselves 300 years from these events, and can look back on all that has come
and gone in Paris since, we can clearly see that the year 1533 was one of the
grand turning-points in the history of France. Between the stake of Berquin and
the stake of Alexander, there were three full years during which the winds of
persecution were holden. During at least two of these years the Gospel was
freely and faithfully preached in the capital; an influence from on High was
plainly at work amongst the people. Five thousand men and women daily passed in
at the gates of the Louvre to listen to Roussel; and numerous churches
throughout the city were opened and filled with crowds that seemed to thirst for
the Water of Life. Many "felt the powers of the world to come." In these events,
Providence put it distinctly to the inhabitants of Paris, "Choose ye this day
whom ye shall serve. Will ye abide by the Papacy, or will ye cast in your lot
with the Reformation?" and the men of Paris as distinctly replied, when the
period of probation had come to an end, "We will abide by the Pope." The choice
of Paris was the choice of France. Scarcely were the flames of Alexander's pile
extinguished, when the sky of that country, which was kindling apace, as the
friends of truth fondly thought, with the glories of the opening day, because
suddenly overcast, and clouds of threatening blackness began to gather. In the
spring of 1534 the churches of Paris were closed, the sermons were suppressed,
300 Lutherans were swept off to prison, and soon thereafter the burnings were
resumed. But the ominous circumstance was that the persecutor was backed by the
populace. Queen Margaret's attempt to win over the population of the capital to
the Gospel had proved a failure, and the consequence was that the Sorbonne, with
the help of the popular suffrage, again set up the stake, and from that day to
this the masses in France have been on the side of Rome.
CHAPTER
12 Back to
Top
CALVIN'S FLIGHT FROM
PARIS.
Out of Paris comes the Reformer The Contrasts of History
Calvin's Interview with the Queen of Navarre Nicholas Cop, Rector of the
Sorbonne An Inaugural Discourse Calvin Writes and Cop Delivers it The
Gospel in Disguise Rage of the Sorbonne Cop flies to Basle The Officers on
their way to Arrest Calvin Calvin is let down by the Window Escapes from
Paris disguised as a Vine-Dresser Arrives in Angouleme Received at the
Mansion of Du Tillet Here projects the Institutes Interview with Lefevre
Lefevre's Prediction.
PEPIN of France was the first of the Gothic princes
to appear before the throne of St. Peter, and lay his kingdom at the feet of the
Pope. As a reward for this act of submission, the "Holy Father" bestowed upon
him the proud title for so have the Kings of France accounted it of "Eldest
Son of the Church." Throughout the thirteen centuries since, and amid much
vicissitude of fortune, France has striven to justify the distinction she bears
by being the firmest pillar of the Papal See. But, as D'Aubigne has observed, if
Paris gave Pepin to the Popedom, it is not less true that Paris gave Calvin to
the Reformation. This is the fact, although Calvin was not born in Paris. The
little Noyon in Picardy had this honor, or disgrace as it accounted it.[1] But if Noyon was the scene
of Calvin's first birth, Paris was the scene of his second birth, and it was the
latter that made him a Reformer. In estimating the influence of the two men, the
pen of Calvin may well be thrown into the scale against the sword of
Pepin.
As the cradle of Moses was placed by the side of the throne of
Pharaoh, the Church's great oppressor, so the cradle of this second Moses was
placed by the side of the chair of Pepin, the "Eldest; Son of the Church," and
the first of those vassal kings who stood round the Papal throne; and from the
court of France, as Moses from the court of Egypt, Calvin went forth to rend the
fetters of his brethren, and ring the knell of their oppressor's power. The
contrasts and resemblances of history are instructive as well as striking. They
shed a beautiful light upon the Providence of God. They show us that the Great
Ruler has fixed a time and a place for every event and for every man; that he
sets the good over against the evil, maintaining a nice and equitable poise
among events, and that while the laws of his working are eternal, the results
are inexpressibly varied.
We have seen Calvin return to Paris in 1529. He
was present in that city during those four eventful years when the novel and
stirring scenes we have narrated were taking place. How was he occupied? He felt
that to him the day of labor had not yet fully arrived; he must prepare against
its approach by reading, by study, and by prayer. In the noisy combats with
which the saloons, the halls of the Sorbonne, and even the very streets were
then resounding, Calvin cared but little to mingle. His ambition was to win
victories which, if less ostentatious, would be far more durable. Like his old
teacher, Mathurin Cordier so wise in his honesty he wished solidly to lay
the foundations, and was not content to rear structures which were sure to
topple over with the first breeze. He desired to baptise men for the stake, to
make converts who would endure the fire. Eschewing the knots of disputants in
the streets, he entered the abodes of the citizens, and winning attention by his
very shyness, as well as by the clearness and sweetness of his discourse, he
talked with the family on the things that belonged to their peace. He had
converted a soul while his friends outside had but demolished a syllogism.
Calvin was the pioneer of all those who, since his day, have labored in the work
of the recovery of the lapsed masses.
However, the fame he shunned did,
the more he fled from it, but the more pursue him. His name was mentioned in the
presence of the Queen of Navarre. Margaret must needs see the young
evangelist.[2] We tremble as we see
Calvin enter the Louvre to be presented at court. They who are in king's houses
wear "soft raiment," and learn to pursue middle courses. If Calvin is to be all
to the Church he must be nothing to kings and queens. All the more do we tremble
at the ordeal he is about to undergo when we reflect that, in combination with
his sternness of principle and uprightness of aim, there are in Calvin a
tenderness of heart, and a yearning, not for praise, but for sympathy, which may
render him susceptible to the blandishments and flatteries of a court. But God
went with him to the palace. Calvin's insight discovered even then, what
afterwards became manifest to less penetrating observers, that, while Margaret's
piety was genuine, it was clouded nevertheless by mysticism, and her opinions,
though sound in the main, were too hesitating and halting to compass a full
Reformation of the Church.
On these accounts he was unable to fully
identify himself with the cause of the Queen of Navarre. Nevertheless, there
were not a few points of similarity between the two which excited a mutual
admiration. There was in both a beautiful genius; there was in both a lofty
soul; there was in both a love of what is pure and noble; and especially there
was in both what is the beginning and end of all piety a deep
heaven-begotten reverence and love of the Savior. Margaret did not conceal her
admiration of the young scholar and evangelist. His eye so steadfast, yet so
keen; his features so calm, yet so expressive of energy; the wisdom of his
utterances, and the air of serene strength that breathed around him betokening
a power within, which, though enshrined in a somewhat slender frame, was
evidently awaiting a future of great achievements won the confidence of the
queen.[3] Calvin was in a fair way
of becoming a frequent visitor at the palace, when an unexpected event drove the
young scholar from Paris, and averted the danger, if ever it had existed, of the
chief Reformer of Christendom becoming lost in the court chaplain.
That
event fell out thus Nicholas Cop, Rector of the Sorbonne, was the intimate
friend of Calvin. It was October, 1533, and the session of the university was to
open on the 1st of next month (All Saints' Day), when Cop was expected to grace
the occasion with an inaugural discourse. What an opportunity, thought Calvin,
of having the Gospel preached in the most public of all the pulpits of
Christendom! He waited on his friend Cop and broke to him his stratagem. But Cop
felt unequal to the task of composing such an address as would answer the end.
It was finally agreed between the two friends that Calvin should write, and that
Cop should read the oration. It was a bold experiment, full of grave risks, of
which its devisers were not unaware, but they had made up their minds to the
dangerous venture.
The 1st of November arrived. It saw a brilliant
assembly in the Church of the Mathurins professors, students, the elite of the
learned men of Paris, a goodly muster of Franciscans, some of whom more than
half suspected Cop of a weakness for Lutheranism, and a sprinkling of the
friends of the new opinions, who had had a hint of what was to happen.
On
a bench apart sat Calvin, with the air of one who had dropped in by the way. Cop
rose, and proceeded amid deep silence to pronounce an oration in praise of
"Christian Philosophy." But the philosophy which he extolled was not that which
had been drawn from the academies of Greece, but that diviner wisdom to reveal
which to man the Immortal had put on mortality. The key-note of the discourse
was the "Grace of God," the one sole fountain of man's renewal, pardon, and
eternal life. The oration, although Protestant in spirit, was very thoroughly
academic. Its noble sentiments were clothed in language clear, simple, yet
majestic.[4]
Blank astonishment
was portrayed on the faces of the most part of the audience at the beginning of
the oration. By-and-by a countenance here and there began to kindle with
delight. Others among the listeners were becoming uneasy on their seats. The
monks knit their brows, and shooting out fiery glances from beneath them,
exchanged whispers with one another. They saw through the thin disguise in which
the rector was trying to veil the Gospel. Spoken on "All Saints' Day," yet not a
word about the saints did that oration contain! It was a desecration of their
festival; an act of treason against these glorious intercessors; a blow struck
at the foundations of Rome: so they judged, and rightly. The assembly rose, and
then the storm burst. Heresy had reached an astounding pitch of audacity when it
dared to rear its head in the very midst of the Sorbonne. It must be struck down
at once.
Cop was denounced to the Parliament, then the supreme judge and
executioner of heretics. Summoned to its bar, he resolved, strong in the
integrity of his cause, and presuming not a little on his position as head of
the first university in Christendom, to obey the citation. He was already on his
way to the Palace of Justice, attired in his robes of office, his beadles and
apparitors preceding him, with their maces and gold-headed staves, when a
friend, pressing through the crowd, whispered into his ear that he was marching
to his death. Cop saw the danger of prosecuting further this duel between the
Parliament and the Sorbonne. He fled to Basle, and so escaped the fate already
determined on for him.[5]
When Cop was gone,
it began to be rumored that the author of the address, which had set Parliament
and the university in flames, was still in Paris, and that he was no other than
Calvin. Such a spirit was enough to set all Christendom on fire: he must be
burned. Already the lieutenant-criminal, Jean Morin, who for some time had had
his eye on the young evangelist,[6] was on his way to
apprehend him. Calvin, who deemed himself safe in his obscurity, was sitting
quietly in his room in the College of Fortret [7] when some of his comrades
came running into his chamber, and urged him to flee that instant. Scarcely had
they spoken when a loud knocking was heard at the outer gate. It was the
officers. Now their heavy tramp was heard in the corridor. Another moment and
Calvin would be on his way to the Conciergerie, to come out of it only to the
stake. That would, indeed, have been a blow to the Reformation, and probably
would have changed the whole future of Christendom. But God interposed at this
moment of peril. While some of his friends held a parley with the officers at
the door, others, seizing the sheets on his bed, twisted them into a rope,
fastened them in the window, and Calvin, catching hold of them, let himself down
into the street of the Bernardins.[8]
Dropped into the
street, the fugitive traversed Paris with rapid steps, and soon reached the
suburbs. His first agitation subsiding, he began to think how he could disguise
himself, knowing that the officers of Morin would be on his track. Espying a
vine-dresser's cottage, and knowing the owner to be friendly to the Gospel, he
entered, and there arranged the plan of his flight. Doffing his own dress, he
put on the coat of the peasant, and, with a garden hoe on his shoulder he set
out on his journey. He went forth not knowing whither he went the pioneer of
hundreds of thousands who in after-years were to flee from France, and to seek
under other skies that liberty to confess the Gospel which was denied them in
their native land. To Calvin the disappointment must have been as keen as it was
sudden.
He had fondly hoped that the scene of his conversion would be the
scene of his labors also. He saw too, as he believed, the Gospel on the eve of
triumphing in France. Was it not preached in the churches of the capital, taught
from some of the chairs of the Sorbonne, and honored in the palace of the
monarch? But God had arranged for both France and Calvin a different future from
that which the young evangelist pictured to himself. The great kingdom of France
was to harden its heart that God might glorify his power upon it, and Calvin was
to go into exile that he might prepare in solitude those great works by which he
was to instruct so many nations, and speak to the ages of the
future.
Turning to the south, Calvin went on towards Orleans, but he did
not stop there. He pursued his way to Tours, but neither did he halt there.
Going onwards still, he traveled those great plains which the Loire and other
streams water, so rich in meadows and tall umbrageous trees, and which are so
loved by the vine, forming then as they do at this day the finest part of that
fine country. After some weeks' wandering, he reached Angouleme, the birth-place
of Margaret of Navarre.[9] Here he directed his steps
to the mansion of the Du Tillets, a noble and wealthy family, high in office in
the State, famed moreover for their love of letters, and with one of whose
members Calvin had formed an acquaintance in Paris. The exile had not
miscalculated. The young Du Tiller, the only one of the family then at home, was
delighted to resume in Angouleme the intercourse begun in Paris. The noble
mansion with all in it was at the service of Calvin.[10]
The mariner whose
bark, pursued by furious winds, is suddenly lifted on the top of some billow
mightier than its fellows, floated in safety over the reef on which it seemed
about to be dashed, and safely landed in the harbor, is not more surprised or
more thankful than Calvin was when he found himself in this quiet and secure
asylum. The exile needed rest; he needed time for reading and meditation; he
found both under this princely and friendly roof. The library of the chateau was
one of the finest of which France, or perhaps any other country, in that age
could boast, containing, it is said, some 4,000 volumes. Here he reposed, but
was not idle. As Luther had been wafted away in the midst of the tempest to rest
awhile in the Wart-burg, so Calvin was made to sit down here and equip himself
for the conflicts that were about to open. Around him were the mighty dead, with
nothing to interrupt his converse with them. An occasional hour would he pass in
communing with his friend the young Louis du Tillet; but even this had to be
redeemed. Nights without sleep, and whole days during which he scarcely tasted
food, would Calvin pass in this library, so athirst was he for knowledge. It was
here that Calvin projected his Institutes, which D'Aubigne styles "the finest
work of the Reformation." Not that he wrote it here; but in this library he
collected the materials, arranged the plan, and it may be penned some of its
passages. We shall have occasion to speak of this great work afterwards; suffice
it here to remark that it was composed on the model of those apologies which the
early Fathers presented to the Roman emperors on behalf of the primitive
martyrs.
Again were men dying at the stake for the Gospel. Calvin felt
that it became him to raise his voice in their defense; but how could he better
vindicate them than by vindicating their cause, and proving in the face of its
enemies and of the whole world that it was the cause of truth? But to plead such
a cause before such an audience was no light matter. He prepared himself by
reading, by much meditation, and by earnest prayer; and then he spoke in the
Institutes with a voice that sounded through Europe, and the mighty
reverberations of which have come down the ages.
An opponent of the
Reformation chancing to enter, in after-years, this famous library, and knowing
who had once occupied it, cast around him a look of anger, and exclaimed, "This
is the smithy where the modern Vulcan forged his bolts; here it was that he wove
the web of the Institutes, which we may call the Koran or Talmud of heresy."[11]
An episode of a
touching kind varied the sojourn of Calvin at Angouleme. Lefevre still survived,
and was living at Nerac, near to Angouleme, enjoying the protection and
friendship of Margaret. Calvin, who yearned to see the man who had first opened
the door of France to the Reformation, set out to visit him. The aged doctor and
the young Reformer met for the first and last time. Calvin was charmed with the
candor, the humility, the zeal, and the loving spirit of Lefevre lights that
appeared to shine the brighter in proportion as he in whom they dwelt drew
towards the tomb. Lefevre, on his part, was equally struck with the depth of
intellect and range of view exhibited by Calvin. A Reformer of loftier stature
than any he had hitherto known stood before him. In truth, the future, as
sketched by the bold hand of Calvin, filled him with something like alarm.
Calvin's Reform went a good way beyond any that Lefevre had ever projected. The
good doctor of Etaples had never thought of discarding the Pope and hierarchy,
but of transforming them into Protestant pastors. He was for uniting the tyranny
of the infallibility with the liberty of the Bible. Calvin by this time had
abandoned the idea of Reforming Catholicism; his rule was the Word of God alone,
and the hoped-for end a new structure on Divine foundations. Nevertheless, the
aged Lefevre grasping his hand, and perhaps recalling to mind his own words to
Farel, that God would send a deliverer, and that they should see it, said,
"Young man, you will be one day a powerful instrument in the Lord's hand; God
will make use of you to restore the kingdom of heaven in France."[12]
CHAPTER
13 Back to
Top
FIRST PROTESTANT ADMINISTRATION OF
THE LORD'S SUPPER IN FRANCE.
Calvin goes to Poictiers Its Society
Calvin draws Disciples round him Re-unions The Gardens of the Basses
Treilles The Abbot Ponthus Calvin's Grotto First Dispensation of the
Lord's Supper in France Formation of a Protestant Congregation Home Mission
Scheme for the Evangelisation of France The Three First Missionaries Their
Labors and Deaths Calvin Leaves Poictiers The Church of Poictiers Present
State and Aspect of Poictiers.
CALVIN had been half-a-year at Angouleme, and now,
the storm having blown over, he quitted it and returned northward to Poictiers.
The latter was then a town of great importance. It was the seat of a flourishing
university, and its citizens numbered amongst them men eminent for their rank,
their learning, or their professional ability. Two leagues distant from the town
is the battlefield where, in 1356, the Black Prince met the armies of France
under John of Valois, and won his famous victory. Here, in the spring of 1534,
we behold a humble soldier arriving to begin a battle which should change the
face of the world. In this district, too, in former times lived Abelard, and the
traces he had left behind him, though essentially skeptical, helped to prepare
the way for Calvin. Thin, pale, and singularly unobtrusive, yet the beauty of
his genius and the extent of his knowledge soon drew around the stranger a
charmed circle of friends.
The Prior of Trois Moutiers, a friend of the
Du Tillets, opened his door to the traveler. The new opinions had already found
some entrance into the learned society of Poictiers; but with Calvin came a new
and clearer light, which soon attracted a select circle of firm
friends.
The chief magistrate, Pierre de La Planche, became his friend,
and at his house he was accustomed to meet the distinguished men of the place,
and under his roof, and sometimes in the garden, the Basses Treilles, did Calvin
expound to them the true nature of the Gospel and the spiritual glory of the
kingdom of heaven, thus drawing them away from idle ceremonies and dead
formulas, to living doctrines by which the heart is renewed and the life
fructified. Some contemned the words spoken to them, others received them with
meekness and joy. Among these converts was Ponthus, abbot of a Benedictine
convent in the neighborhood of Poictiers, and head of a patrician family.[1] Forsaking a brilliant
position, he was the first abbot in France who openly professed himself a
disciple of the Reformed faith. Among his descendants there have been some who
gave their lives for the Gospel; and to this day the family continue steadfastly
on the side of Protestantism, adorning it by their piety not less than by their
rank.[2]
It was at Poictiers
that the evangelisation of France began in a systematic way. The school which
Calvin here gathered round him comprehended persons in all conditions of life
canons, lawyers, professors, counts, and tradesmen. They discoursed about Divine
mysteries as they walked together on the banks of the neighboring torrent, the
Clain, or as they assembled in the garden of the Basses Treilles, where, like
the ancient Platonists, they often held their re-unions. There, as the Papists
have said, were the first beginnings in France of Protestant conventicles and
councils.[3] "As it was in a garden,"
said the Roman Catholics of Poictiers, "that our first parents were seduced, so
are these men being enchanted by Calvin in the garden of the Basses Treilles."[4]
By-and by it was
thought prudent to discontinue these meetings in the Basses Treilles, and to
seek some more remote and solitary place of re-union. A deep and narrow ravine,
through which rolls the rivulet of the Clain, winds past Poictiers. Its rocks,
being of the limestone formation, abound in caves, and one of the roomiest of
these, then known as the "Cave of Benedict," but which from that day to this has
borne the name of "Calvin's Grotto," was selected as the scene of the future
gatherings of the converts.[5] It was an hour's walk from
the town. Dividing into groups, each company, by a different route, found its
way to the cave. Here prayer was offered and the Scriptures expounded, the
torrent rolling beneath, and the beetling rocks and waving trees concealing the
entrance. In this grotto, so far as the light of history serves, was the Lord's
Supper celebrated for the first time in France after the Protestant fashion.[6] On an appointed day the
disciples met here, and Calvin, having expounded the Word and offered prayer,
handed round the bread and cup, of which all partook, even as in the upper room
at Jerusalem sixteen centuries before. The place had none of the grandeurs of
cathedral, but "the glory of God and the Lamb" lent it beauty. No chant of
priest, no swell of organ accompanied the service, but the devotion of contrite
hearts, in fellowship with Christ, was ascending from that rocky chamber, and
coming up before the throne in heaven.
Often since have the children of
the Reformation assembled in the dens and caves, in the forests, wildernesses,
and mountains of France, to sing their psalm and celebrate their worship; and He
who disdains the gorgeous temple, which unholy rites defile, has been present
with them, turning the solitude of the low-browed cave into an august
presence-chamber, in which they have seen the glory and heard the voice of the
Eternal.
Calvin now saw, as the fruit of his labors, a little Protestant
congregation in Poictiers. This did not content him; he desired to make this
young Church a basis of evangelisation for the surrounding provinces, and
ultimately for the whole kingdom. One day in the little assembly he said, "Is
there any one here willing to go and give light to those whom the Pope has
blinded?"[7] Jean Vernon, Philip Veron,
and Albert Babinot stood up and offered themselves for this work. Veron and
Babinot, turning their steps to the south and west, scattered the good seed in
those fertile provinces and great cities which lie along the course of the
Garonne. In Toulouse and Bordeaux they made many disciples. Obeying Calvin's
instructions they sought to win the teachers of the youth, and in many cases
they entirely succeeded; so that, as we find the staunch Roman Catholic Raemond
complaining, "the minister was hid under the cloak of the magister," "the young
were lost before they were aware of their danger," and "many with only down on
their chins were so incurably perverted, that they preferred being roasted over
a slow fire to renouncing their Calvinism."[8] Jean Vernon remained at
Poictiers, where he found an interesting field of labor among the students at
the university. It was ever the aim of Calvin to unite religion and science. He
knew that when these are divorced we have a race of fanatics on the one side,
and of sceptics on the other; therefore, of his little band, he commanded one to
abide at the university seat; and of the students not a few embraced the
Reformed faith. These three missionaries, combining prudence with activity, and
escaping the vigilance of the priests, continued to evangelise in France to
their dying day. Veron and Babinot departed in peace; Vernon was seized as he
was crossing the Alps of Savoy, and burned at Chambery. This was the first
home-mission set agoing in modern times. After a stay of barely two months
Calvin quitted Poictiers, going on by way of Orleans and Paris to Noyon, his
birth-place, which he visited now for the last time.
But he did not leave
Poictiers as he had found it. There was now within its walls a Reformed Church,
embracing many men distinguished by their learning, occupying positions of
influence, and ready to confess Christ, if need were amid the flames.[9]
It is deeply
interesting to observe the condition at this day of a city around which the
visit of Calvin has thrown so great an interest, and whose Church, founded by
his hands, held no inconspicuous place among the Protestant Churches of France
in the early days of the Reformation.[10]
Poictiers, we dare
say, like the city of Aosta in Italy, is in nowise proud of this episode in its
history, and would rather efface than perpetuate the traces of its illustrious
visitor; and, indeed, it has been very successful in doing so. We question
whether there be now a dozen persons in all Poictiers who know that the great
chief of the Reformation once honored it by his residence, and that there he
laid the foundations of a Protestant Church which afterwards gave martyrs to the
Gospel. Poictiers is at this day a most unexceptionably Roman Catholic city, and
exhibits all the usual proofs and concomitants of genuine Roman Catholicism in
the dreariness and stagnation of its streets, and the vacuity and ignorance to
be read so plainly on the faces of its inhabitants. The landscape around is
doubtless the same as when Calvin went in and out at its gates. There is the
same clear, dry, balmy sky; there is the same winding and picturesque ravine,
with the rivulet watering its bottom, and its sides here terraced with vines,
there overhung with white limestone rocks, while cottages perched amid
fruit-trees, and mills, their wheels turned by the stream, are to be seen along
its course. East and west of the town lie outspread those plains on which the
Black Prince, in the fourteenth century, marshalled his bowmen, and where French
and English blood flowed in commingled torrents, and where, 200 years later,
Calvin restored to its original simplicity that rite which commemorates an
infinitely greater victory than hero ever achieved on earth. Within its old
limits, unchanged since the times of Calvin, is the town itself. Here has
Poicfiers been sitting all this long while, nursing its orthodoxy till little
besides is left it to nurse.
Manufactures and commerce have left it; it
has but a scanty portion of the corn and wine which the plains around yield to
others. Its churches and edifices have grown hoary and tottering; the very
chimes of its bells have a weird and drowsy sound; and its citizens, silent,
listless, and pensive, look as if they belonged to the fifteenth century, and
had no light to be seen moving about in the nineteenth.
In the center of
Poictiers is a large quadrangular piazza, a fountain in the middle of it, a
clock-tower in one of its angles, and numerous narrow lanes running out from it
in all directions. These lanes are steep, winding, and ill-paved.
In one
of these lanes, but a little way from the central piazza, is a venerable pile of
Gothic architecture, as old, at least, as the days of Calvin, and which may have
served as the college amongst whose professors and students he found his first
disciples. Its gables, turned to the street, show to the passer-by its rich
oriels; and pleasant to the eye is its garden of modest dimensions, with its bit
of velvet sward, and its trees, old and gnarled, but with life enough in their
roots to send along their boughs, in spring, a rush of rich massy
foliage.
A little farther off from the Piazza, in another lane which
attains the width of a street, with an open space before it, stands the
Cathedral, by much the most noticeable of all the buildings of Poictiers. Its
front is a vast unrolled scroll of history, or perhaps we ought to say of
biography. It is covered from top to bottom with sculptures, the subjects
extremely miscellaneous, and some of them not a little grotesque. The lives of
numerous Scripture heroes patriarchs, warriors, and kings are here depicted,
being chiselled in stone, while in the alternate rows come the effigies of
saints, and Popes, and great abbots; and, obtruding uncouthly among these
venerable and dignified personages, are monsters of a form and genus wholly
unknown to the geologist. A rare sight must this convention of ante-diluvians,
of mediaeval Popes, and animals whose era it is impossible to fix, have
presented when in the prime of its stony existence. But the whole goodly
assemblage, under the influence of the weather, is slowly passing into oblivion,
and will by-and-by disappear, leaving only the bare weather-worn sand-stone,
unless the chisel come timeously to the rescue, and give the worthies that
figure here a new lease of life.
Calvin must sometimes have crossed the
threshold of this Cathedral and stood under this roof. The interior is plain
indeed, offering a striking contrast to the gorgeous grotesqueness of the
exterior. The walls, covered with simple whitewash, are garnished with a few
poor pictures, such as a few pence would buy at a print-seller's. The usual nave
and aisle are wanting, and a row of stone pillars, also covered with whitewash,
run along the center of the floor and support the roof of the edifice. It had
been well if Poictiers had continued steadfast in the doctrine taught it by the
man who entered its gates in the March of 1534. Its air at this hour would not
have been so thick, nor its streets so stagnant, nor its edifices so crumbling;
in short, it would not have been lying stranded now, dropped far astern in the
world's onward march.
CHAPTER
14 Back to
Top
CATHERINE DE MEDICI.
St.
Paul Calvin Desire to Labor in Paris Driven from this Field Francis I.
Intrigues to Outmanoeuvre Charles V. Offers the Hand of his Second Son to the
Pope's Niece Joy of Clement VII. The Marriage Agreed on Catherine de
Medici Rise of the House of Medici Cosmo I. His Patronage of Letters and
Scholars Fiesole Descendants of Cosmo Clement VII. Birth of Catherine de
Medici Exposed to Danger Lives to Mount the Throne of France Catherine as
a Girl Her Fascination Her Tastes Her Morals Her Love of Power;
etc.
ST. PAUL when converted fondly hoped to abide at
Jerusalem, and from this renowned metropolis, where the Kings of Judah had
reigned, where the prophets of Jehovah and One greater than all prophets had
spoken, he purposed to spread abroad the light among his countrymen. But a new
dispensation had commenced, and there must be found for it a new
center.
In Judaea, Paul would have had only the Synagogue for his
audience, and his echoes would have died away on the narrow shore of Palestine.
He must speak where his voice would sound throughout the world. He must carry
the Gospel of his master through a sphere as wide as that which the Greek
philosophy had occupied, and subjugate by the power of the Cross tribes as
remote as those Rome had vanquished by the force of her arms.
And so,
too, was it with one who has been styled the second Paul of the Christian
dispensation. The plan which Calvin had formed to himself of his life's labors,
after his conversion, had Paris and France as its center. Nearest his heart, and
occupying the foreground in all his visions of the future, was his native land.
It needed but the Gospel to make France the first of the nations, and its throne
the mightiest in Europe.
And the footing the Gospel had already obtained
in that land seemed to warrant these great expectations. Had not the Gospel
found martyrs in France, and was not this a pledge that it would yet triumph, on
the soil which their blood had watered? Had not the palace opened its gates to
welcome it? More wonderful still, it was forcing its way, despite the prejudice
and pride of ages, into the halls of the Sorbonne. The many men of letters which
France now contained were, with scarce an exception, favorable to the
Reformation. The monarch, it is true, had not yet decided; but Margaret, so
sweet in disposition, so sincere in her Protestant faith, would not be wanting
in her influence with her brother, and thus there was ground to hope that when
Francis did decide his choice would be given in behalf of Protestantism. So
stood the matter then. Was it wonderful that Calvin should so linger around
Paris, and believe that he saw in it the field of his future labors? But ever
and anon, as he came back to it, and grasping the seed-basket, had begun again
to sow, the sky would darken, the winds would begin to howl, and he was forced
to flee before a new outburst of the tempest. At last he began to understand
that it was not the great kingdom of France, with its chivalrous monarch and its
powerful armies, that God had chosen to sustain the battle of the Reformation. A
handful only of the French people had the Reformation called to follow it, whose
destined work was to glorify it on their own soil by the heroism of the stake,
and to help to sow it in others by the privations and sacrifices of exile. But
before speaking of Calvin's third and last flight from Paris, let us turn to an
incident big with the gravest consequences to France and Christendom.
The
Pope, Spain, and France, the three visible puissances of the age, were by turns
the allies and the adversaries of one another. The King of France, who was
constantly scheming to recover by the arts of diplomacy those fair Italian
provinces which he had lost upon the battle-field, was now plotting against
Charles of Spain. The emperor, on his way to Augsburg, was at this moment
closeted, as we have already related, with the Pope at Bologna.[1] Francis, who was not
ignorant of these things, would frequently ask himself, "Who can tell what evil
may be brewing against France? I shall out-manoeuvre the crafty Charles; I shall
detach the Pope from the side of Spain, and secure him for ever to France;"
for in those days the Pontiff, as a dynastic power, counted for more than he
afterwards did.
Francis thought that he had hit on a capital device for
dealing a blow to his rival. What was it? The Pope, Clement VII., of the House
of Medici, had a niece, a little fairy girl of fourteen; he would propose
marriage between this girl and his second son, Henry, Duke of Orleans. The Pope,
he did not doubt, would grasp at the brilliant offer; for Clement, he knew, was
set on the aggrandisement of his family, and this marriage would place it among
the royal houses of Europe. But was Francis I. in earnest? Would the King of
France stoop to marry his son to the descendant of a merchant? Yes, Francis
would digest the mortification which this match might cause him for the sake of
the solid advantages, as he believed them to be, which it would bring with it.
He would turn the flank of Charles, and take his revenge for Pavia. Had Francis
feared the God of hosts as much as he did the emperor, and been willing to stoop
as low for the Gospel as for the favor of the Pope, happy had it been for both
himself and his kingdom.
Clement, when the offer was made to him, could
scarce believe it.[2] He was in doubt this
moment; he was in ecstasy the next. The emperor soon discovered the affair, and
foreseeing its consequences to himself, endeavored to persuade the Pope that the
King of France was insincere, and counselled him to beware of the snake in the
grass. The ambassadors of the French King, the Duke of Albany and the Cardinals
Tournon and Gramont, protested that their master was in earnest, and pushed on
the business till at last they had finished it. It was concluded that this girl,
Catherine de Medici by name, should be linked with the throne of France, and
that the blood of the Valois and the Medici should henceforth be mixed. The Pope
strode through his palace halls, elate at the honor which had so unexpectedly
come to his house, and refused to enter the league which the emperor was
pressing him to form with him against Francis, and would have nothing to do with
calling a Council for which Charles was importuning him.[3] And the King of France, on
his part, thought that if he had stooped it had been to make a good bargain. He
had stipulated that Catherine should bring with her as her dowry, Parma,
Florence, Pisa, Leghorn, Modena, Urbino, and Reggio, besides the Duchy of Milan,
and the Lordship of Genoa. This would leave little unrecovered of what had been
lost on the field of Pavia. The Pope promised all without the least hesitation.
To Clement it was all the same much or little for he had not the slightest
intention of fulfilling aught of all that he had undertaken.[4]
Let us visit the
birth-place of this woman the natal lair of this tigress. Her cradle was
placed in one of the most delicious of the Italian vales. Over that vale was
hung the balmiest of skies, and around it rose the loveliest of mountains,
conspicuous among which is the classic Fiesole. The Arno, meandering through it
in broad pellucid stream, waters it, and the olive and cypress clothe its bosom
with a voluptuous luxuriance. In this vale is the city of Florence, and here, in
the fifteenth century, lived Cosmo, the merchant. Cosmo was the founder of that
house from which was sprung the little bright-eyed girl who bore the name of
Catherine de Medici a name then innocent and sweet as any other, but destined
to gather a most unenviable notoriety around it, till it has become one of the
most terrific in history, the mention of which evokes only images of tragedies
and horrors.
With regard to her famous ancestor, Cosmo, he was a
merchant, we have said, and his ships visited the shores of Greece, the harbors
of Egypt, and the towns on the sea-coast of Syria. It was the morning of the
Renaissance, and this Florentine merchant had caught its spirit. He gave
instructions to his sailing-masters, when they touched at the ports of the
Levant and Egypt, to make diligent inquiry after any ancient manuscripts that
might still survive, whether of the ancient pagan literature, or of the early
Christian theology. His wishes were carefully attended to; and when his ships
returned to Pisa, the port of Tuscany, they were laden with a double freight
the produce and fabrics of the countries they had visited, and the works of
learned men which had slumbered for ages in the monasteries of Mount Athos, the
convents of Lebanon, and in the cities and tombs of the Nile. Thus it was that
Cosmo prosecuted, with equal assiduity and success, commerce and letters. By the
first he laid the foundations of that princely house that long reigned over the
Florentine Republic; and by the second he contributed powerfully to the recovery
of the Greek and Hebrew languages, as they in their turn contributed to the
outbreak of evangelical light which so gloriously distinguished the century that
followed that in which Cosmo flourished. The sacred languages restored, and the
Book of Heaven again opened, the pale, chilly dawn of the Renaissance warmed and
brightened into the day of Christianity.
Another event contributed to
this happy turn of affairs. Constantinople had just fallen, and the scholars of
the metropolis of the East, fleeing from the arms of the Turk, and carrying with
them their literary treasures, came to Italy, where they were warmly welcomed by
Cosmo, and entertained with princely hospitality in his villa on Fiesole. The
remains of that villa are still to be seen half-way between the base of the hill
and the Franciscan monastery that crowns its summit, looking down on the
unrivalled dome of Brunelleschi, which even in Cosmo's days adorned the
beautiful city of Florence. The terrace is still pointed out, bordered by
stately cypresses, where Cosmo daily walked, conversing with the illustrious
exiles whom the triumph of barbarian arms had chased from their native East, the
delicious vale of the Arno spread out at their feet, with the clustering towers
of the city and the bounding hills in the nearer view, while the remoter
mountains, rising peak on peak in the azure distance, lent grandeur to the
scene.[5] "In gardens," says Hallam,
"which Tully might have envied, with Ficino, Laudino, and Politian at his side,
he delighted his hours of leisure with the beautiful visions of the Platonic
philosophy, for which the summer stillness of an Italian sky appears the most
congenial accompaniment."
His talents, his probity, and his great wealth
placed Cosmo at the head of Florence, and gave him the government of the Duchy
of Tuscany. His grandson Lorenzo better known as Lorenzo the Magnificent
succeeded him in his vast fortune, his literary and aesthetic tastes, and his
government of the duchy. Under Lorenzo the Medician family may be said to have
fully blossomed. Lorenzo had three sons Giuliano, Pietro, and Giovanni. The
last (John) became Pope under the title of Leo X. He inherited his father's
taste for magnificence, and the Tuscan's love of pleasure. Under him the Vatican
became the gayest court in all Christendom, and Rome a scene of revelry and
delights not surpassed, if equalled, by any of the capitals of Europe. Leo's
career has already come before us. He was far from "seeing the day of Peter,"
but he lived to see Luther's day, and went to the tomb as the morning-light of
the Reformation was breaking over the world, closing with his last breath the
halcyon era of the Papacy. He was succeeded in the chair of St. Peter, after the
short Pontificate of Adrian of Utrecht, by another member of the same family of
Medici, Giulio, a son of the brother of Leo X., who ascended the Papal throne
under the title of Clement VII.
When Clement took possession of the Papal
chair, he found a storm gathering round it. To whatever quarter of the sky his
eye was turned, there he saw lowering clouds portending furious tempests in the
future.
Luther was thundering in Germany; the Turk was marshalling his
hordes and unfurling his standards on the borders of Christendom; nearer home,
at his own gates almost, Francis and Charles were settling with the sword the
question which of the two should be master of that fair land which both
meanwhile were laying waste. The infuriated Germans, now scarcely amenable to
discipline, were hanging like tempest on the brow of Alp, and threatening to
descend on Rome and make a spoil of all the wealth and art with which the lavish
Pontificate of Leo X. had enriched and beautified it.
To complete the
unhappiness of the time the plague had broken out at Rome, and with pomps,
festivities, and wassail, which went on all the same, were mingled corpses,
funerals, and other gloomy insignia of the tomb. The disorders of Christendom
had come to a head; all men demanded a remedy, but no remedy was found, and
mainly for this reason, that no one understood that a cure to be effectual must
begin with one's self. Men thought of reforming the world, but leaving the men
that composed it as they were.
The new Pope saw very plainly that the air
was thick and the sky lowering, but having vast confidence in his own consummate
craft and knowledge of business, he set about, the task of replacing the world
upon its foundations. This onerous work resolved itself into four
divisions.
First, he had the abuses of his court and capital to correct;
secondly, he had the poise to maintain between Spain and France, taking care
that neither Power became too strong for him; thirdly, he had the Turk to drive
out of Christendom; and fourthly, and mainly, he had the Reformation to
extinguish; and this last gave him more concern than all the rest. His attention
to business was unwearied; but labor as he might it would not all do. The
mischiefs of ages could not be cured in a day, even granting that Clement had
known how to cure them. But the storm did not come just yet; and Clement
continued to toil and intrigue, to threaten the Turk, cajole the kings, and
anathematise Lutheranism to no other effect than to have the advantage gained by
the little triumph of to-day swept away by the terrible disaster of the
morrow.
That woman who was just stepping upon a scene where she was
destined long and conspicuously to figure, and where she was to leave as her
memorials a throne dishonored and a nation demoralised, here demands a brief
notice. Catherine was the daughter of Lorenzo II.,[6] the grandson of Lorenzo
the Magnificent, who, as we have said, was the grandson of Cosmo I., or Cosmo il
Vecchio, as he is styled at Florence, the founder of the greatness of the
family, and so honourably remembered as the patron of letters and the friend of
scholars. Her mother was Magdeleine de Boulogne, of the Royal House of France.[7] Her father survived her
birth only a few days; her mother, too, died while she was still a child, and
thus the girl, left an orphan, was taken under the care of her relative, Clement
VII. An astrologer was said to have foretold at her birth that the child would
be the ruin of her house; and the vaticination, as may well be believed, wrought
her no good. She was but little cared for, or rather she was put, on purpose, in
the way of receiving harm. She is said to have been placed in a basket, and hung
outside the wall of a castle that was being besieged, in the hope that a chance
arrow might rid them of her, and along with her the calamity which her continued
existence was believed to portend. The missiles struck right and left, leaving
their indentations on the wall, but the basket was not hit, and the child it
enclosed lived on to occupy at a future day the throne of France.
When
she comes before us, in connection with this marriage-scheme, Catherine de
Medici was a gift of fourteen, of diminutive stature, of sylph-like form, with a
fiery light streaming from her eyes. Bright, voluble, and passionate, she
bounded from sport to sport, filling the halls where she played with the chatter
of her talk, and the peals of her merriment. There was about her the power of a
strange fascination, which all felt who came near her, but the higher faculties
which she displayed in after-life had not yet been developed. These needed a
wider stage and a loftier position for their display.
As she grew up it
was seen that she possessed not a few of the good as well as the evil qualities
of the race from which she was sprung. She had a princely heart, and a large
understanding. To say that she was crafty, and astute, and greedy of power, and
prudent, patient, and plodding in her efforts to grasp it, is simply to say that
she was a Medici. She possessed, in no small degree, the literary and aesthetic
tastes of her illustrious ancestor, Cosmo I. She loved splendor as did her
great-grandfather, Lorenzo the Magnificent. She was as prodigal and lavish in
her habits as Leo X.; and withal, as great a lover of pleasure. She filled the
Louvre with scandals, even as Leo had done the Vatican, and from the court
diffused a taint through the city, from which Paris has not been cleansed to
this day.
The penetration and business habits of her uncle we style him
so, but his birth being suspicious, it is impossible to define his exact
relationship Clement VII., she inherited, and the pleasures in which she so
freely indulged do not appear to have dulled the one or interrupted the
other.
Above all, she was noted for the truly Medician feature of an
inordinate love of power. Whoever occupied the throne, Catherine was the real
ruler of France. Most of the occurrences which made the reigns of her husband
and sons so tragical, and blackened so dismally that era of history, had their
birth in her scheming brain. Not that she loved blood for its own sake, as did
some of the Roman Emperors, but her will must be done, and whatever cause or
person stood in her way must take the consequences by the dungeon or the stake,
by the poignard or the poison-cup.
CHAPTER
15 Back to
Top
MARRIAGE OF HENRY OF FRANCE TO
CATHERINE DE MEDICI.
The Pope sets Sail Coasts along to France
Meets Francis I. at Marseilles The Second Son of the King of France Married to
Catherine de Medici Her Promised Dowry The Marriage Festivities Auguries
Clement's Return Voyage His Reflections His Dream of a New Era His Dream
to be Read Backwards His Troubles His Death Catherine Enters France as
Calvin is Driven Out Retrogression of Protestantism Death and Catherine de
Medici Death's Five Visits to the Palace Each Visit Assists Catherine in her
Ascent to Power Her Crimes She Gains no Real Success.
THE marriage is to take place, and accordingly the
Pope embarks at Leghorn, and sets out for the port of Marseilles, where he is to
meet the King of France, and conclude the transaction. Popes have never loved
ships, unless it were the bark of St. Peter, nor cared to sail in any sea save
the sea ecclesiastic; but Clement's anxiety about the marriage overcame his
revulsion to the waves. He sails along the coast of Italy; he passes the Gulf of
Spezzia; he rounds the bold headland of Monte Fino; Genoa is passed; and now the
shore of Nice, where the ridge of Apennine divides Italy from France, is under
his lee, and thus, wafted along over these classic waters by soft breezes, he
enters, in the beginning of October, 1533, the harbor of Marseilles. Catherine
did not accompany him. She tarried at Nice meanwhile, to be at hand when she
should be wanted. The interview between the Pontiff and the king terminated to
the satisfaction of both parties. Francis again stipulated that the bride should
bring as outfit "three rings," the Duchies of Urbino, Milan, and Genoa; and
Clement had no difficulty in promising everything, seeing he meant to perform
nothing. All being arranged, the little Tuscan beauty was now sent for; and amid
the benedictions of the Pope, the congratulations of the courtiers, the firing
of cannon, ringing of bells, and rejoicings of the populace, Catherine de
Medici, all radiant with joy and sparkling with jewels, became the
daughter-in-law of Francis I., and wife of the Duke of Orleans, the future Henry
II.
In the banquet-chamber in which sat Catherine de Medici as the bride
of the future Henry II. of France, well might there have been set a seat for the
skeleton which the Egyptians in ancient times were wont to introduce into their
festal halls. Had that guest sat amid the courtiers at Marseilles, glaring on
them with empty sockets, and mingling his ghastly grin with their gay merriment,
all must have confessed that never had his presence been more fitting, nor his
augury more truly prophetic. Or if this was not clearly seen at the moment, how
plain did it become in after-years, when the bridal torches were exchanged for
martyr-fires, and the marriage-songs were turned into wailings, which ever and
anon rung through France, and each time with the emphasis of a deeper woe! But
before that day should fully come Clement was to sleep in marble; Francis too
was to be borne to the royal vaults of St. Denis, leaving as the curse of his
house and kingdom the once lively laughing little girl whose arrival he
signalised with these vast rejoicings, and who was yet too young to take much
interest in court intrigue, or to feel that thirst for power which was to awaken
in her breast with such terrible strength in years to come.
The marriage
festivities were at an end, and Pope Clement VII. turned his face toward his own
land. He had come as far as to see the utmost borders of the children of the
Reformation, and, like another Balaam, he had essayed to curse them. He had come
doubly armed: he grasped Catherine in the one hand, he held a bull of anathema
in the other; the first he engrafted on France, the second he hurled against the
Lutherans, and having shot this bolt, he betook him again to his galleys. A
second time the winds were propitious. As he sailed along over the blue sea, he
could indulge his reveries undistracted by those influences to which Popes, like
other men, are liable on shipboard. He had taken a new pledge of France that it
should not play the part England was now playing. France was now more than ever
the eldest daughter of the Papacy. Clement, moreover, had fortifed himself on
the side of Spain. To the greatness of that Power he himself, above most men,
had contributed, when he acted as the secretary and adviser of his uncle Leo
X.,[1] but its sovereigns
becoming less the champions and more the masters of the Papacy, Spain caused the
Pope considerable uneasiness. Now, however, it was less likely that the emperor
would press for a Council, the very idea of which was so terrible to the Pope,
that he could scarce eat by day or sleep by night. And so, as the coast of
France sunk behind him and the headlands of Italy rose on his prow, he thought
of the new splendor with which he had invested his house and name, and the
happier days he was now likely to see in the Vatican.
Nevertheless, the
horizon did not clear up: the storm still lowered above Rome. The last year of
Clement's life for he was now drawing toward the grave was the unhappiest he
had yet seen. Not one of all his fond anticipations was there that did not
misgive him. If the dreams of ordinary mortals are to be read backwards, much
more as Clement and even Pontiffs in our own time have experienced are the
dreams of Popes.
The emperor became more pressing for a Council than
ever. The Protestants of Germany, having formed a powerful league, had now a
voice at the political council-table of Christendom. Nay, with his own hands
Clement had been rearing a rampart round them, inasmuch as his alliance with
Francis made Charles draw towards the Protestants, whose friendship was now more
necessary to him. Even the French king, now his ally, could not be depended
upon. Catherine's "three rings" the Pope had not made forthcoming, and Francis
threatened, if they were not speedily sent, to come and fetch them. To fill up
Clement's cup, already bitter enough and brimming over, as one would think, his
two nephews quarrelled about the sovereignty of Florence, and were fighting
savagely with one another. To whatever quarter Clement turned, he saw only
present trouble and portents of worse to come. It was hard to say whether he had
most to dread from his enemies or from his friends, from the heretical princes
of Germany or front the most Christian King of France and the most Catholic King
of Spain.
Last of all, the Pope fell sick. It soon became apparent that
his sickness was unto death, and though but newly returned from a wedding,
Clement had to set about the melancholy task of preparing the ring and robe
which are used at the funeral of a Pope. "Having created thirty cardinals," says
Platina, "and set his house in order, he died the 25th September, 1534, between
the eighteenth and nineteenth hour,[2] having lived sixty-six
years and three months, and held the Papacy ten years, ten months, and seven
days. He was buried," adds the historian, "in St. Peter's; but, in the
Pontificate of Paul III. (his successor), his body was transferred, along with
the remains of Leo X., to the Church of Minerva, and laid in a tomb of
marble."[3] "Sorrow and secret
anguish," says Soriano, brought him to the grave. Ranke pronounces him "without
doubt, the most ill-fated Pope that ever sat on the Papal throne."[4]
Clement now reposed
in marble in the Minerva, but the evil he had done was not "interred with his
bones;" his niece lived after him, and to her for a moment we turn. There are
beings whose presence seems to darken the light, and taint the very soil, on
which they tread. Of the number of these was Catherine de Medici. She was sunny
as her own Italy: but there lurked a curse beneath her gaieties and smiles.
Wherever she had passed, there was a blight. Around her all that was fair and
virtuous and manly, as if smitten by some mysterious and deadly influence, began
to pine and die.
And, moreover, it is instructive to mark how nearly
contemporaneous were the departure of Calvin from France and the entrance into
that country of Catherine de Medici. Scarcely had the gates of Paris shut out
the Reformer, when they were opened to admit the crafty Italian woman. He who
would have been the restorer and savior of his country was chased from it, while
she who was to inoculate it with vice, which first corrupted, and at last sunk
it into ruin, was welcomed to it with demonstrations of unbounded joy.
We
trace a marked change in the destinies of France from the day that Catherine
entered it. Up till this time events seemed to favor the progress of
Protestantism in that country; but the admission of this woman was the virtual
banishment of the Reformation, for how could it, ever mount the throne with
Catherine de Medici sitting upon its steps? and unless the throne were won there
was hardly a hope, in a country where the government was so powerful, of the
triumph of the Reformation in the conversion of the great body of the
nation.
True, the marriage of the king's second son with this orphan of
the House of Medici did not seem an event of the first consequence. Had it been
the Dauphin whom she espoused, she would have been on the fair way to the
throne; but as the wife of Henry the likelihood was that she never would be more
than the Duchess of Orleans. Nor had Catherine yet given unmistakable indication
of those imperious passions inclining and fitting her for rule that were lodged
in her. No one could have foretold at that hour that the girl of fifteen all
radiant with smiles would become the woman of fifty dripping all over with
blood. But from the day that she put her hand into Henry's, all things wrought
for her. Even Death, as D'Aubigne has strikingly observed, seemed to be in
covenant with this woman. To others the "King of Terrors," to Catherine de
Medici he was but the obsequious attendant, who waited only till she should
signify her pleasure, that he might strike whomsoever she wished to have taken
out of her path. How many a visit, during her long occupancy, did the grim
messenger pay to the Louvre! but not a visit did he make which did not assist
her in her ascent to power. He came a first time, and, lo! the Dauphin lay a
corpse, and Henry, Catherine's husband, became the immediate heir to the throne.
He came a second time, and now Francis I. breathes his last. Henry reigns in his
father's stead, and by his side sits the Florentine girl, now Queen of France.
Death came a third time to the Louvre, and now it is Henry II. that is struck
down; but the blow, so far from diminishing, enlarged the power of Catherine,
for from this time she became, with a few brief and exceptional intervals, the
real ruler of France.
Her imbecile progeny sat upon the throne, but the
astute mother governed the country. Death came a fourth time to the palace, and
now it is the weak-minded Francis II. who is carried out a corpse, leaving his
throne to his yet weaker-minded brother, Charles IX. If her son, a mere puppet,
wore the crown, Catherine with easy superiority directed the government. Casting
off the Guises, with whom till now she had been compelled to divide her power,
she stood up alone, the ruler of the land. Even when Death shifted the scenes
for the last time by the demise of Charles IX., it was not to abridge this
woman's influence. Under Henry III., as under all her other sons, it was the
figure of Catherine de Medici that was by far the most conspicuous and terrible
in France. Possessing one of those rare minds which reach maturity at an age
when those of others begin to decay, it was only now, during the reigns of her
last two sons, that she showed all that was in her. She discovered at this
period of her career a shrewder penetration, a greater fertility of resource,
and a higher genius for governing men than she had yet exhibited, and
accordingly it was now that she adventured on her boldest schemes of policy, and
that she perpetrated the greatest of her crimes. But, notwithstanding all her
talent and wickedness, she gained no real success. The cause she espoused did
not triumph eventually, and that which she opposed she was not able to
crush.
CHAPTER
16 Back to
Top
MELANCTHON'S PLAN FOR UNITING
WITTEMBERG AND ROME.
The Laborers Scattered The Cause Advances
The Dread it Inspires Calvin and Catherine A Contrast The Keys and the
Fleur-de-Lis The Doublings of Francis Agreement between Francis and Philip
of Hesse at Bar-le-Duc Campaign Wurtemberg Restored to Christopher Francis
I's Project for Uniting Lutheranism and Romanism Du Bellay's Negotiations with
Bucer Melancthon Sketches a Basis of Union Bucer and Hedio add their Opinion
The Messenger Returns with the Paper to Paris Sensation Council at the
Louvre Plan Discussed An Evangelical Pope.
OF the evangelists who, but a dozen years before the
period at which we are now arrived, had proclaimed the truth in France, hardly
one now survived, or was laboring in that country. Some, like Lefevre, had gone
to the grave by "the way of all men." Others, like Berquin and Pavane, had
passed to it by the cruel road of the stake. Some there were, like Farel, who
had been chased to foreign lands, there to diffuse the light of which France was
showing itself unworthy. Others, whose lot was unhappier still, had apostatised
from the Gospel, seduced by love of the world, or repelled by the terrors of the
stake. But if the earlier and lesser lights had nearly all disappeared, their
place was occupied by a greater; and, despite the swords that were being
unsheathed and the stakes that were being planted, it was becoming evident to
all men that the sun of truth was mounting into the horizon, and soon the whole
firmament would be filled with his light.
The movement caused much
chagrin and torment to the great ones of the earth. They trembled before a power
which had neither war-horse nor battle-axe, but against which all their force
could avail nothing. They saw that mysterious power advancing from victory to
victory; they beheld it scattering the armies that stood up to oppose it, and
recruiting its adherents faster than the fire could consume them; and they could
hardly help seeing in this an augury of a day when that power would "possess the
kingdom and dominion and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven."
This power was none other than the CHRISTIANITY of the first ages, smitten by
the sword of the pagan emperors, wounded in yet more deadly fashion by the
superstition of Rome, but now risen from the dead, and therefore mighty works
did show forth themselves in it.
The two chiefs of the great drama which
was now opening in France had just stepped upon the stage Calvin and Catherine
de Medici. The one was taken from an obscure town in the north of France; the
other came from a city already glorified by the renown of its men of letters,
and the state and power of its princes. The former was the grandson of a cooper;
the latter was of the lineage of the princely House of Tuscany. Catherine was
placed in the Louvre, with the resources of a kingdom at her command; Calvin was
removed outside of France altogether, where, in a small town hidden among the
hills of the Swiss, he might stand and fight his great battle. But as yet
Catherine had not reached the throne, nor was Calvin at Geneva. Death had to
open the way that the first might ascend to power, and years of wandering and
peril had yet to be gone through before the latter should enter the friendly
gates of the capital of the Genevese.
We return for a moment to
Marseilles. Catheline de Medici had placed her cold hand in that of Henry of
Valois, and by the act a new link had been forged which was to bind together,
more firmly than ever, the two countries of Italy and France. The. Keys and the
Fleur-de-lis were united for better for worse. The rejoicings and festivities
were now at an end. The crowd of princes and courtiers, of prelates and monks,
of liveried attendants and men-at-arms, which for weeks had crowded the streets
of Marseilles, and kept it night and day in a stir, had dispersed; and Francis
and Clement, mutually satisfied, were on their way back, each to his own land.
The winds slept, the uneasy Gulf of Lyons was still till the Pontiff's galley
had passed; and as he sailed away over that glassy sea, Clement felt that now
the tiara sat firmer on his head than before, and that he might reckon on
happier days in the Vatican. Alas, how little could he forecast the actual
future! What awaited him at Rome was a shroud and a grave.
Francis I.,
equally overjoyed, but equally mistaken, amused himself, on his journey to
Paris, with visions of the future, arrayed in colors of equal brilliancy. He had
not patience till he should arrive at the Louvre before making a beginning with
these grand projects. He halted at Avignon, that old city on the banks of the
Rhone, which had so often opened its gates to receive the Popes when Rome had
cast them out. Here he assembled his council, and startled its members by
breaking to them his purpose of forming a league with the Protestants of
Germany.[1] Fresh from the embraces of
Clement, this was the last thing his courtiers had expected to hear from their
master. Yet Francis I. was in earnest. One hand had he given to Rome, the other
would he give to the Reformation: he would be on both sides at once.[2] This was very
characteristic of this monarch; divided in his heart unstable in all his
ways continually oscillating but sure to settle on the wrong side in the
end, and to reap, as the fruit of all his doublings, only disgrace to himself
and destruction to his kingdom.
The King of France was, in sooth, at this
moment playing a double game a political league and a religious reform. Of the
two projects the last was the more chimerical, for Francis aimed at nothing less
than to unite Rome and the Reformation. What a strange moment to inaugurate
these schemes, when Europe was still ringing with the echoes of the bull in
which the German heretics had been cursed, and which had been issued by the man
with whom Francis had been closeted these many days past! And not less strange
the spot chosen for the concoction of these projects, a city which was a second
Rome, the very dust of which was redolent of the footprints of the Popes, and
whose streets and palaces recalled the memories of the pride, the luxury, and
the disorders of the Papal court.
The key of the policy of Francis was
his desire to humble his dreaded rival, Charles V. Hence his approach to the
Pope, on the one hand, and to the Protestant princes, on the other. For the
Papacy he did not greatly care; for Lutheranism he cared still less: his own
ascendency was the object he sought.
The political project came first and
sped best. An excellent opportunity for broaching it presented itself just at
this time. Charles V. had carried away by force of arms the young Duke of
Wurtemberg. And not only had he stolen the duke; he had stolen his duchy too,
and annexed it to the dominions of the House of Austria.[3] Francis thought that to
strike for the young duke, despoiled of his ancestral dominions, would be
dealing a blow at Charles V., while he would appear to be doing only a
chivalrous act. It would, moreover, vastly please the German princes, and smooth
his approaches to them. If his recent doings at Marseilles had rendered him an
object of suspicion, his espousal of the quarrel of the Duke of Wurtemberg would
be a counter-stroke which would put him all right with the princes. An incident
which had just fallen out was in the line of these reasonings, and helped to
decide Francis.
The young Duke Christopher had managed to escape from the
emperor in a way which we have narrated in its proper place. He remained for
some time in hiding, and was believed to be dead; but in November, 1532, he
issued a manifesto claiming restoration of his ancestral dominions. The claim
was joyfully responded to by the Protestants of Germany, as well as by his own
subjects of Wurtemberg. This was the opening which now presented itself to the
King of France, ever ready to ride post from Rome to Germany, and back again
with even greater speed and heartier good-will from Germany to Rome.
A
Diet was assembling at Augsburg, to discuss the question of the restoration of
the States of Wurtemberg to their rightful sovereign. The representatives of
Ferdinand were to appear before that Diet, to uphold the cause of Austria.
Francis I. sent Du Bellay as his ambassador, with instructions quietly, yet
decidedly, to throw the influence of France into the opposite scale.[4] Du Bellay zealously
carried out the instructions of his master. He pleaded the cause of Duke
Christopher so powerfully before the Diet, that it decided in favor of his
restoration to Wurtemberg. But the ambassadors of Austria stood firm; if
Wurtemberg was to be reft from their master, and carried over to the Protestant
side, it must be by force of arms. Philip, Landgave of Hesse, met Francis I. at
Bar-le-Duc, near the western frontier of Germany, and there arranged the terms
for a campaign on behalf of the young Duke Christopher. The landgrave was to
supply the soldiers, and the King of France, was to furnish though secretly,
for he did not wish his hand to be seen the requisite money.[5] All three had a different
aim, though uniting in a common action. Philip of Hesse hoped to strengthen
Protestantism by enlarging its territorial area. Du Bellay hoped to make the
coming war the wedge that was to separate Francis from the Pope, and rend the
Ultramontane yoke from the neck of his country. Francis was simply pursuing what
had been his one policy since the battle of Pavia, the humiliation of Charles
V., which he hoped to effect, in this case, by kindling a war between the German
princes and the emperor.
There was another party having interest; this
party now stepped upon the scene. Luther and Melancthon were the representatives
of Protestantism as a religion, as the princes were the representatives of it as
a policy. To make war for the Gospel was to them the object of their utmost
alarm and abhorrence. They exerted all their rhetoric to dissuade the Protestant
princes from drawing the sword. But it was in vain. The war was precipitately
entered upon by Philip. A battle was fought. The German Protestants were
victorious; the Austrian army was beaten, and Wurtemberg, restored to Duke
Christopher, was transferred to the political side of Protestantism.[6]
The political
project of Francis I. had prospered. He had wrested Wurtemberg from Ferdinand,
and through the sides of Austria had hurt the pride of his rival Charles V. This
success tempted him to try his hand at the second project, the religious one. To
mould opinions might not be so easy as to move armies, but the Lutheran fit was
upon Francis just now, and he would try. The Reformation which the French king
meditated consisted only in a few changes on the surface; these he thought would
bring back the Protestants, and heal the broken unity of Rome. He by no means
wished to injure the Pope, much less to establish a religion that would
necessitate a reform of his own life, or that of his courtiers. The first step
was to sound Melancthon, and Bucer, and Hedio, as to the amount of change that
would satisfy them. It was significant that Luther was not approached. It was
Lutheranism with Luther left out that was now entering into negotiations with
Rome. It does not seem to have struck those who were active in setting this
affair on foot, that the man who had created the first Lutheranism could create
a second, provided the first fell back into the old gulf of
Romanism.
Meanwhile, however, the project gave promise of prospering. Du
Bellay, in his way back from Augsburg, had an interview with Bucer at Strasburg;
and, with true diplomatic tact, hinted to the pacific theologian that really it
was not worth his while to labor at uniting the Zwinglians and the Lutherans.
Here was something more worthy of him, a reconcilement of Protestantism and
Romanism. The moment this great affair was mentioned to Bucer, other unions
seemed little in his eyes. Though he should reconcile Luther and Zwingle, the
great rent would still remain; but Rome and the Reformation reconciled, all
would be healed, and the source closed of innumerable, strifes and wars in
Christendom. Bucer, being one of those who have more faith in the potency of
persons than of principles, was overjoyed; if so powerful a monarch as Francis
and so able a statesman as Du Bellay had put their shoulders to this work, it
must needs, he thought, progress.
A special messenger was dispatched to
Melancthon (July, 1534) touching this affair. The deputy found the great doctor
bowed to the earth under an apprehension of the evils gathering over
Christendom. There, first of all, was the division in the Protestant camp; and
there, too, was the cloud of war gathering over Europe, and every hour growing
bigger and blacker. The project looked to Melancthon like a reprieve to a world
doomed to dissolution. The man from whom it came had been in recent and
confidential intercourse with the Pope; and who could tell but that Clement VII.
was expressing his wishes and hopes through the King of France? Even if it were
not so, were there not here the "grand monarchs," the Kings of France and
England, on the side of union? Melancthon took his pen, sat down, and sketched
the basis of the one Catholic Church of the future. In this labor he strove to
be loyal to his convictions of truth. His plan, in brief, was to leave untouched
the hierarchy of Rome, to preserve all her ceremonies of worship, and to reform
her errors of doctrine. This, he admitted, was not all that could be wished, but
it was a beginning, and more would follow.[7] Finishing the paper, he
gave it to the messenger, who set off with it to Francis.
On his way to
Paris the courier halted at Strasburg, and requested Bucer also to put on paper
what he thought ought to form a basis of union between the two Churches. Bucer's
plan agreed in the main with that of Melancthon. The truth was the essential
thing; let us restore that at the foundation, and we shall soon see it
refashioning the superstructure. So said Bucer. There was another Reformer of
name in Strasburg Hedio, a meek but firm man; him also the messenger of
Francis requested to give his master his views in writing. Hedio complied; and
with these three documents the messenger resumed his journey to Paris.
On
his arrival in the capital the papers were instantly laid before the king. There
was no small sensation in Paris; a great event was about to
happen.
Protestantism had spoken its last word. Its ultimatum lay on the
king's table. How anxiously was the opening of these important papers, which
were to disclose the complexion of the future, waited for! Were Rome and
Wittemberg about to join hands? Was a new Church, neither Romanist nor
Protestant, but Reformed and eclectic, about to gather once more within its
bosom all the peoples of Christendom, hushing angry controversies, and
obliterating the lines of contending sects in one happy concord? Or was the
division between the two Churches to be henceforward wider than ever, and were
the disputes that could not be adjusted in the conference-hall to be carried to
the bloody field, and the blazing stake?. Such were the questions that men asked
themselves with reference to the three documents which the royal messenger had
brought back with him from Germany. In the midst of many fears, hope
predominated.
The king summoned a council at the Louvre to discuss the
programme of Melancthon and his two fellow-Reformers. Gathered round the
council-table in the palace were men of various professions, ranks, and aims.
There sat the Archbishop of Paris and other prelates; there sat Du Bellay and a
few statesmen; and there, too, sat doctors of the Sorbonne and men of letters.
Some sincerely wished a Reformation of religion; others, including the king,
made the Reform simply a stalking-horse for the advancement of their own
interests.
The papers were opened and read. All around the table, were
pleased and offended by turns. The color came into the king's face when he found
the Reformers commencing by stating that "a true faith in Christ" was a main
requisite for such a union as was now sought to be attained. But when, farther
on, the Pope's deposing power was thrown overboard, the monarch was appeased.
Prominence was given to the "doctrine of the justification of sinners," nor was
the council displeased when this was ascribed not to "good works," nor the
"rites of priests," but to the "righteousness and blood of Christ;" for had not
the schoolmen used similar language? The question of the Sacrament was a crucial
one. "There is a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist," said the Reformers,
without defining the nature or manner of that presence; but they added, it is
"faith," not the "priest," that gives communion with Christ in the Lord's
Supper. The bishops frowned; they saw at a glance that if the opus operatum were
denied, their power was undermined, and the "Church" betrayed. On neither side
could there be surrender on this point.
The king had looked forward with
some uneasiness to the question of the Church's government. He knew that the
Reformers held the doctrine of the "priesthood of all believers;" this, he
thought, was fatal to order. But, replied the Reformers, the Gospel-church is a
"kingdom of priests," and in a kingdom there must be officers and laws; the
function of priesthood is inherent in all, but the exercise of it appertains
only to those chosen and appointed thereto. The king was reassured; but now it
was the turn of the Protestants at the council-board to feel alarm; for
Melancthon and his fellow-Reformers were willing to go so far on the point of
Church government as to retain the hierarchy. True, its personnel was to undergo
a transformation. All its members from its head downwards were to become
Reformed. The Pope was to be retained, but how greatly changed from his former
self! He was to hold the primacy of rank, but not the primacy of power, and
after this he would hardly account his tiara worth wearing. Here, said the
Protestants, is the weak point of the scheme. A Reformed Pope! that indeed will
be something new! When Melancthon put this into his scheme of Reform, said they,
he must have left the domain of possibilities and strayed into the region of
Utopia.
To these greater reforms a few minor ones were appended. Prayers
to the saints were to be abolished, although their festivals were still to be
observed; priests were to be allowed to marry, but only celibates would be
eligible as bishops; the monasteries were to be converted into schools; the cup
was to be restored to the laity; private masses were to be abolished; in
confession it was not to be obligatory to enumerate all sins; and, in fine, a
conference of pious men, including laymen, was to meet and frame a constitution
for the Church, according to the Word of God.[8]
CHAPTER
17 Back to
Top
PLAN OF FRANCIS I. FOR COMBINING
LUTHERANISM AND ROMANISM.
End of Conference Francis I, takes the
Matter into his own Hand Concocts a New Basis of Union Sends Copies to
Germany, to the Sorbonne and the Vatican Amazement of the Protestants Alarm
of the Sorbonnists They send a Deputation to the King What they Say of
Lutheranism Indignation at the Vatican These Projects of Union utterly
Chimerical Excuse of the Protestants of the Sixteenth Century Their
Stand-point Different from Ours Storms that have Shaken the World, but Cleared
the Air.
The conference was now over. The king was not
displeased;[1] the Protestants were
hopeful; but the bishops were cold. At heart they wished to have done with these
negotiations; for their instincts surely told them that if this matter went on
it could have but one ending, and that was the subversion of their Church. But
the king, for the moment, was on the side of the Reform. He would put himself at
its head, and guide it to such a goal as would surround his throne with a new
glory. He would heal the schism, preserve Catholicism, curb the fanaticism of
Luther, punish the hypocrisy of the monks, repress the assumptions of the Pope,
and humble the pride of the emperor. To do all this would be to place himself
without a rival in Europe. The King of France now took the matter more than ever
into his own hands.
Francis now proceeded to sketch out what virtually
was a new basis of union for Christendom. He thought, doubtless, that he knew
the spirit of the new times, and the influences stirring in the world at large,
better than did the theologians of Wittemberg and Strasburg; that a throne was a
better point of observation than a closet, and that he could produce something
broader and more catholic than Melancthon, which would hit the
mark.
Summoning a commission round him,[2] he sat down, and making
the papers of the three theologians the groundwork, retrenching here, enlarging
there, and expunging some articles wholly,[3] the king and his
councillors produced a new basis of union or fusion, different to some extent
from the former.
The king, although not aspiring like Henry of England to
the repute of a theologian, was doubtless not a little proud of his handiwork.
He sent copies of it to Germany, to the Sorbonne, and even to the Pope,[4] requesting these several
parties to consider the matter, and report their judgment upon it to the king.
To the German theologians it caused no small irritation; they recognized in the
king's paper little but a caricature of their sentiments.[5] In the Sorbonne the
message of Francis awakened consternation. The doctors saw Lutheranism coming in
like a torrent, while the king was holding open the gates of France.[6] We can imagine the
amazement and indignation which would follow the reading of the king's paper in
the Vatican. Modified, it yet retained the essential ideas of Melancthon's plan,
in that it disowned the saints, denied the opus operatum, and left the Papal
tiara shorn of nearly all its authority and grandeur. What a cruel blow would
this have been to Clement VII., aggravated, as he would have felt it, by the
fact that it was dealt by the same hand which had so lately grasped his in
friendship at Marseilles! But before the document reached Rome, Clement had
passed from this scene of agitation, and was now resting in the quiet grave.
This portentous paper from the eldest son of the Papacy was reserved to greet
his successor, Paul III., on his accession to the Papal chair, and to give him
betimes a taste of the anxieties and vexations inseparable from a seat which
fascinates and dazzles all save the man who occupies it. But we return to the
Sorbonnists.
The royal missive had alarmed the doctors beyond measure.
They saw France about to commit itself to the same downward road on which
England had already entered. This was no time to sit still. They went to the
Louvre and held a theological disputation with the king's ministers. Their
position was not improved thereby. If argument had failed them they would try
what threats could do. Did not the king know that Lutheranism was the enemy of
all law and order? that wherever it came it cast down dignities and powers, and
trampled them in the dust? If the altar was overturned, assuredly the throne
would not be left standing. They thought that they had found the opening in the
king's armor. But Francis had the good sense to look at great facts as seen in
contemporaneous history. Had law and order perished in Germany? nay, did not the
Protestants of that country reverence and obey their princes more profoundly
than ever? Was anarchy triumphant in England? Francis saw no one warring with
kings and undermining their authority save the Pope, who had deposed his Brother
of England, and was not unlikely to do the same office for himself one of these
days. Sorbonnists saw that neither was this the right tack. Must France then be
lost to the Papacy? There did seem at the moment some likelihood of such
disaster, as they accounted it, taking place. The year 1534 was drawing to a
close, with Francis still holding by his purpose, when an unhappy incident
occurred, all unexpectedly, which fatally changed the king's course, and turned
him from the road on which he seemed about to enter. Of that event, with all the
tragic consequences that followed it, we shall have occasion afterwards to
speak.
As regards this union, or rather fusion, there is no need to
express any sorrow over its failure, and to regret that so fair an opportunity
of banishing the iron age of controversy and war, and bringing in the golden age
of concord and peace, should have been lost. Had this compromise been
accomplished, it would certainly have repressed, for a decade or two, the more
flagrant of the abuses and scandals and tyrannies of the Papacy, but it would
also have stifled, perhaps extinguished, those mighty renovating forces which
had begun to act with such marked and beneficial effect. Christendom would have
lost infinitely more than all it could have gained: it would have gained a brief
respite; it would have lost a real and permanent Reformation. What was the plan
projected? The Reformation was to bring its "doctrine," and Rome was to bring
its "hierarchy," to form the Church of the future. But if the new wine had been
poured into the old bottle, would not the bottle have burst? or if the wine were
too diluted to rend the bottle, would it not speedily have become as acrid and
poisonous as the old wine? "Justification by faith," set in the old glosses,
circumscribed by the old definitions, and manipulated by the old hierarchy,
would a second time, and at no distant date, have been transformed into
"Justification by works," and where then would Protestantism have been? But we
are not to judge of the men who advocated this scheme by ourselves. They
occupied a very different standpoint from ours. We have the lessons of three
most eventful centuries, which were necessarily hidden and veiled from them; and
the utter contrariety of these two systems, in their originating principles, and
in their whole course since their birth, and by consequence the utter utopianism
of attempting their reconcilement, could be seen not otherwise than as the
progression of events and of centuries furnished the gradual but convincing
demonstration of it. Besides, the Council of Trent had not yet met; the hard and
fast line of distinction between the two Churches had not then been drawn; in
especial, that double-partition-wall of anathemas and stakes, which has since
been set up between them, did not then exist; moreover, the circumstances of the
Reformers at that early hour of the movement were wholly unprecedented; no
wonder that their vision was distracted and their judgment at fault. The two
systems were as yet, but slowly drawing away the one from the other, and
beginning to stand apart, and neither had as yet taken up that distinct and
separate ground, which presents them to us clearly and sharply as systems that
in their first principles in their roots and fibres are antagonistic, so
that the attempt to harmonise them is simply to try to change the nature and
essence of things.
Besides, it required a far greater than the ordinary
amount of courage to accept the tremendous responsibility of maintaining
Protestantism. The bravery that would have sufficed for ten heroes of the
ordinary type would scarcely have made, at that hour, one courageous Protestant.
It began now to be seen that the movement, if it was to go forward, would entail
on all parties on those who opposed as well as on those who aided it
tremendous sacrifices and sufferings. It was this prospect that dismayed
Melancthon. He saw that every hour the spirits of men were becoming more
embittered; that the kingdoms were falling apart; that the cruel sword was about
to sited the blood of man; in short, that the world was coming to an end. In
truth, the old world was, and Melancthon, his eye dimmed for the moment by the
"smoke and vapor" of that which was perishing, could not clearly see the new
world that was rising to take its place. To save the world, Melancthon would
have put the Reformation into what would have been its grave. Had Melancthon had
his choice, he would have pronounced for the calm the mephitic stillness in
which Christendom was rotting, rather than the hurricane with its noise and
overturnings. Happily for us who live in this age, the great scholar had not the
matter in his choice. It was the tempest that came: but if it shook the world by
its thunders, and swept it by its hurricanes, it has left behind it a purer air,
a clearer sky, and a fresher earth.
CHAPTER
18 Back to
Top
FIRST DISCIPLES OF THE GOSPEL IN
PARIS.
Calvin now the Center of the Movement Shall he enter
Priest's Orders? Hazard of a Wrong Choice He walks by Faith Visits Noyon
Renounces all his Preferments in the Romish Church Sells his Patrimonial
Inheritance Goes to Paris Meets Servetus His Opinions Challenges Calvin
to a Controversy Servetus does not Keep his Challenge State of things at
Paris Beda More Ferocious than ever The Times Uncertain Disciples in
Paris Bartholemew Millon His Deformity Conversion Zeal for the Gospel
Du Bourg, the Draper Valeton, of Nantes Le Compte Giulio Camillo Poille,
the Bricklayer Other Disciples Pantheists Calvin's Forecastings Calvin
quits Paris and goes to Strasburg.
WE return to Calvin, now and henceforward the true
center of the Reformation. Wherever he is, whether in the library of Du Tillet,
conversing with the mighty dead, and forging, not improbably, the bolts he was
to hurl against Rome in future years, or in the limestone cave on the banks of
the rivulet of the Clain; dispensing the Lord's Supper to the first Protestants
of Poictiers, as its Divine Founder had, fifteen centuries before, dispensed it
to the first disciples of Christianity, there it is that the light of the new
day is breaking.
Calvin had come to another most eventful epoch of his
life. The future Reformer again stood at "the parting of the ways." A wrong
decision at this moment would have wrecked all his future prospects, and changed
the whole history of the Reformation.
We left Calvin setting out from
Poictiers in the end of April, 1534, attended by the young Canon Du Tillet,
whose soul cleaved to the Reformer, and who did not discover till two years
afterwards, when he began to come in sight of the stake, that something stronger
than even the most devoted love to Calvin was necessary to enable him to cleave
to the Gospel which Calvin preached. Calvin would be twenty-five on the 10th of
July. This is the age at which, according to the canons, one who has passed his
novitiate in the Church must take the first orders of priesthood. Calvin had not
yet done so, he had not formally broken with Rome, but now he must take up his
position decidedly within or decidedly without the Church. At an early age the
initiatory mark of servitude to the Pope had been impressed upon his person. His
head had been shorn. The custom, which is a very ancient one, is borrowed from
the temples of paganism. The priests of Isis and Serapis, Jerome informs us,
officiated in their sanctuaries with shorn crowns, as do the priests of Rome at
this day. Calvin must now renew his vow and consummate the obedience to which he
was viewed as having pledged himself was performed upon himself when the rite of
tonsure was performed upon him. He must now throw off the fetter entirely, or be
bound yet more tightly, and become the servant of the Pope, most probably for
ever.
His heart had left the Church of Rome, and any subjection he might
now promise could be feigned only, not real. Yet there were not wanting friends
who counselled him to remain in outward communion with Rome. Is it not, we can
imagine these counsellors saying to the young cure, is it not the Reformation of
the Church which is your grand aim? Well, here is the way to compass it.
Dissemble the change within; remain in outward conformity with the Church; push
on from dignity to dignity, from a curacy to a mitre, from a mitre to the
purple, and from the purple to the tiara; what post is it to which your genius
may not aspire? and once seated in the Papal chair, who or what can hinder you
from reforming the Church?
The reasoning was specious, and thousands in
Calvin's circumstances have listened to similar persuasion, and have been
undone. So doubtless reasoned Caraffa, who, as a simple priest, was a frequenter
of the evangelical re-unions in Chaija at Naples, but who, when he became Paul
IV., restored the Inquisition, and kindled, alas! numerous stakes at Rome. Those
who, listening to such counsel, have adopted this policy, have either never
attained the dignities for which they stifled the convictions of duty, or they
found that with loftier position had come stronger entanglements, that honors
and gold were even greater hindrances than obscurity and poverty, and that if
they had now the power they had not the heart to set on foot the Reformation
they once burned to accomplish.
Calvin, eschewing the path of expediency,
and walking by faith, found the right road. He refused to touch the gold or wear
the honors of the Church whose creed he no longer believed. "Not one, but a
hundred benefices would I give up," he said, "rather than make myself the Pope's
vassal."[1] Even the hope of one day
becoming generalissimo of the Pope's army, and carrying over his whole force to
the camp of the enemy in the day of battle, could not tempt him to remain in the
Papal ranks. He arrived in Noyon in the beginning of May. On May 4th, 1534, in
presence of the officials, ecclesiastical and legal, he resigned his Chaplaincy
of La Gesine, and his Cursoy of Pont l'Eveque, and thus he severed the last link
that bound him to the Papacy, and by the sale of his paternal inheritance at the
same time,[2] he broke the last tie to
his birth-place.
Calvin, "his bonds loosened," was now more the servant
of Christ than ever. In the sale of his patrimony he had "forgotten his father's
house," and he was ready to go anywhere to the stake should his Master order
him. He longed to plant the standard of the cross in the capital of a great
country, and hard by the gates of a university which for centuries had been a
fountain of knowledge. Accordingly, he turned his steps to Paris, where he was
about to make a brief but memorable stay, and then leave it nevermore to
return.
It was during this visit to Paris that Calvin met, for the first
time, a man whom he was destined to meet a second time, of which second meeting
we shall have something to say afterwards. The person who now crossed Calvin's
path was Servetus. Michael Servetus was a Spaniard, of the same age exactly as
Calvin,[3] endowed with a penetrating
intellect, highly imaginative genius, and a strongly speculative turn of mind.
Soaring above both Romanism and Protestantism, he aimed at substituting a system
of his own creation, the corner-stone of which was simple Theism. He aimed his
stroke at the very heart of Christianity, the doctrine of the Trinity.[4]
Confident in his
system, and not less in his ability, he had for some years been leading the life
of a knight-errant, having wandered into Switzerland, and some parts of Germany,
in quest of opposers with whom he might do battle.[5] Having heard of the young
doctor of Noyon, he came to Paris, and threw down the gage to him.[6] Calvin felt that should he
decline the challenge of Servetus, the act would be interpreted into a
confession that Protestantism rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, and so was
corrupt at the core. It concerned the Reformers to show that Protestantism was
not a thing that tore up Christianity by the roots under pretense of removing
the abuses that had grown up around it. This consideration weighed with Calvin
in accepting, as he now did, Servetus' challenge. The day, the hour, the place
a house in the suburb of St. Antoine were all agreed upon.
Calvin was
punctual to the engagement; but Servetus why, was never known did not
appear.[7] "We shall not forget,"
says Bungener, "when the time comes, the position into which the Spanish
theologian had just thrutst the leaders of the Reformation, and Calvin in
particular. By selecting him for his adversary on the question of the Trinity,
upon which no variance existed between Romanism and the Reformation, he, in a
measure, constituted him the guardian of that doctrine, and rendered him
responsible for it before all Christendom. It was this responsibility which
nineteen years afterwards kindled the pile of Servetus.' [8]
Let us mark the
state of Paris at the time of Calvin's visit. We have already had a glimpse into
the interior of the palace, and seen what was going on there. Francis I. was
trying to act two parts at once, to be "the eldest son of the Church," and the
armed knight of the Reformation. He had gone in person to Marseilles to fetch
the Pope's niece to the Louvre, he had sent William du Bellay to negotiate with
the German Protestants; not that he cared for the doctrines, but that he needed
the arms of the Lutherans. And, as if the King of France had really loved the
Gospel, there was now a conference sitting in the Louvre concocting a scheme of
Reform. Councils not a few had labored to effect a Reformation of the Church in
its head and members; but not one of them had succeeded. It will indeed be
strange, we can hear men saying, if what Pisa, and Constance, and Basle failed
to give to the world, should at last proceed from the Louvre. There were persons
who really thought that this would happen. But Reformations are not things that
have their birth in royal cabinets, or emerge upon the world kern princely
gates. It is in closets where, on bended knee, the page of Scripture is searched
with tears and groans for the way of life, that these move. ments have their
commencement. From the court let us turn to the people.
We have already
narrated the sudden turn of the tide in Paris in the end of 1533. During the
king's absence at Marseilles the fiery Beda was recalled from exile. His
banishment had but inflamed his wrath against the Protestants, and he set to
work more vigorously than ever to effect their suppression, and purge Paris from
their defilement. The preachers were forbidden the pulpits, and some three
hundred Lutherans were thrown into the Conciergerie. Not content with these
violent proceedings, the Parliament, in the beginning of 1534, at the
instigation of Beda, passed a law announcing death by burning against those who
should be convicted of holding the new opinions on the testimony of two
witnesses.[9] It was hard to say on whom
this penalty might fall. It might drag to the stake Margaret's chaplain,
Roussel; it might strike down the learned men in the university the lights of
France whom the king had assembled round him from other lands. But what
mattered it if Lutheranism was extinguished? Beda was clamoring for a holocaust.
Nevertheless, despite all this violence the evangelisation was not stopped. The
disciples held meetings in their own houses, and by-and-by when the king
returned, and it was found that he had thrown off the Romish fit with the air of
Marseilles, the Protestants became bolder, and invited their neighbors and
acquaintances to their reunions. Such was the state in which Calvin found
matters when he returned to Paris, most probably in the beginning of June, 1534.
There was for the moment a calm. Protestant conferences were proceeding at the
Louvre; Beda could not provide a victim for the stake, and the Sorbonne was
compelled meanwhile to be tolerant. The times, however, were very uncertain; the
sky at any moment might become overcast, and grow black with
tempest.
Calvin, on entering Paris, turned into the Rue St. Denis, and
presented himself at the door of a worthy tradesman, La Forge by name, who was
equally marked by his sterling sense and his genuine piety. This was not the
first time that Calvin had lived under this roof, and now a warm welcome waited
his return. But his host, well knowing what was uppermost in his heart,
cautioned him against any open attempt at evangelising. All, indeed, was quiet
for the moment, but the enemies of the Gospel were not asleep; there were keen
eyes watching the disciples, and if left unmolested it was only on the condition
that they kept silence and remained in the background. To Calvin silence was
agony, but he must respect the condition, however hard he felt it, for any
infraction of it would be tantamount to setting up his own stake. Opportunities
of usefulness, however, were not wanting. He exhorted those who assembled at the
house of La Forge, and he visited in their own dwellings the persons named to
him as the friends of the Gospel in Paris.
The evangelist showed much
zeal and diligence in the work of visitation. It was not the mansions of the
rich to which he was led; nor was it men of rank and title to whom he was
introduced; he met those whose hands were roughened and whose brows were
furrowed by hard labor; for it was now as at the beginning of Christianity, "not
many mighty, not many noble are called, but God hath chosen the poor of this
world." It is all the better that it is so, for Churches like States must be
based upon the people. Not far from the sign of the "Pelican," at which La Forge
lived, in the same Rue St. Denis, is a shoe-maker's shop, which let us enter. A
miserable-looking hunchback greets our eyes. The dwarfed, deformed, paralysed
figure excites our compassion. His hands and tongue remain to him; his other
limbs are withered, and their power gone. The name of this poor creature is
Bartholomew Millon. Bartholomew had not always been the pitiably misshapen
object we now behold him. He was formerly one of the most handsome men in all
Paris, and with the gifts of person he possessed also those of the mind.[10] But he had led a youth of
boisterous dissipation. No gratification which his senses craved did he deny
himself. Gay in disposition and impetuous in temper, he was the ring-leader of
his companions, and was at all times equally ready to deal a blow with his
powerful arm, or let fly a sarcasm with his sharp tongue.
But a
beneficent Hand, in the guise of disaster, arrested Bartholomew in the midst of
his mad career. Falling one day, he broke his ribs, and neglecting the needful
remedies, his body shrunk into itself, and shrivelled up. The stately form was
now bent, the legs became paralysed, and on the face of the cripple grim
peevishness took the place of manly beauty. He could no longer mingle in the
holiday spirit or the street brawl. He sat enchained, day after day, in his
shop, presenting to all who visited it the rueful spectacle of a poor deformed
paralytic. His powers of mind, however, had escaped the blight which fell upon
his body. His wit was as sharp as ever, and it may be a little sharper,
misfortune having soured his temper. The Protestants were especially the butt of
his ridicule. One day, a Lutheran happening to pass before his shop, the bile of
Millon was excited, and he forthwith let fly at him a volley of insults and
scoffs. Turning round to see whence the abuse proceeded, the eye of the passer-
by lighted on the pitiful object who had assailed him. Touched with compassion,
he went up to him and said, "Poor man, don't you see that God has bent your body
in this way in order to straighten your soul?[11] and giving him a New
Testament, he bade him read it, and tell him at an after-day what he thought of
it.
The words of the stranger touched the heart of the paralytic: Millon
opened the book, and began to read. Arrested by its beauty and majesty, "he
continued at it," says Crespin, "night and day." He now saw that his soul was
even more deformed than his body. But the Bible had revealed to him a great
Physician, and, believing in his power to heal, the man whose limbs were
withered, but whose heart was now smitten, cast himself down before that
gracious One. The Savior had pity upon him. His soul was "straightened." The
malignity and spite which had blackened and deformed it were cast out. "The wolf
had become a lamb."[12] He turned his shop into a
conventicle, and was never weary of commending to others that Savior who had
pardoned sins so great and healed diseases so inveterate as his.
The gibe
and the scoff were forgotten; only words of loving-kindness and instruction now
fell from him. Still chained to his seat he gathered round him the young, and
taught them to read. He exerted his skill in art to minister to the poor; and
his powers of persuasion he employed day after day to the reclaiming of those
whom his former example had corrupted, and the edification of such as he had
scoffed at aforetime. He had a fine voice, and many came from all parts of Paris
to hear him sing Marot's Psalms. "In short," says Crespin, "his room was a true
school of piety, day and night, re-echoing with the glory of the
Lord."
Let us visit another of these disciples, so humble in station, yet
so grand in character. Such men are the foundation-stones of a kingdom's
greatness. We have not far to go. At the entrance of the same Rue was a large
shop in which John du Bourg carried on, under the sign of the "Black Horse,"[13] the trade of a draper. Du
Bourg, who was a man of substance, was very independent in his opinions, and
liked to examine and judge of all things for himself. He had imbibed the
Reformed sentiments, although he had not associated much with the Protestants.
He had gone, as his habit of mind was, directly to the Scriptures, and drawn
thence his knowledge of the truth. That water was all the sweeter to him, that
he had drunk it fresh from the fountain. He did not hoard his treasure. He was a
merchant, but not one of all his wares did it so delight him to vend as this.
"This fire," said his relations, "will soon go out like a blaze of tow." They
were mistaken. The priests scowled, his customers fell off, but, says the old
chronicler, "neither money nor kindred could ever turn him aside from the
truth."[14]
It consoled Du
Bourg to see others, who had drunk at the same spring, drawing around him. His
shop was frequently visited by Peter Valeton, a receiver of Nantes.[15] Valeton came often to
Paris, the two chief attractions being the pleasure of conversing with Du Bourg,
and the chance of picking up some writing or other of the Reformers. He might be
seen in the quarter of the booksellers, searching their collections; and, having
found what he wanted, he would eagerly buy it, carry it home under his cloak,
and locking the door of his apartment, he would begin eagerly to read. His
literary wares were deposited at the bottom of a large chest, the key of which
he carried always on his person.[16] He was timid as yet, but
he became more courageous afterwards.
Another member of this little
Protestant band was Le Compte, a disciple as well as fellow-townsman of the
doctor of Etaples, Lefevre. He had a knowledge of Hebrew, and to his power of
reading the Scriptures in the original, he added a talent for exposition, which
made him in no small measure useful in building up the little Church. The
membership of that Church was farther diversified by the presence of a
dark-visaged man, of considerable fame, but around whom there seemed ever to
hover an air of mystery. This was Giulio Camillo, a native of Italy, whoin
Francis I. had invited to Paris. The Italian made trial of all knowledge, and he
had dipped, amongst other studies, into the cabalistic science; and hence, it
may be, the look of mystery which he wore, and which struck awe into those who
approached him. Hearing of the new opinions, on his arrival in France, he must
needs know what they were. He joined himself to the Protestants, and professed
to love their doctrine; but it is to be feared that he was drawn to the Gospel
as to any other new thing, for when the time came when it was nccessary to bear
stronger testimony to it than by words, Camillo was not found amongst its
confessors.
Humbler in rank than any of the foregoing was Henry Poille,
also a member of the infant Church of Paris. Poille was a bricklayer, from the
neighborhood of Meaux. Around him there hung no veil, for he had not meddled
with the dark sciences; it was enough, he accounted it, to know the Gospel. He
could not bring to it what lie did not possess, riches and renown; but he
brought it something that recommended it even more, an undivided heart, and a
steadfast courage; and when the day of trial came, and others fled with their
learning and their titles, and left the Gospel to shift for itself, Poille stood
firmly by it. He had learned the truth from Briconnet; but, following a Greater
as his Captain, when the bishop went back, the bricklayer went forward, though
he saw before him in the near distance the lurid gleam of the
stake.
Besides these humble men the Gospel had made not a few converts in
the ranks above them. Even in the Parliament there were senators who had
embraced at heart that very Lutheranism against which that body had now recorded
the punishment of death; but the fear of an irate priesthood restrained them
from the open confession of it. Nay, even of the priests and monks there were
some who had been won by the Gospel, and who loved the Savior. Professors in the
university, teachers in the schools, lawyers, merchants, tradesmen in short,
men of every rank, and of all professions swelled the number of those who had
abjured the faith of Rome and ranged themselves, more or less openly, on the
side of the Reformation. But the most part now gathered round the Protestant
standard were from the humbler classes. Their contemporaries knew them not, at
least till they saw them at the stake, and learned, with some little wonder and
surprise, what heroic though misguided men, as they thought them, had been
living amongst them unknown; and, as regards ourselves, we should never have
heard their names, or learned aught of their history, but for the light which
the Gospel sheds upon them. It was that alone which brought these humble men
into view, and made them the heirs of an immortality of fame even on earth; for
so long as the Church shall exist, and her martyr-records continue to be read,
their names, and the services they did, will be mentioned with
honor.
Living at the house of La Forge, such were the men with whom
Calvin came into almost daily contact. But not these only: others of a different
stamp, whose inspiration and sentiments were drawn from another source than the
Scriptures, did the future Reformer occasionally meet at the table of his host.
The avowal of pantheistic and atheistic doctrines would, at times, drop from the
mouths of these suspicious-looking strangers, and startle Calvin not a little.
It seemed strange that the still dawn of the evangelic day should be deformed by
these lurid flashes; yet so it was.[17]
The sure forecast
of Calvin divined the storms with which the future of Christendom was pregnant,
unless the Gospel should anticipate and prevent their outburst. We have already
said that from the days of Abelard the seeds of communistic pantheism had begun
to be scattered in Europe, and more especially in France. Dining the cold and
darkness of the centuries that followed Abelard's time, these seeds had lain
silently in the frozen soil, but now the warm spring-time of the sixteenth
century was bringing them above the surface. The tares were springing up as well
as the wheat. The quick eye of Calvin detected, at that early stage, the
difference between the two growths, and the different fruits that posterity
would gather from them. He heard men who had stolen to La Forge's table under
color of being favorers of the new age, avow it as their belief that all things
were God themselves, the universe, all was God and he heard them on that
dismal ground claim an equally dismal immunity from all accountability for their
actions, however wicked.[18] From that time Calvin set
himself to resist these frightful doctrines, not less energetically than the
errors of Rome. He felt that there was no salvation for Christendom save by the
Gospel; and he toiled yet more earnestly to erect this great and only
breakwater. If, unhappily, others would not permit him, and if as a consequence
the deluge has broken in, and some countries have been partially overflowed, and
others wholly so, it is not Calvin who is to blame.
In the meantime
Calvin quitted Paris, probably in the end of July, 1534. It is possible that he
felt the air thick with impending tempest. But it was not fear that made him
depart; his spirit was weighed down, for almost every door of labor was closed
meanwhile; he could not evangelise, save at the risk of a stake, and yet he had
no leisure to read and meditate from the numbers of persons who were desirous to
see and converse with him. He resolved to leave France and go to Germany, where
he hoped to find "some shady nook,"[19] in which he might enjoy
the quiet denied him in the capital of his native land. Setting out on
horseback, accompanied by Du Tillet, the two travelers reached Strasburg in
safety. His departure was of God; for hardly was he gone when the sky of France
was overcast, and tempest came. Had Calvin been in Paris when the storm burst,
he would most certainly have been numbered among its victims. But it was not the
will of God that his career should end at this time and in this
fashion.
Humbler men were taken who could not, even had their lives been
spared, have effected great things for the Reformation. Calvin, who was to
spread the light over the earth, was left. He served the cause of the Gospel by
living, they by dying.
CHAPTER
19 Back to
Top
THE NIGHT OF THE
PLACARDS.
Inconstancy of Francis Two Parties in the young French
Church: the Temporisers and the Scripturalists The Policy advocated by each
Their Differences submitted to Farel The Judgment of the Swiss Pastors The
Placard Terrific Denunciation of the Mass Return of the Messenger Shall
the Placards be Published? Two Opinions Majority for Publication The
Kingdom Placarded in One Night The Morning Surprise and Horror Placard on
the Door of the Royal Bed-chamber Wrath of the King.
WE stand now on the threshold of an era of
martyrdoms. Francis I. had not hitherto been able to come to a decision on the
important question of religion. This hour he turned to the Reformation in the
hope that, should he put himself at its head, it would raise him to the
supremacy of Europe; the next he turned away in disgust, offended by the
holiness of the Gospel, or alarmed at the independence of the Reform. But an
incident was about to take place, destined to put an end to the royal
vacillation.
There were two parties in the young Church of France; the
one was styled the Temporisers, the other the Scripturalists. Both parties were
sincerely devoted to the Scriptural Reform of their native land, but in seeking
to promote that great end the one party was more disposed to fix its eyes on men
in power, and follow as they might lead, than the other thought it either
dutiful or safe. The monarch, said the first party, is growing every day more
favorable to the Reformation; he is at no pains to conceal the contempt he
entertains, on the one hand, for the monks, and the favor he bears, on the
other, to men of letters and progress. Is not his minister, Du Bellay,
negotiating a league with the Protestants of Germany, and have not these
negotiations already borne fruit in the restoration of Duke Christopher to his
dominions, and in an accession of political strength to the Reform? Besides,
what do we see in the Louvre? Councils assembling under the presidency of the
king to discuss the question of the union of Christendom. Let us leave this
great affair in hands so well able to guide it to a prosperous issue. We shall
but spoil all by obtruding our counsel, or obstinately insisting on having our
own way.
The other party in the young Protestant Church were but little
disposed to shape their policy by the wishes and maxims of the court. They did
not believe that a monarch so dissolute in his manners, and so inconstant in his
humors, would labor sincerely and steadfastly for a Reform of religion. To
embrace the Pope this hour and the German Protestants the next, to consign a
Romanist to the Conciergerie to-day and burn a Lutheran to-morrow, was no proof
of impartiality, but of levity and passion. They built no hopes on the
conferences at the Louvre. The attempt to unite the Reformation and the Pope
could end only in the destruction of the Gospel.
The years were gliding
away; the Reformation of France tarried; they would wait no longer on man. A
policy bolder in tone, and more thoroughly based on principle, alone could lead,
they thought, to the overthrow of the Papacy in France.
Divided among
themselves, it was natural that the Protestants should turn their eyes outside
of France for counsel that would unite them. Among the Reformers easily
accessible, there was no name that carried with it more authority than that of
Farel. He was a Frenchman; he understood, it was to be supposed, the situation
better than any other, and he could not but feel the deepest interest in a work
which he himself, along with Lefevre, had commenced. To Farel they resolved to
submit the question that divided them.
They found a humble Christian,
Feret by name, willing to be their messenger.[1] He departed, and arriving
in Switzerland, now the scene of Farel's labors, he found himself in a new
world. In all the towns and villages the altars were being demolished, the idols
cast down, and the Reformed worship was in course of being set up. How different
the air, the messenger could not but remark, within the summits of the Jura,
from that within the walls of Paris. It required no great forecast to tell what
the answer of the Swiss Reformers would be. They assembled, heard the messenger,
and gave their voices that the Protestants of France should halt no longer; that
they should boldly advance; and that they should notify their forward movement
by a vigorous blow at that which was the citadel of the Papal Empire of bondage
the root of that evil tree that overshadowed Christendom the
mass.
But the bolt had to be forged in Switzerland. It was to take the
form of a tract or placard denunciatory of that institution which it was
proposed by this one terrible blow to lay in the dust. But who shall write it?
Farel has been commonly credited with the authorship; and the trenchant
eloquence and burning scorn which breathe in the placard, Farel alone, it has
been supposed, could have communicated to it.[2] It was no logical thesis,
no dogmatic refutation; it was a torrent of scathing fire; a thunderburst,
terrific and grand, resembling one of those tempests that gather in awful
darkness on the summits of those mountains amid which the document was written,
and finally explode in flashes which irradiate the whole heavens, and in volleys
of sound which shake the plains over which the awful reverberations are
rolled.
The paper was headed, "True Articles on the horrible, great, and
intolerable Abuses of the Popish Mass; invented in direct opposition to the Holy
Supper of our Lord and only Mediator and Savior Jesus Christ." It begins by
taking "heaven and earth to witness against the mass, because the world is and
will be by it totally desolated, ruined, lost, and undone, seeing that in it our
Lord is outrageously blasphemed, and the people blinded and led astray." After
citing the testimony of Scripture, the belief of the Fathers, and the evidence
of the senses against the dogma, the author goes on to assail with merciless
and, judged by modern taste, coarse sarcasm the ceremonies which accompany its
celebration.
"What mean all these games?" he asks; "you play around your
god of dough, toying with him like a cat with a mouse. You break him into three
pieces... and then you put on a piteous look, as if you were very sorrowful; you
beat your breasts... you call him the Lamb of God, and pray to him for peace.
St. John showed Jesus Christ ever present, ever living, living all in one an
adorable truth! but you show your wafer divided into pieces, and then you eat
it, calling for something to drink."
The writer asks "these cope-wearers"
where they find "this big word TRANSUBSTANTION?" Certainly, he says, not in the
Bible. The inspired writers "called the bread and wine, bread and wine." "St.
Paul does not say, Eat the body of Jesus Christ; but, Eat this bread." "Yes,
kindle your faggots," but let it be for the true profaners of the body of
Christ, for those who place it in a bit of dough, "the food it may be of spiders
or of mice." And what, the writer asks, has the fruit of the mass been? "By it:"
he answers, "the preaching of the Gospel is prevented. The time is occupied with
bell-ringing, howling, chanting, empty ceremonies, candles, incense, disguises,
and all manner of conjuration. And the poor world, looked upon as a lamb or as a
sheep, is miserably deceived, cajoled, led astray what do I say? bitten,
gnawed, and devoured as if by ravening wolves."
The author winds up with
a torrent of invective directed against Popes, cardinals, bishops, and monks,
thus: "Truth is wanting to them, truth terrifies them, and by truth will their
reign be destroyed for ever."
Written in Switzerland, where every sight
and sound the snowy peak, the gushing torrent, the majestic lake speak of
liberty and inspire courageous thoughts, and with the crash of the falling
altars of an idolatrous faith in the ears of the writer, these words did not
seem too bold, nor the denunciations too fierce. But the author who wrote, and
the other pastors who approved, did not sufficiently consider that this terrible
manifesto was not to be published in Switzerland, but in France, where a
powerful court and a haughty priesthood were united to combat the Reformation.
It might have been foreseen that a publication breathing a defiance so fierce,
and a hatred so mortal, could have but one of two results: it would carry the
convictions of men by storm, and make the nation abhor and renounce the
abomination it painted in colors so frightful, and stigmatized in words so
burning, or if it failed in this and the likelihood was that it would fail
it must needs evoke such a tempest of wrath as would go near to sweep the
Protestant Church from the soil of France altogether.
The document was
printed in two forms, with a view to its being universally circulated. There
were placards to be posted up on the walls of towns, and on the posts along the
highway, and there were small slips to be scattered in the streets. This light
was not to be put under a bushel; it was to flash the same day all over France.
The bales of printed matter were ready, and Feret now set out on his return. As
he held his quiet way through the lovely mountains of the Jura, which look down
with an air so tranquil on the fertile plains of Burgundy, no one could have
suspected what a tempest traveled with him. He seemed the dove of peace, not the
petrel of storm. He arrived in Paris without question from any
one.
Immediately on his arrival the members of the little Church were
convened; the paper was opened and read; but the assembly was divided. There
were Christians present who were not lacking in courage nay, were ready to go
to the stake but who, nevertheless, shrunk from the responsibility of
publishing a fulmination like this. France was not Switzerland, and what might
be listened to with acquiescence beyond the Jura, might, when read at the foot
of the throne of Francis I., bring on such a convulsion as would shake the
nation, and bury the Reformed Church in its own ruins. Gentler words, they
thought, would go deeper.
But the majority were not of this mind. They
were impatient of delay. France was lagging behind Germany, Switzerland, and
other countries. Moreover, they feared the councils now proceeding at the
Louvre. They had as their object, they knew, to unite the Pope and the
Reformation, and they were in haste to launch this bolt, "forged on Farel's
anvil," before so unhallowed a union should be consummated. In this assembly now
met to deliberate about the placard were Du Bourg and Millon, and most of the
disciples whom we have mentioned in our former chapter. These gave their voices
that the paper should be published, and in this resolution the majority
concurred.
The next step was to make arrangements to secure, if possible,
that this manifesto should meet the eye of every man in France. The kingdom was
divided into districts, and persons were told off who were to undertake the
hazardous work of posting up, each in the quarter assigned him, this placard
the blast, it was hoped, before which the walls of the Papal Jericho in France
would fall. A night was selected; for clearly the work could be done only under
cover of the darkness, and equally clear was it that it must be done in one and
the same night all over France. The night fixed on was that of the 24th October,
1534. [3]
The eventful night
came. Before the morning should break, this trumpet must be blown all over
France. As soon as the dusk had deepened into something like darkness the
distributors sallied forth; and gliding noiselessly from street to street, and
from lane to lane, they posted up the terrible placards. They displayed them on
the walls of the Louvre, at the gates of the Sorbonne, and on the doors of the
churches. What was being done in Paris was at the same instant being transacted
in all the chief towns nay, even in the rural parts and highways of the
kingdom. France had suddenly become like the roll of the prophet. An invisible
finger had, from side to side, covered it with a terrible writing with
prophetic denunciations of woe and ruin unless it repented in sackcloth and
turned from the mass.
When morning broke, men awoke in city and village,
and came forth at the doors of their houses to see this mysterious placard
staring them in the face. Little groups began to gather round each paper. These
groups speedily swelled into crowds, comprising every class, lay and cleric. A
few read with approbation, the most with amazement, some with horror. The paper
appeared to them an outpouring of blasphemous sentiment, and they trembled lest
it should draw down upon the people of France some sudden and terrible stroke.
Others were transported with rage, seeing in it an open defiance to the Church,
and an expression of measureless contempt at all that was held sacred by the
nation. Frightful rumors began to circulate among the masses. The Lutherans, it
was said, had concocted a terrible conspiracy, they were going to set fire to
the churches, and burn and massacre every one.[4] The priests, though
professing of course horror at the placards, were in reality not greatly
displeased at what had occurred. For some time they had been waiting for a
pretext to deal a blow at the Protestant cause, and now a weapon such as they
wished for had been put into their hands.
The king at the time was living
at the Castle of Amboise. At an early hour Montmorency and the Cardinal de
Tournon knocked at his closet door to tell him of the dreadful event of the
night. As they were about to enter their eye caught sight of a paper posted up
on the door of the royal cabinet. It was the placard put there by some
indiscreet Protestant, or, as is more generally supposed, by some hostile hand.
Montmorency and Tournon tore it down, and carried it in to the king.[5] The king grasped the
paper. Its heading, and the audacity shown in posting it on the door of his
private apartment, so agitated Francis that he was unable to read it. He handed
it again to his courtiers, who read it to him. He stood pallid and speechless a
little while; but at length his wrath found vent in terrible words: "Let all be
seized, and let Lutheranism be totally exterminated!"[6]
CHAPTER
20 Back to
Top
MARTYRS AND EXILES.
Plan
of Morin. The Betrayer Procession of Corpus Christi Terror of Paris
Imprisonment of the Protestants Atrocious Designs attributed to them Nemesis
Sentence of the Disciples Execution of Bartholomew Millon Burning of Du
Bourg Death of Poille His Tortures General Terror Flight of Numbers
Refugees of Rank Queen of Navarre Her Preachers All Ranks Flee What
France might have been, had she retained these Men Prodigious
Folly.
NOW it was that the storm burst. The king wrote
summoning the Parliament to meet, and execute strict justice: in the affair, he
further commanded his lieutenant-criminal, Jean Morin, to use expedition in
discovering and bringing to justice all in any way suspected of having been
concerned in the business.[1] Morin, a man of profligate
life, audacious, a thorough hater of the Protestants, and skilfill in laying
traps to catch them, needed not the increase of pay which the king promised him
to stimulate his zeal. A few moments thought and he saw how the thing was to be
done. He knew the man whose office it was to convene the Protestants when a
reunion was to be held, and he had this man, who was a sheath-maker by trade,
instantly apprehended and brought before him. The lieutenant-criminal told the
poor sheath-maker he was perfectly aware that he knew every Lutheran in Paris,
and that he must make ready and conduct him to their doors. The man shrunk from
the baseness demanded of him. Morin coolly bade an attendant prepare a scaffold,
and turning to his prisoner gave him his choice of being burned alive, or of
pointing out to him the abodes of his brethren. Terrified by the horrible
threat, which was about to be put in instant execution, the poor man became the
betrayer.[2] The lieutenant-criminal
now hoped at one throw of his net to enclose all the Lutherans in
Paris.
Under pretense of doing expiation for the affront which had been
put upon the "Holy Sacrament," Morin arranged a procession of the Corpus
Christi.[3] The houses in the line of
the procession were draped in black, and with slow and solemn pace friar and
priest passed along bearing the Host, followed by a crowd of incense-bearers and
hymning choristers. The excitement thus awakened favored the plans of the
lieutenant-criminal. He glided through the streets, attended by his serjeants
and officers. The traitor walked before him. When he came opposite the door of
any of his former brethren the sheath-maker stopped and, without saying a word,
made a sign. The officers entered the house, and the family were dragged forth
and led away manacled. Alas, what a cruel as well as infamous task had this man
imposed upon himself! Had he been walking to the scaffold, his joy would have
grown at every step. As it was, every new door he stopped at, and every fresh
victim that swelled the procession which he headed, bowed lower his head in
shame, and augmented that pallor of the face which told of the deep remorse
preying at his heart.
Onwards went the procession, visiting all the
quarters of Paris, the crowd of onlookers continually increasing, as did also
the mournful train of victims which Morin and the traitor, as they passed along,
gathered up for the stake. The tidings that the lieutenant-criminal was abroad
spread over the city like wild-fire. "Morin made all the city quake."[4] This was the first day of
the "Reign of Terror." Anguish of spirit preceded the march of Morin and his
agents; for no one could tell at whose door he might stop. Men of letters
trembled as well as the Protestants. If fear marched before Morin, lamentation
and cries of woe echoed in his rear.
The disciples we have already spoken
of Du Bourg, the merchant; Bartholomew Millon, the paralytic; Valeton, who was
ever inquiring after the writings of the Reformers; Poille, the bricklayer and
others of higher rank, among whom were Roussel and Courault and Berthaud, the
Queen of Navarre's preachers, were all taken in the net of the
lieutenant-criminal, and drafted off to prison. Morin made no distinction among
those suspected: his rage fell equally on those who had opposed and on those who
had favored the posting up of the placards. Persons of both sexes, and of
various nationalities, were indeed among the multitude now lodged in prison, to
be, as the lieutenant-criminal designed, at no distant day produced on the
scaffold, a holocaust to the offended manes of Rome. 359
The Parliament. the
Sorbonne, and the priests were resolved to turn the crisis to the utmost
advantage. They must put an end to the king's communings with German and English
heretics; they must stamp out Lutheranism in Paris; a rare chance had the
untoward zeal of the converts thrown into their power for doing so. They must
take care that the king's anger did not cool; they must not be sparing in the
matter of stakes; every scaffold would be a holy altar, every victim a grateful
sacrifice, to purify a land doubly polluted by the blasphemous placard. Above
all, they must maintain the popular indignation at a white heat. The most
alarming rumors began to circulate through Paris. To the Lutherans were
attributed the most atrocious designs. They had conspired, it was said, to fire
all the public buildings, and massacre all the Catholics. They were accused of
seeking to compass the death of the king, the overthrow of the monarchy, and the
destruction of society itself. They meant to leave France a desert. So it was
whispered, and these terrible rumors were greedily listened to, and the mob
shouted, "Death, death to the heretics!"[5]
With reference to
these charges that were now industriously circulated against the Protestants of
Paris, there was not a Lutheran who ever meditated such wickedness as this. Not
a fragment of proof of such designs has ever been produced. Well; three hundred
years pass away, and Protestantism is all but suppressed in France. What
happens? Is the nation tranquil, and the throne stable? On the contrary, from
out the darkness there stands up a terrible society, which boldly avows it as
its mission to inflict on France those same atrocious designs which the
disciples of the Gospel had been falsely accused of entertaining. The bugbear of
that day, conjured up by hypocrisy and bigotry, has become the menace of ours.
We have seen the throne overturned, the blood of nobles and priests shed like
water, the public monuments sinking in ashes, the incendiary's torch and the
assassin's sword carrying terror from end to end of France, and society saved
only by the assertion of the soberer sense of the people.
The several
stages of the awful drama we are narrating followed each other in quick
succession. On the 10th November, just a fortnight after their apprehension,
were Millon, Du Bourg, Poille, and the rest brought forth and presented before
their judges. For them there could be no other sentence than death, and that
death could come in no other form than the terrible one of burning. Nor had they
long to wait. Three short days and then the executions began! The scaffolds were
distributed over all the quarters of Paris, and the burnings followed on
successive days, the design being to spread the terror of heresy by spreading
the executions. The advantage however, in the end, remained with the Gospel. All
Paris was enabled to see what kind of men the new opinions could produce. There
is no pulpit like the martyr's pile. The serene joy that lighted up the faces of
these men as they passed along, in their wretched tumbril, to the place of
execution, their heroism as they stood amid the bitter flames, their meek
forgiveness of injuries, transformed, in instances not a few, anger into pity,
and hate into love, and pleaded with resistless eloquence in behalf of the
Gospel.
Of this little band, the first to tread the road from the prison
to the stake, and from the stake to the crown, was Bartholomew Millon. The
persecutor, in selecting the poor paralytic for the first victim, hoped perhaps
to throw an air of derision over the martyrs and their cause. It was as if he
had said, Here is a specimen of the miserable creatures who are disturbing the
nation by their new opinions: men as deformed in body as in mind. But he had
miscalculated. The dwarfed and distorted form of Millon but brought out in bold
relief his magnanimity of soul, The turnkey, when he entered his cell, lifted
him up in his arms and placed him in the tumbril. On his way to the place of
execution he passed his father's door. He bade adieu with a smile to his earthly
abode, as one who felt himself standing at the threshold of his heavenly home. A
slow fire awaited him at the Greve, and the officer in command bade the fire be
lowered still more, but he bore the lingering tortures of this mode of death
with a courage so admirable that the Gospel had no reason to be ashamed of its
martyr. None but words of peace dropped from his lips. Even the enemies who
stood around his pile could not withhold their admiration of his constancy.[6]
The following day
the wealthy tradesman Du Bourg was brought forth to undergo the same dreadful
death. He was known to be a man of decision; and his persecutors set themselves
all the more to contrive how they might shake his steadfastness by multiplying
the humiliations and tortures to which they doomed him before permitting him to
taste of death and depart. The tumbril that bore him was stopped at Notre Dame,
and there he was made a gazing-stock to the multitude, as he stood in front of
the cathedral, with taper in hand, and a rope round his neck. He was next taken
to the Rue St. Denis, in which his own house was situated, and there his hand
was cut off the hand which had been busy on that night of bold but imprudent
enterprise. He was finally taken to the Halles and burned alive. Du Bourg in
death as in life was still the man of courage; he shrunk from neither the shame
nor the suffering, but was "steadfast unto the end."[7]
Three days passed;
it was now the 18th November, and on this day Poille, the bricklayer, was to
die. His stake was set up in the Faubourg St. Antoine, in front of the Church of
St. Catherine; for it was the inhabitants of this quarter of Paris who were next
to be taught to what a dreadful end heresy brings men, and yet with what a
glorious hope and unconquerable courage it has the power to inspire them. Poille
had learned the Gospel from Bishop Briconnet, but while the master had
scandalised it by his weakness, the disciple was to glorify it by his
steadfastness. He wore an air of triumph as he alighted from his cart at the
place of execution. Cruel, very cruel was his treatment at the stake. "My Lord
Jesus Christ," he said, "reigns in heaven, and I am ready to fight for him to
the last drop of my blood." "This confession of truth at the moment of
punishment," says D'Aubigne, quoting Crespin's description of the martyr's last
moments, "exasperated the executioners. 'Wait a bit,' they said, 'we will stop
your prating.' They sprang upon him, opened his mouth, caught hold of his
tongue, and bored a hole through it; they then, with refined cruelty, made a
slit in his cheek, through which they drew the tongue, and fastened it with an
iron pin. Some cries were heard from the crowd at this most horrible spectacle;
they proceeded from the humble Christians who had come to help the poor
bricklayer with their compassionate looks, Poille spoke no more, but his eye
still announced the peace; he enjoyed. He was burnt alive."[8]
For some time each
succeeding day had its victim. Of these sufferers there were some whose only
crime was that they had printed and sold Luther's writings; it was not clear
that they had embraced his sentiments; their persecutors deemed them well
deserving of the stake for simply having had a hand in circulating them. This
indiscriminate vengeance, which dragged to a common pile the Protestants and all
on whom the mere suspicion of Protestantism had fallen, spread a general terror
in Paris.
Those who had been seen at the Protestant sermons, those who
had indulged in a jest at the expense of the monks, but especially those who, in
heart, although not confessing it with the mouth, had abandoned Rome and turned
to the Gospel, felt as if the eye of the lieutenant-criminal was upon them, and
that, at any moment, his step might be heard on their threshold.
Paris
was no longer .a place for them; every day and every hour they tarried there, it
was at the peril of being burned alive. Accordingly, they rose up and fled. It
was bitter to leave home and country and all the delights of life, and go forth
into exile, but it was less bitter than to surrender their hope of an endless
life in the better country; for at no less a cost could they escape a stake in
France.
A few days made numerous blanks in the society of Paris. Each
blank represented a convert to the Gospel. When men began to look around them
and count these gaps, they were amazed to think how many of those among whom
they had been living, and with whom they had come into daily contact, were
Lutherans, but wholly unknown in that character till this affair brought them to
light. Merchants vanished suddenly from their places of business; tradesmen
disappeared from their workshops; clerks were missing from the countinghouse;
students assembled at the usual hour, but the professor's chair was empty; their
teacher, not waiting to bid his pupils adieu, had gone forth, and was hastening
towards some more friendly land.
The bands of fugitives now hurrying by
various routes, and in various disguises, to the frontiers of the kingdom,
embraced all ranks and all occupations. The Lords of Roygnac and Roberval, of
Fleuri, in Briere, were among those who were now fleeing their country and the
wrath of their sovereign. Men in government offices, and others high at court
and near the person of the king, made the first disclosure, by a hasty flight,
that they had embraced the Gospel, and that they preferred it to place and
emolument. Among these last was the privy purse-bearer of the king. Every hour
brought a new surprise to both the friends and the foes of the Gospel. The
latter hated it yet more than ever as a mysterious thing, possessing some
extraordinary power over the minds of men. They saw with a sort of terror the
numbers it had already captivated, and they had uneasy misgivings as to
whereunto this affair would grow.
Margaret wept, but the fear in which
she stood of her brother made her conceal her tears. Her three preachers
Roussel, Berthaud, and Courault had been thrown into prison. Should she make
supplication for them? Her enemies, she knew, were laboring to inflame the king
against her, and bring her to the block. The Constable Montmorency, says
Brant"me, told the king that he "must begin at his court and his nearest
relations," pointing at the Queen of Navarre, "if he had a mind to extirpate the
heretics out of his kingdom."[9] Any indiscretion or
over-zeal, therefore, might prove fatal to her. Nevertheless, she resolved on
braving the king's wrath, if haply she might rescue her friends from the stake.
Bigotry had not quite quenched Francis's love for his sister; the lives of her
preachers were given her at her request; but, with the exception of one of the
three, their services to the Protestant cause ended with the day on which they
were let out of prison. Roussel retired to his abbey at Clairac; Berthand
resumed his frock and his beads, and died in the cloister; Courault contrived to
make his escape, and turning his steps toward Switzerland, he reached Basle,
became minister at Orbe, and finally was a fellow-laborer with Calvin at
Geneva.
Meanwhile another, and yet another, rose up and fled, till the
band of self-confessed and self-expatriated disciples of the Gospel swelled to
be between 400 and 500. Goldsmiths, engravers, notably printers and bookbinders,
men of all crafts, lawyers, teachers of youth, and even monks and priests were
crowding the roads and by-ways of France, fleeing from the persecutor. Some went
to Strasburg; some to Basle; and a few placed the Alps between them and their
native land. Among these fugitives there is one who deserves special mention
Mathurin Cordier, the venerable schoolmaster, who was the first to detect, and
who so largely helped to develop, the wonderful genius of Calvin. Million and Du
Bourg and Poille we have seen also depart; but their flight was by another road
than that which these fugitives were now treading in weariness and hunger and
fear. They had gone whither the persecutor could not follow them.
The men
who were now fleeing from France were the first to tread a path which was to be
trodden again and again by hundreds of thousands of their countrymen in years to
come. During the following two centuries and a half these scenes were renewed at
short intervals. Scarcely was there a generation of Frenchmen during that long
period that did not witness the disciples of the Gospel fleeing before the
insane fury of the persecutor, and carrying with them the intelligence, the
arts, the industry, the order, in which, as a rule, they pre-eminently excelled,
to enrich the lands in which they found an asylum. And in proportion as they
replenished other countries with these good gifts did they empty their own of
them. If all that was now driven away had been retained in France; if, during
these 300 years, the industrial skill of the exiles had been cultivating her
soil; if, during these 300 years, their artistic bent had been improving her
manufactures; if, during these 300 years, their creative genius and analytic
power had been enriching her literature and cultivating her science; if their
wisdom had been guiding her councils, their bravery fighting her battles, their
equity framing her laws, and the religion of the Bible strengthening the
intellect and governing the conscience of her people, what a glory would at this
day have encompassed France! What a great, prosperous, and happy country a
pattern to the nations would she have been! But a blind and inexorable bigotry
chased from her soil every teacher of virtue, every champion of order, every
honest defender of the throne; it said to the men who would have made their
country a "renown and glory" in the earth, Choose which you will have, a stake
or exile? At last the ruin of the State was complete; there remained no more
conscience to be proscribed; no more religion to be dragged to the stake; no
more patriotism to be chased into banishment; revolution now entered the morally
devastated land, bringing in its train scaffolds and massacres, and once more
crowding the roads, and flooding the frontiers of France with herds of miserable
exiles; only there was a change of victims.
CHAPTER
21 Back to
Top
OTHER AND MORE DREADFUL
MARTYRDOMS.
A Great Purgation Resolved on Preparations Procession
The Four Mendicants Relics: the Head of St. Louis; the True Cross, etc.
Living Dignitaries The Host The King on Foot His Penitence Of what Sins
does he Repent? The Queen Ambassadors, Nobles, etc. Homage of the Citizens
High Mass in Notre Dame Speech of the King The Oath of the King Return
of Procession Apparatus of Torture Martyrdom of Nicholas Valeton More
Scaffolds and Victims The King and People's Satisfaction An Ominous Day in
the Calendar of France The 21st of January.
AS yet we have seen only the beginning of the
tragedy; its more awful scenes are to follow. Numerous stakes had already been
planted in Paris, but these did not slake the vengeance of the persecutor; more
victims must be immolated if expiation was to be done for the affront offered to
Heaven in the matter of the placards, and more blood shed if the land was to be
cleansed from the frightful pollution it had undergone. Such was the talk which
the priests held in presence of the king.[1] They reminded him that
this was a crisis in France, that he was the eldest son of the Church, that this
title it became him to preserve unsullied, and transmit with honor to his
posterity, and they urged him to proceed with all due rigour in the performance
of those bloody rites by which his throne and kingdom were to be purged. Francis
I was but too willing to obey. A grand procession, which was to be graced by
bloody interludes, was arranged, and the day on which it was to come off was the
21st of January, 1535. The horrors which will make this day famous to all time
were not the doings of the king alone; they were not less the acts of the nation
which by its constituted representatives countenanced the ceremonial and put its
hand to its cruel and sanguinary work.
The day fixed on arrived. Great
crowds from the country began to pour into Paris. In the city great preparations
had been made for the spectacle. The houses along the line of march were hung
with mourning drapery, and altars rose at intervals where the Host might repose
as it was being borne along to its final resting-place on the high altar of
Notre Dame. A throng of sight-seers filled the streets. Not only was every inch
of the pavement occupied by human beings, but every door-step had its little
group, every window its cluster of faces; even the roofs were black with
on-lookers, perched on the beams or hanging on by the chimneys. "There was not,"
says Simon Fontaine, a chronicler of that day, and a doctor of the Sorbonne,
"the smallest piece of wood or stone, jutting out of the walls, on which a
spectator was not perched, provided there was but room enough, and one might
have fancied the streets were paved with human heads."[2] Though it was day, a
lighted taper was stuck in the front of every house "to do reverence to the
blessed Sacrament and the holy relics.[3]
At the early hour
of six the procession marshalled at the Louvre. First came the banners and
crosses of the several parishes; next appeared the citizens, walking two and
two, and bearing torches in their hands. The four Mendicant orders followed; the
Dominican in his white woollen gown and black cloak; the Franciscan in his gown
of coarse brown cloth, half-shod feet, and truncated cowl covering his shorn
head; the Capuchin in his funnel-shaped cowl, and patched brown cloak, girded
with a white three-knotted rope; and the Augustine with a little round hat on
his shaven head, and wide black gown girded on the loins with a broad sash.
After the monks walked the priests and canons of the city.
The next part
of the procession evoked, in no ordinary degree, the interest and the awe of the
spectators. On no former occasion had so many relics been paraded on the streets
of Paris.[4] In the van of the
procession was carried the head of St. Louis, the patron saint of France. There
followed a bit of the true cross, the real crown of thorns, one of the nails,
the swaddling clothes in which Christ lay, the purple robe in which he was
attired, the towel with which he girded himself at the last supper, and the
spear-head that pierced his side. Many saints of former times had sent each a
bit of himself to grace the procession, and nourish the devotion of the
on-lookers some an arm, some a tooth, some a finger, and others one of the
many heads which, as it would seem, each had worn in his lifetime. This goodly
array of saintly relics was closed by the shrine of Genevieve, the patron saint
of Paris, borne by the corporation of butchers, who had prepared themselves for
this holy work by the purification of a three days' fast.[5]
After the dead
members of the Church, whose relics were enshrined in silver and gold, came a
crowd of living dignitaries, in their robes and the insignia of their
ecclesiastical rank. Cardinal and abbot, archbishop and bishop were there, in
the glory of scarlet hat and purple gown, of cope and mitre and crozier. Now
came the heart of this grand show, the Host; and in it the spectators saw One
mightier than any dead saint or living dignitary in all that great procession.
The Host was carried by the Bishop of Paris under a magnificent canopy, the four
pillars of which were supported by four princes of the blood the three sons of
the king, and the Duke of Vend'me.
After the Host walked the king. The
severe plainness of his dress was in marked and studied contrast to the
magnificence of the robes in which the ecclesiastics that preceded and the civic
functionaries that followed him were arrayed. Francis I. on that day wore no
crown, nor robe of state, nor was he borne along in chariot or litter. He
appeared walking on foot, his head uncovered, his eyes cast on the ground, and
in his hand a lighted taper.[6] The king was there in the
character of a penitent. He was the chief mourner in that great national act of
humiliation and repentance. He mourned with head bowed and eyes cast down, but
with heart unbroken.
For what did Francis I., monarch of France, do
penance? For the debaucheries that defiled his palace? for the righteous blood
that stained the streets of his capital? for the violated oaths by which he had
attempted to overreach those who trusted him at home, and those who were
transacting with him abroad? No; these were venial offenses; they were not worth
a thought on the part of the monarch. The King of France did penance for the all
but inexpiable crime of his Protestant subjects in daring to attack the mass,
and publish in the face of all France their Protest against its blasphemy and
idolatry.
The end of the procession was not yet; it still swept on; at
slow pace, and in mournful silence, save when some penitential chant rose upon
the air. Behind the king walked the queen; she was followed by all the members
of the court, by the ambassadors of foreign sovereigns, by the nobles of the
realm, by the members of Parliament in their scarlet robes, by judges, officers,
and the guilds of the various trades, each with the symbol of penitence in his
hand, a lighted candle. The military guard could with difficulty keep open the
way for the procession through the dense crowd, which pressed forward to touch
some holy relic or kiss some image of saint. They lined the whole route taken by
the processionists, and did homage on bended knee to the Host as it passed
them.[7]
The long procession
rolled in at the gates of Notre Dame. The Host, which had been carried thither
with so much solemnity, was placed on the high altar; and a solemn mass
proceeded in the presence of perhaps a more brilliant assemblage than had ever
before been gathered into even the great national temple of France. When the
ceremony was concluded the king returned to the bishop's palace, where he dined.
After dinner he adjourned with the whole assembly to the great hall, where he
ascended a throne which had been fitted up for the occasion. It was understood
that the king was to pronounce an oration, and the assembly kept silence, eager
to hear what so august a speaker, on so great an occasion, would say.
The
king presented himself to his subjects with a sorrowful countenance; nor is it
necessary to suppose that that sorrow was feigned. The affair of the placards
threatened to embroil him with both friend and foe; it had crossed his political
projects; and we can believe, moreover, that it had shocked his feelings and
beliefs as a Roman Catholic; for there is little ground to think that Francis
had begun to love the Gospel, and the looks of sadness in which he showed
himself to his subjects were not wholly counterfeited.
The speech which
Francis I. delivered on this occasion and several reports of it have come down
to us was touching and eloquent. He dwelt on the many favors Providence had
conferred on France; her enemies had felt the weight of her sword; her friends
had had good cause to rejoice in her alliance; even when punished for her faults
great mercy had been mingled with the chastisement; above all, what an honor
that France should have been enabled to persevere these long centuries in the
path of the Holy Catholic faith, and had so nobly worn her glorious title the
"Most Christian." But now, continued the king, she that has been preserved
hitherto from straying so little, seems on the point of a fatal plunge into
heresy; her soil has begun to produce monsters; "God has been attacked in the
Holy Sacrament," France has been dishonored in the eyes of other nations, and
the cloud of the Divine displeasure is darkening over her. "Oh, the crime, the
blasphemy, the day of sorrow and disgrace! Oh, that it had never dawned upon
us!"
These moving words drew tears from nearly all present, says the
chronicler who reports the scene, and who was probably an eye-witness of it.[8] Sobs and sighs burst from
the assembly. After a pause the king resumed: "What a disgrace it will be if we
do not extirpate these wicked creatures! If you know any person infected by this
perverse sect, be he your parent, brother, cousin, or connection, give
information against him. By concealing his misdeeds you will be partakers of
that pestilent faction." The assembly, says the chronicle, gave numerous signs
of assent.
"I give thanks to God," he resumed, "that the greatest, the
most learned, and undoubtedly the majority of my subjects, and especially in
this good city of Paris, are full of zeal for the Catholic religion." Then, says
the chronicle, you might have seen the faces of the spectators change in
appearance, and give signs of joy; acclamations prevented the sighs, and sighs
choked the acclamations. "I warn you," continued the king, "that I will have the
said errors expelled and driven from my kingdom, and will excuse no one." Then
he exclaimed, says our historian, with extreme anger, "As true, Messieurs, as I
am your king, if I knew one of my own limbs spotted or infected with this
detestable rottenness, I would give it you to cut off. . . . And farther, if I
saw one of my children defiled by it, I would not spare him... I would deliver
him up myself, and would sacrifice, him to God."[9]
The king was so
agitated that he was unable to proceed; he burst into tears. The assembly wept
with him. The Bishop of Paris and the provost of the merchants now approached
the monarch, and kneeling before him swore, the first in the name of the clergy,
and the second in that of the citizens, to make war against heresy. "Thereupon
all the spectators exclaimed, with voices broken by sobbing, 'We will live and
die for the Catholic religion!'"[10]
Having sworn this
oath in Notre Dame the roof under which, nearly three centuries after, the
Goddess of Reason sat enthroned the assembly reformed and set forth to begin
the war that very hour. Their zeal for the "faith" was inflamed to the utmost;
but they were all the better prepared to witness the dreadful sights that
awaited them. A terrible programme had been sketched out; horrors were to mark
every step of the way back to the Louvre, but Francis and his courtiers were to
gaze with pitiless eye and heart on these horrors.
The procession in
returning made a circuit by the Church of Genevieve, where now stands the
Pantheon. At short distances scaffolds had been erected on which certain
Protestant Christians were to be burned alive, and it was arranged that the
faggots should be lighted at the moment the king approached, and that the
procession should halt to witness the execution.
The men set apart to
death were first to undergo prolonged and excruciating tortures, and for this
end a most ingenious but cruel apparatus had been devised, which let us
describe. First rose an upright beam, firmly planted in the ground; to that
another beam was attached crosswise, and worked by a pulley and string. The
martyr was fastened to one end of the movable beam by his hands, which were tied
behind his back, and then he was raised in the air. He was next let down into
the slow fire underneath. After a minute or two's broiling he was raised again,
and a second time let drop into the fire; and thus was he raised and lowered
till the ropes that fastened him to the pole were consumed, and he fell amid the
burning coals, where he lay till he gave up the ghost.[11] "The custom in France,"
says Sleidan,[12] describing these cruel
tragedies; "is to put malefactors to death in the afternoon; where first silence
is cried, and then the crimes for which they suffer are repeated aloud. But when
any one is executed for Lutheranism, as they call it that is, if any person
hath disputed for justification by faith, not by works, that the saints are not
to be invocated, that Christ is the only Priest and Intercessor for mankind; or
if a man has happened to eat flesh upon forbidden days; not a syllable of all
this is published, but in general they cry that he hath renounced God Almighty .
. . and violated the decrees of our common mother, Holy Church. This aggravating
way makes the vulgar believe such persons the most profligate wretches under the
cope of heaven; insomuch that when they are broiling in the flame, it is usual
for the people to storm at them, cursing them in the height of their torments,
as if they were not worthy to tread upon the earth."
The first to be
brought forth was Nicholas Valeton, the Christian whom we have already mentioned
as frequently to be seen searching the innermost recesses and nooks of the
booksellers' shops in quest of the writings of the Reformers. The priests
offered him a pardon provided he would recant. "My faith," he replied, "has a
confidence in God, which will resist all the powers of hell.[13] He was dealt with as we
have already described; tied to the beam, he was alternately raised in the air
and lowered into the flames, till the cords giving way, there came an end to his
agonies.
Other two martyrs were brought forward, and three times, was
this cruel sport enacted, the king and all the members of the procession
standing by the while, and feasting their eyes on the torments of the sufferers.
The King of France, like the Roman tyrant, wished that his victims should feel
themselves die.
This was on the road between the Church of Genevieve and
the Louvre. The scene of this tragedy, therefore, could not be very far from the
spot where, somewhat more than 250 years after, the scaffold was set up for
Louis XVI., and 2,800 other victims of the Revolution. The spectacles of the day
were not yet closed. On the line of march the lieutenant-criminal had prepared
other scaffolds, where the cruel apparatus of death stood waiting its prey; and
before the procession reached the Louvre, there were more halts, more victims,
more expiations; and when Francis I. re-entered his palace and reviewed his
day's work, he was well pleased to think that he had made propitiation for the
affront offered to God in the Sacrament, and that the cloud of vengeance which
had lowered above his throne and his kingdom was rolled away. The priests
declared that the triumph of the Church in France was now for ever secured; and
if any there were among the spectators whom these cruel deaths had touched with
pity, by neither word nor sign dared they avow it. The populace of the capital
were overjoyed; they had tasted of blood and were not soon to forego their
relish for it,[14] nor to care much in
after-times at whose expense they gratified it.
As there are events so
like to one another in their outward guise that they seem to be the same
repeated, so there are days that appear to return over again, inasmuch as they
come laden with the same good or evil fortune to which they had as it were been
consecrated. Every nation has such days.
The 21st of January is a noted
and ominous day in the calendar of France. Twice has that day summoned up
spectacles of horror; twice has it seen deeds enacted which have made France and
the world shudder; and twice has it inaugurated an era of woes and tragedies
which stand without a parallel in history. The first 21st of January is that
whose tragic scenes we have just described, and which opened an era that ran on
till the close of the eighteenth century, during which the disciples of the
Gospel in France were pining in dungeons and in the galleys, were enduring
captivity and famine, were expiring amid the flames or dying on the field of
battle.
The second notable 21st of January came round in 1793. This day
had, too, its procession through the streets of Paris; again the king was the
chief figure; again there were tumult and shouting; again there was heard the
cry for more victims; again there were black scaffolds; and again the scenes of
the day were closed by horrid executions; Louis XVI., struggling hand to hand
with his jailers and executioners was dragged forward to the block, and there
held down by main force till the axe had fallen, and his dissevered head rolled
on the scaffold.
Have we not witnessed a third dismal 21st of January in
France? It is the winter of 1870-71. Four months has Paris suffered siege; the
famine is sore in the city; the food of man has disappeared from her luxurious
tables; her inhabitants ravenously devour unclean and abominable things the
vermin of the sewers, the putrid carcasses of the streets. Within the city, the
inhabitants are pining away with cold and hunger and disease; without, the sword
of a victorious foe awaits them. Paris will rouse herself, and break through the
circle of fire and steel that hems her in. The attempt is made, but fails. Her
soldiers are driven back before the victorious German, and again are cooped up
within her miserable walls. On the 21st of January, 1871, it was resolved to
capitulate to the conqueror.[15]
CHAPTER
22 Back to
Top
BASLE AND THE
"INSTITUTES."
Glory of the Sufferers Francis I. again turns to the
German Protestants They Shrink back His Doublings New Persecuting Edicts
Departure of the Queen of Navarre from Paris New Day to Bearn Calvin
Strasburg Calvin arrives there Bucer, Capito, etc. Calvin Dislikes their
Narrowness Goes on to Basle Basle Its Situation and Environs Soothing
Effect on Calvin's Mind His Interview with Erasmus Erasmus "Lays the Egg"
Terrified at what Comes of it Draws back Calvin's Enthusiasm Erasmus'
Prophecy Catherine Klein First Sketch of the InstitutesWhat led Calvin to
undertake the Work Its Sublimity, but Onerousness.
WE described in our last chapter the explosion that
followed the publication of the manifesto against the mass. In one and the same
night it was placarded over great part of France, and when the morning broke,
and men came forth and read it, there were consternation and anger throughout
the kingdom. It proclaimed only the truth, but it was truth before its time in
France. It was a bolt flung at the mass and its believers, which might silence
and crush them, but if it failed to do this it would rouse them into fury, and
provoke a terrible retaliation. It did the latter. The throne and the whole
kingdom had been polluted; the Holy Sacrament blasphemed; the land was in danger
of being smitten with terrible woes, and so a public atonement was decreed for
the public offense which had been offered. Not otherwise, it pleased the king,
his prelates, and his nobles to think, could France escape the wrath of the Most
High.
The terrible rites of the day of expiation we have already
chronicled. Was the God that France worshipped some inexorable and remorseless
deity, seeing she propitiated him with human sacrifices? The tapers carried that
day by the penitents who swept in long procession through the streets of the
capital, blended their lights with the lurid glare of the fires in which the
Lutherans were burned; and the loud chant of priest and chorister rose amid no
cries and sobs from the victims. These noble men, who were now dragged to the
burning pile, uttered no cry; they shed no tear; that were a weakness that
would, have stained the glory of their sacrifice. They stood with majestic mien
at the stake, and looked with calmness on the tortures their enemies had
prepared for them, nor did they blanch when the flames blazed up around them.
The sacrifice of old, when led to the altar, was crowned with garlands. So it
was with these martyrs. They came to the altar to offer up their lives crowned
with the garlands of joy and praise. Their faith, their courage, their reliance
on God when suffering in His cause, their vivid anticipations of future glory,
were the white robes in which they dressed themselves when they ascended the
altar to die. France, let us hope, will not always be ignorant of her true
heroes. These have shed around her a renown purer and brighter, a hundred times,
than all the glory she has earned on the battle-field from the days of Francis
I. to those of the last Napoleon.
Hardly had Francis I. concluded his
penitential procession when he again turned to the Protestant princes of
Germany, and attempted to resume negotiations with them. They not unnaturally
asked of him an explanation of his recent proceedings. Why so anxious to court
the favor of the Protestants of Germany when he was burning the Protestants of
France?
Were there two true faiths in the world, the creed of Rome on the
west of the Rhine, and the religion of Wittenberg on the east of that river? But
the king was ready with his excuse, and his excuse was that of almost all
persecutors of every age. The king had not been burning Lutherans, but executing
traitors. If those he had put to death had imbibed Reformed sentiments, it was
not for their religion, but for their sedition that they had been punished. Such
was the excuse which Francis gave to the German princes in his letter of the
15th of February. "To stop this plague of disloyalty from spreading, he punished
its originators severely, as his ancestors had also done in like cases."[1] He even attempted to
induce Melanchthon to take up his abode in Paris, where he would have received
him with honor, and burned him a few months afterwards. But these untruths and
doublings availed Francis little. Luther had no faith in princes, least of all
had he faith in Francis I. Melanchthon, anxious as he was to promote
conciliation, yet refused to enter a city on the streets of which the ashes of
the fires in which the disciples of Christ had been burned were not yet cold.
And the Protestant princes, though desirous of strengthening their political
defences, nevertheless shrank back from a hand which they saw was red with the
blood of their brethren. The situation in France began to be materially altered.
The king's disposition had undergone a change for the worse; a gloomy
determination to crush heresy had taken possession of him, and was clouding his
better qualities.
The men of letters who had shed a lustre upon his court
and realm were beginning to withdraw. They were terrified by the stakes which
they saw around them, not knowing but that their turn might come next. The monks
were again looking up, which augured no good for the interests of
learning.
Not content with the executions of the terrible 21st of
January, the king continued to issue edicts against the sect of "Lutherans still
swarming in the realm;" he wrote to the provincial parliaments, exhorting them
to furnish money and prisons for the extirpation [2] of heresy; lastly, he
indited an ordinance declaring printing abolished all over France, under pain of
the gallows.[3] That so barbarous a decree
should have come from a prince who gloried in being the leader of the literary
movements of his age, would not have been credible had it not been narrated by
historians of name. It is one among a hundred proofs that literary culture is no
security against the spirit of persecution.
Of those who now withdrew
from Paris was Margaret of Valois, the king's sister. We have seen the hopes
that she long and ardently cherished that her brother would be won to the
Reformation; but now that Francis I. had cast the die, and sealed his choice by
the awful deeds of blood we have narrated, Margaret, abandoning all hope,
quitted Paris, where even the palace could hardly protect her from the stake,
and retired to her own kingdom of Bearn. Her departure, and that of the exiles
who had preceded her, if it was the beginning of that social and industrial
decadence which ever since has gone on, amid many deceitful appearances, in
France, was the dawn of a new day to Bearn. Her court became the asylum of the
persecuted. Many refugee families transported their industry and their fortune
to her provinces, and the prosperity which had taken a long adieu of France,
began to enrich her little kingdom. Soon a new face appeared upon the state of
the Bearnais. The laws were reformed, schools were opened, many branches of
industry were imported and very successfully cultivated, and, in short, the
foundations were now laid of that remarkable prosperity which made the little
kingdom in the Pyrenees resemble an oasis amid the desert which France and Spain
were now beginning to become. When Margaret went to her grave, in 1549, she left
a greater to succeed her in the government of the little territory which had so
rapidly risen from rudeness to wealth and civilisation. Her daughter, Jeanne
d'Albret, is one of the most illustrious women in history.
We return to
Calvin, in the track of whose footsteps it is that the great movement, set for
the rising of one kingdom and the fall of another, is to be sought. He now
begins to be by very much the chief figure of his age. Francis I. with his
court, Charles V. with his armies, are powers more imposing but less real than
Calvin. They pass across the stage with a great noise, but half-a-century
afterwards, when we come to examine the traces they have left behind them, it is
with difficulty that we can discover them; other kings and other armies are busy
effacing them, and imprinting their own in their room. It is Calvin's work that
endures and goes forward with the ages. We have seen him, a little before the
bursting of the storm, leave Paris, nevermore to enter its gates.
Setting
out in the direction of Germany, and travelling on horseback, he arrived in due
course at Strasburg. Its name, "the City of the Highways," sufficiently
indicates its position, and the part it was expected to play in the then system
of Europe. Strongly fortified, it stood like a mailed warrior at the point where
the great roads of Northern Europe intersected one another. It was the capital
of Alsace, which was an independent territory, thrown in as it were, in the
interests of peace, between Eastern and Western Europe, and therefore its
fortifications were on purpose of prodigious strength. As kings were rushing at
one another, now pushing eastward from France into Germany, and now rushing
across the Rhine from Germany into France, eager to give battle and redden the
earth with blood, this man in armor the City of the Highways, namely who
stood right in their path compelled them to halt, until their anger should
somewhat subside, and peace might be maintained.
A yet more friendly
office did Strasburg discharge to the persecuted children of the Reformation.
Being a free city, it offered asylum to the exiles from surrounding countries.
Its magistrates were liberal; its citizens intelligent; its college was already
famous; the strong walls and firm gates that would have resisted the tempests of
war had yielded to the Gospel, and the Reformation had found entrance into
Strasburg at an early period. Bucer, Capito, and Hedio, whom we have already met
with, were living here at the time of Calvin's visit, and the pleasure of seeing
them, and conversing with them, had no small share in inducing the Reformer to
turn his steps in the direction of this city.
In one respect he was not
disappointed. He much relished the piety and the learning of these men, and they
in turn were much impressed with the seriousness and greatness of character of
their young visitor. But in another respect he was disappointed in them. Their
views of Divine truth lacked depth and comprehensiveness, and their scheme of
Reformation was, in the same proportion, narrow and defective. The path which
they loved, a middle way between Wittenberg and Rome, was a path which Calvin
did not, or would not, understand. To him there were only two faiths, a true and
a false, and to him there could be but two paths, and the attempt to make a
third between the two was, in his judgment, to keep open the road back to Rome.
All the greater minds of the Reformation were with Calvin on this point. Those
only who stood in the second class among the Reformers gave way to the dream of
reconciling Rome and the Gospel: a circumstance which we must attribute not to
the greater charity of the latter, but to their incapacity to comprehend either
the system of Rome or the system of the Gospel in all the amplitude that belongs
to each.
Calvin grew weary of hearing, day after day, plans propounded
which, at the best, could have but patched and soldered a hopelessly rotten
system, but would have accomplished no Reformation, and so, after a sojourn of a
few months, he took his departure from Strasburg, and began his search for the
"quiet nook"[4] where he might give
himself to the study of what he felt must, under the Spirit, be his great
instructor the Bible. The impression was growing upon him, and his experience at
Strasburg had deepened that impression, that it was not from others that he was
to learn the Divine plan; he must himself search it out in the Holy Oracles; he
must go aside with God, like Moses on the mount, and there he would be shown the
fashion of that temple which he was to build in Christendom.
Following
the course of the Rhine, Calvin went on to Basle. Basle is the gate of
Switzerland as one comes from Germany, and being a frontier town, situated upon
one of the then great highways of Europe, it enjoyed a large measure of
prosperity. The Huguenot traveler, Misson, who visited it somewhat more than a
century after the time of which we speak, says of it: "The largest, fairest,
richest city now reckoned to be in Switzerland."[5] Its situation is pleasant,
and may even in some respects be styled romantic. Its chief feature is the
Rhine, even here within sight, if one may so speak, of the mountains where it
was born: a broad, majestic river, sweeping past the town with rapid flow,[6] or rather dividing it into
two unequal parts, the Little Basle lying on the side towards Germany, and
joined to the Great Basle by a long wooden bridge, now changed into one of
stone. Crowning the western bank of the Rhine, in the form of a half-moon, are
the buildings of the city, conspicuous among which are the fine towers of the
Minster. Looking from the esplanade of the Cathedral one's eye lights on the
waters of the river, on the fresh and beautiful valleys through which it rolls;
on the gentle hills of the Black Forest beyond, sprinkled with dark pines, and
agreeably relieved by the sunny glades on which their shadows fall; while a
short walk to the south of the town brings the tops of the Jura upon the
horizon, telling the traveler that he has reached the threshold of a region of
mountainous grandeur. "They have a custom which is become a law," says the
traveler to whom we have referred above, speaking of Basle, "and which is
singular and very commendable; 'tis that whoever passes through Basle, and
declares himself to be poor, they give him victuals I think, for two or three
days; and some other relief, if he speaks Latin." [7]
Much as the scene
presents itself to the tourist of to-day, would it appear to Calvin more than
three centuries ago. There was the stream rolling its "milk-white" floods to the
sea, nor was he ignorant of the fact that it had borne on its current the ashes
of Huss and Jerome, to bury them grandly in the ocean. There was the long wooden
bridge that spans the Rhine, with the crescent-like line of buildings drawn
along the brow of the opposite bank. There were the Minster towers, beneath
whose shadow Oecolampadius, already dismissed from labor, was resting in the
sleep of the tomb.[8] There were the emerald
valleys, enclosing the town with a carpet of the softest green; there were the
sunny glades, and the tall dark pines on the eastern hills; and in the south
were the azure tops of the Jura peering over the landscape. A scene like this,
so finely blending quietude and sublimity, must have had a soothing influence on
a mind like Calvin's; it must have appeared to him the very retreat he had so
long sought for, and fain would he be to turn aside for awhile here and rest.
Much troubled was the world around; the passions of men were raising frightful
tempests in it; armies and battles and stakes made it by no means a pleasant
dwelling-place; but these quiet valleys and those distant peaks spoke of peace,
and so the exile, weary of foot, and yet more weary of heart for his brethren
were being led as sheep to the slaughter very unobtrusively but very
thankfully entered within those gates to which Providence had led him, and where
he was to compose a work which still keeps its place at the head of the
Reformation literature the Institutes.
On his way from Strasburg to
Basle, Calvin had an interview with a very remarkable man. The person whom he
now met had rendered to the Gospel no small service in the first days of the
Reformation, and he might have rendered it ten times more had his courage been
equal to his genius, and his piety as profound as his scholarship. We refer to
Erasmus, the great scholar of the sixteenth century. He was at this time living
at Freiburg, in Brisgau the progress, or as Erasmus deemed it, the excesses of
the Reformed faith having frightened him into leaving Basle, where he had passed
so many years, keeping court like a prince, and receiving all the statesmen and
scholars who chanced to visit that city. Erasmus' great service to the
Reformation was his publication of the New Testament in the year 1516. [9] The fountain sealed all
through the Dark Ages was anew opened, and the impulse even to the cause of pure
Christianity thereby was greater than we at this day can well imagine. This was
the service of Erasmus. "He laid the egg," it has been said, "of the
Reformation."
The great scholar, in his early and better days, had seen
with unfeigned joy the light of letters breaking over Europe. He hated the monks
with his whole soul, and lashed their ignorance and vice with the unsparing
rigor of his satire; but now he was almost seventy, he had hardly more than
another year to live,[10] and the timidity of age
was creeping over him. He had never been remarkable for courage; he always took
care not to come within wind of a stake, but now he was more careful than ever
not to put himself in the way of harm. He had hailed the Reformation less for
the spiritual blessings which it brought in its train than for the literary
elegances and social ameliorations which it shed around it.
Besides, the
Pope had been approaching him on his weak side. Paul III. fully understood the
importance of enlisting the pen of Erasmus on behalf of Rome. The battle was
waxing hotter every day, and the pen was playing a part in the conflict which
was not second to even that of the sword. A cardinal's hat was the brilliant
prize which the Pope dangled before the scholar. Erasmus had the good sense not
to accept, but the flattery implied in the offer had so far gained its end that
it had left Erasmus not very zealous in the Reformed cause, if indeed he had
ever been so. Could the conflict have been confined to the schools, with nothing
more precious than ink shed in it, and nothing more weighty than a little
literary reputation lost by it, the scholar of Rotterdam would have continued to
play the champion on the Protestant side. But when he saw monarchs girding on
the sword, nations beginning to be convulsed things he had not reckoned on
when he gave the first touch to the movement by the publication of his New
Testament and especially when he saw confessors treading the bitter path of
martyrdom, it needed on the part of Erasmus a deeper sense of the value of the
Gospel and a higher faith in God than, we fear, he possessed, to stand
courageously on the side of the Reformation.
How unlike the two men who
now stood face to face! Both were on the side of progress, but each sought it on
a different line, and each had pictured to himself a different future. Erasmus
was the embodiment of the Renaissance, the other was the herald of a more
glorious day. In the first the light of the Renaissance, which promised so much,
had already begun to wane sprung of the earth, it was returning to the earth;
but where Erasmus stopped, there Calvin found his starting-point. While the
shadows of the departing day darkened the face of the sage of Rotterdam,
Calvin's shone with the brightness of the morning. After a few interrogatories,
to which Erasmus replied hesitatingly, Calvin freely gave vent to the
convictions that filled his soul.[11] Nothing, he believed, but
a radical reform could save Christendom. He would have no bolstering up of an
edifice rotten to its foundations. He would sweep it away to its last stone, and
he would go to the quarry whence were dug the materials wherewith the Christian
Church was fashioned in the first age, and he would anew draw forth the stones
necessary for its reconstruction.
Erasmus shrank back as if he saw the
toppling ruin about to fall upon him and crush him. "I see a great tempest about
to arise in the Church against the Church,"[12] exclaimed the scholar, in
whose ear Calvin's voice sounded as the first hoarse notes of the coming storm.
How much.
Erasmus misjudged! The Renaissance calm, classic, and
conservative as it seemed was in truth the tempest. The pagan principles it
scattered in the soft of Christendom, helped largely to unchain those furious
winds that broke out two centuries after. The interview now suddenly
closed.
Pursuing his journey, with his inseparable companion, the young
Canon Du Tillet, the two travelers at length reached Basle. Crossing the long
bridge, and climbing the opposite acclivity, they entered the city. It was the
seat of a university founded, as we have already said, in 1459, by Pope Pius
II., who gave it all the privileges of that of Bologna. It had scholars,
divines, and some famous printers. But Calvin did not present himself at their
door. The purpose for which he had come to Basle required that he should remain
unknown, he wished to have perfect unbroken quietude for study. Accordingly he
turned into a back street where, he knew, lived a pious woman in humble
condition, Catherine Klein, who received the disciples of the Gospel when forced
to seek asylum, and he took up his abode in her lowly dwelling.
The
penetration of this good woman very soon discovered the many high qualities of
the thin pale-faced stranger whom she had received under her roof. When Calvin
had fulfilled his career, and his name and doctrine were spreading over the
earth, she was wont to dilate with evident pleasure in his devotion to study, on
the beauty of his life, and the charms of his genius. He seldom went out,[13] and when he did so it was
to steal away across the Rhine, and wander among the pines on the eastern hill,
whence he could gaze on the city and its environing valleys, and the majestic
river whose "eternal" flow formed the link between the everlasting hills of its
birth-place, and the great ocean where was its final goal nay, between the
successive generations which had flourished upon its banks:, from the first
barbarian races which had drunk its waters, to the learned men who were filling
the pulpits, occupying the university chairs, or working the printing-presses of
the city below him.
Calvin had found at last his "obscure corner," and he
jealously preserved his incognito. (Ecolampadius, the first Reformed Pastor of
Basle, was now, as we have said, in his grave; but Oswald Myconius, the friend
of Zwingli, had taken his place as President of the Church. In him Calvin knew
he would find a congenial spirit. There was another man living at Basle at that
time, whose fame as a scholar had reached the Reformer Symon Grynaeus.
Grynaeus was the schoolfellow of Melanchthon, and when Erasmus quitted Basle he
was invited to take his place at the university, which he filled with a renown
second only to that of his great predecessor. He was as remarkable for his
honesty and the sweetness of his disposition:as for his learning. Calvin sought
and enjoyed the society of these men before leaving Basle, but meanwhile,
inflexibly bent on the great ends for which he had come hither, he forbore
making their acquaintance. Intercourse with the world and its business sharpens
the observing powers, and breeds dexterity; but the soul that is to grow from
day to day and from year to year, and at last embody its matured and
concentrated strength in some great work, must dwell in solitude. It was here,
in this seclusion and retreat, that Calvin sketched the first outline of a work
which was to be not merely the basis of his own life-work, but the corner-stone
of the Reformed Temple, and which from year to year he was to develop and
perfect, according to the measure of the increase of his own knowledge and
light, and leave to succeeding generations as the grandest, of his and of his
age's achievements.
The Institutes first sprang into form in the
following manner: While Calvin was pursuing his studies in his retirement at
Basle, dreadful tidings reached the banks of the Rhine. The placard, the
outbursts of royal wrath, the cruel torturings and bumlings that followed, were
all carried by report to Basle. First came tidings of the individual martyrs;
scarcely had the first messenger given in his tale, when another escaped from
prison or from the stake, and who could say, as of old, "I only am left to tell
thee" arrived with yet more dreadful tidings of the wholesale barbarities
which had signalised the terrible 21st of January in Paris. The news plunged
Calvin into profound sorrow. He could but too vividly realize the awful scenes,
the tidings of which so wrung his heart with anguish. It was but yesterday that
he had trodden the streets in which they were enacted. He knew the men who had
endured these cruel deaths. They were his brethren. He had lived in their
houses; he had sat at their tables. How often had he held sweet converse with
them on the things of God! He knew them to be men of whom the world was not
worthy; and yet they were accounted as the off-scouring of all things, and as
sheep appointed to the slaughter were killed all day long. Could he be silent
when his brethren were being condemned and drawn to death? And yet what could he
do?
The arm of the king he could not stay. He could not go in person and
plead their cause, for that would be to set up his own stake. He had a pen, and
he would employ it in vindicating his brethren in the face of Christendom. But
in what way should he best do this? He could vindicate these martyrs effectually
not otherwise than by vindicating their cause. It was the Reformation that was
being vilified, condemned, burned in the persons of these men; it was this,
therefore, that he must vindicate. It was not merely a few stakes in Paris, but
the martyrs of the Gospel in all lands that he would cover with his
aegis.
The task that Calvin now set for himself was sublime, but onerous.
He would make it plain to all that the, faith which was being branded as heresy,
and for professing which men were being burned alive, was no cunningly devised
system of man, but the Old Gospel; and that so far from being an enemy of kings,
and a subverter of law and order, which it was accused of being, it was the very
salt of society a bulwark to the throne and a protection to law; and being
drawn from the Bible, it opened to man the gates of a moral purification in this
life, and of a perfect and endless felicity in the next. This was what Calvin
accomplished in his Christianae Religionus Institutio.
CHAPTER
23 Back to
Top
THE "INSTITUTES."
Calvin
Discards the Aristotelian Method How a True Science of Astronomy is Formed
Calvin Proceeds in the same way in Constructing his Theology Induction
Christ Himself sets the Example of the Inductive Method Calvin goes to the
Field of Scripture His Pioneers The Schoolmen Melanchthon Zwingli The
Augsburg Confession Calvin's System more Complete Two Tremendous Facts
First Edition of the Institutes Successive Editions The Creed its Model
Enumeration of its Principal Themes-God the Sole Fountain of all things Christ
the One Source of Redemption and Salvation The Spirit the One Agent in the
Application of Redemption The Church Her Worship and
Government.
We shall now proceed to the consideration of that
work which has exercised so vast an influence on the great movement we are
narrating, and which all will admit, even though they may dissent from some of
its' teachings, to be, in point of logical compactness, and constructive
comprehensive genius, truly grand. It is not of a kind that discloses its
solidity and gigantic proportions to the casual or passing glance. It must be
leisurely contemplated. In the case of some kingly mountain, whose feet are
planted in the depths but whose top is lost in the light of heaven, we must
remove to a distance, and when the little hills which had seemed to overtop it
when we stood at its base have sunk below the horizon, then it is that the true
monarch stands out before us in un-approached and unchallenged supremacy. So
with the Institutes of the Christian Religion. No such production had emanated
from the theological intellect since the times of the great Father of the West
Augustine.
During the four centuries that preceded Calvin, there had been
no lack of theories and systems. The schoolmen had toiled to put the world in
possession of truth; but their theology was simply abstraction piled upon
abstraction, and the more elaborately they speculated the farther they strayed.
Their systems had no basis in fact: they had no root in the revelation of God;
they were a speculation, not knowledge.
Luther and Calvin struck out a
new path in theological discovery. They discarded the Aristotelian method as a
vicious one, though the fashionable and, indeed, the only one until their time,
and they adopted the Baconian method, though Bacon had not yet been born to give
his name to his system. Calvin saw the folly of retiring into the dark closet of
one's own mind, as the schoolmen did, and out of such materials as they were
able to create, fashioning a theology. Taking his stand upon the open field of
revelation, he essayed to glean those God-created and Heaven-revealed truths
which lie there, and he proceeded to build them up into a system of knowledge
which should have power to enlighten the intellect and to sanctify the hearts of
the men of the sixteenth century. Calvin's first question was not, "Who am I?"
but "Who is God?" He looked at God from the stand-point of the human conscience,
with the torch of the Bible in his hand. God was to him the beginning of
knowledge. The heathen sage said, "Know thyself." But a higher Authority had
said, "The fear," that is the knowledge, "of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom." It is in the light that all things are seen. "God is light."
In
chemistry, in botany, in astronomy, he is the best philosopher who most
carefully studies nature, most industriously collects facts, and most skilfully
arranges them into a system or science. Not otherwise can the laws of the
material universe, and the mutual relations of the bodies that compose it, be
discovered. We must proceed in theology just as we proceed in natural science.
He is the best theologian who most carefully studies Scripture, who most
accurately brings out the meaning of its individual statements or truths, and
who so classifies these as to exhibit that whole scheme of doctrine that is
contained in the Bible. Not otherwise than by induction can we arrive at a true
science: not otherwise than by induction can we come into possession of a true
theology. The botanist, instead of shutting himself up in his closet, goes forth
into the field and collects into classes the flora spread profusely, and without
apparent order, over plain and mountain, grouping plant with plant, each
according to its kind, till not one is left, and then his science of botany is
perfected.
The astronomer, instead of descending into some dark cave,
turns his telescope to the heavens, watches the motions of its orbs, and by
means of the bodies that are seen, he deduces the laws and forces that are
unseen, and thus order springs up before his eye, and the system off the
universe unveils itself to him. What the flora of the field are to the botanist,
what the stars of the firmament are to the astronomer, the truths scattered over
the pages of the Bible are to the theologian. The Master Himself has given us
the hint that it is the inductive method which we are to follow in our search
after Divine truth; nay, He has herein gone before us and set us the example,
for beginning at Moses and the prophets, He expounded to His disciples "in all
the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." It was to these pages that Calvin
turned. He searched them through and through, he laid all the parts of the Word
of God under contribution: its histories and dramas, its Psalms and prophecies,
its Gospels and Epistles. With profound submission of mind he accepted whatever
he found taught there; and having collected his materials, he proceeded with the
severest logic, and in the exercise of a marvellous constructive genius, to
frame his system to erect the temple. To use the beautiful simile of
D'Aubigne, "He went to the Gospel springs, and there collecting into a golden
cup the pure and living waters of Divine revelation, presented them to the
nations to quench their thirst."[1]
We have said that
Calvin was the first to open this path, but the statement is not to be taken
literally and absolutely. He had several pioneers in this road; but none of them
had trodden it with so firm a step, or left it so thoroughly open for men to
follow, as Calvin did. By far the greatest of his pioneers was Augustine. But
even the City of God, however splendid as a dissertation, is yet as a system
much inferior to the Institutes, in completeness as well as in logical power.
After Augustine there comes a long and dreary interval, during which no attempt
was made to classify and systematize the truths of revelation. The attempt of
Johannes Damascenus, in the eighth century, is a very defective performance, Not
more successful were the efforts of the schoolmen. The most notable of these
were the four books of Sentences by Peter Lombard, and the Summa of Thomas
Aquinas, but both are defective and erroneous. In perusing the theological
productions of that age, we become painfully sensible of strength wasted, owing
to the adoption of an entirely false method of interpreting the Word of God a
method which, we ought to say, was a forsaking rather than an interpreting of
the Scriptures; for in the schoolmen we have a body of ingenious and laborious
men, who have withdrawn themselves from the light of the Bible into the dark
chamber of their own minds, and are weaving systems of theology out of their
brains and the traditions of their Church, in which errors are much more
plentiful than truths, and which possess no power to pacify the conscience, or
to purify the life.
When we reach the age of the Reformation the true
light again greets our eyes. Luther was no systematiser on a great scale;
Melanchthon made a more considerable essay in that direction. His Loci Communes,
or Common Places, published in 1521, were a prodigious advance on the systems of
the schoolmen. They are quickened by the new life, but yet their mold is
essentially mediaeval, and is too rigid and unbending to permit a free display
of the piety of the author. The Commentarius de Vera et Falsa Religione, or
Commentary on the True and False Religion, of Zwingli, published in 1525, is
freed from the scholastic method of Melanchthon's performance, but is still
defective as a formal system of theology. The Confession of Augsburg (1530) is
more systematic and complete than any of the foregoing, but still simply a
confession of faith, and not such an exhibition of Divine Truth as the Church
required. It remained for Calvin to give it this. The Intitutes of the Christian
Religion was a confession of faith,[2] a system of exegesis, a
body of polemics and apologetics, and an exhibition of the rich practical
effects which flow from Christianity it was all four in one. Calvin takes his
reader by the hand and conducts him round the entire territory of truth; he
shows him the strength and grandeur of its central citadel namely, its
God-given doctrines; the height and solidity of its ramparts; the gates by which
it is approached; the order that reigns within; the glory of the Lamb revealed
in the Word that illuminates it with continual day; the River of Life by which
it was watered that is, the Holy Spirit; this, he exclaims, is the "City of the
Living God," this is the "Heavenly Jerusalem ;" decay or overthrow never can
befall it, for it is built upon the foundation of prophets and apostles, Jesus
Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone. Into this city "there entereth
nothing that defileth, or maketh a lie," and the "nations of them that are saved
shall walk in the light thereof."
That Calvin's survey of the field of
supernatural truth as contained in the Bible was complete; that his
classification of its individual facts was perfect; that his deductions and
conclusions were in all cases sound, and that his system was without error,
Calvin himself did not maintain, and it would ill become even the greatest
admirer of that guarded, qualified, and balanced Calvinism which the Reformer
taught not that caricature of it which some of his followers have presented, a
Calvinism which disjoins the means from the end, which destroys the freedom of
man and abolishes his accountability; which is fatalism, in short, and is no
more like the Calvinism of Calvin than Mahommedanism is like Christianity it
would ill become any one, we say, to challenge for Calvin's system an immunity
from error which he himself did not challenge for it. He found himself, in
pursuing his investigations in the field of Scripture, standing face to face
with two tremendous facts God's sovereignty and man's freedom; both he
believed to be facts; he maintained the last as firmly as the first; he
confessed that he could not reconcile the two, he left this and all other
mysteries connected with supernatural truth to be solved by the deeper
researches and the growing light of the ages to come, if it were meant that they
should ever find their solution on earth.
This work was adopted by the
Reformed Church, and after some years published in most of the languages of
Christendom. The clearness and strength of its; logic; the simplicity and beauty
of ifs exposition; the candour of its conclusions; the fullness of its doctrinal
statements, and not less the warm spiritual life that throbbed under its
deductions, now bursting out in rich practical exhortation, and now soaring into
a vein of lofty speculation, made the Church feel that no book like this had the
Reformation given her heretofore; and she accepted it, as at once a confession
of her faith, an answer to all charges whether from the Roman camp or from the
infidel one, and her justification alike before those now living and the ages to
come, against the violence with which the persecutor was seeking to overwhelm
her.
The first edition of the Institutes contained only six chapters.
During all his life after he continued to elaborate and perfect the work.
Edition after edition continued to issue from the press. These were published in
Latin, but afterwards rendered into French, and translated into all the tongues
of Europe. "During twenty-four years," says Bungener, "the book increased in
every edition, not as an edifice to which additions are made, but as a tree
which develops itself naturally, freely, and without the compromise of its unity
for a moment."[3] It is noteworthy that the
publication of the work fell on the mid-year of the Reformer's life.
Twenty-seven years had he been preparing for writing it, and twenty-seven years
did he survive to expand and perfect it; nevertheless, not one of its statements
or doctrines did he essentially alter or modify. It came, too, at the right time
as regards the Reformation.[4]
We shall briefly
examine the order and scope of the book. It proposes two great ends, the
knowledge of God and the knowledge of man. It employs the first to attain the
second. "The whole sum of wisdom," said the author at the outset, "is that by
knowing God each of us knows himself also."[5] If man was made in the
image of God, then surely the true way to know what our moral and spiritual
powers are, or ought to be, what are the relations in which we stand to God, and
what the service of love and obedience we owe him, is not to study the dim and
now defaced image, but to turn our eye upon the undimmed and glorious Original
the Being in whose likeness man was created.
The image of God, it is
argued, imprinted upon our own souls would have sufficed to reveal him to us if
we had not fallen. But sin has defaced that image. Nevertheless, we are not left
in darkness, for God has graciously given us a second revelation of himself in
his Word. Grasping that torch, and holding it aloft, Calvin proceeds on his way,
and bids all who would know the eternal mysteries follow that shining light.
Thus it was that the all-sufficiency and supreme and sole authority of the
Scriptures took a leading place in the system of the Reformer.
The order
of the work is simplicity itself. It is borrowed from the Apostles' Creed, whose
four cardinal doctrines furnish the Reformer with the argument of the four books
in which he finally arranged the Institutes.
In regard to Church government, the means which the Reformer adopted for putting an end to all existing corruptions and abuses, and preventing their recurrence, are well summed up by Dr. Cunningham. He sought to attain this end
CHAPTER
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CALVIN ON PREDESTINATION AND
ELECTION.
Calvin's Views on the Affirmative Side God as the Author
of all things Ordains all that is to come to pass The Means equally with the
End comprehended in the Decree As Sovereign, God Executes all that comes to
pass Calvin's Views on the Negative Side Man a Free Agent Man an
Accountable Being Calvin maintained side by side God's Eternal Ordination and
Man's Freedom of Action Cannot Reconcile the Two Liberty and Necessity
Tremendous Difficulties confessed to Attach to Both Theories Explanations
Locke and Sir William Hamilton Growth of the Institutes.
WE have reserved till now our brief statement of
Calvin's views on the subject of predestination and election the shroud, in
the eyes of some, in which he has wrapped up his theology; the rock, in the view
of others, on which he has planted it. Our business as historians is neither to
impugn nor to defend, but simply to narrate; to state, with all the clearness,
fairness, and brevity possible, what Calvin held and taught on this great point.
The absolute sovereignty of God was Calvin's cornerstone. As the Author and
Ruler of his own universe, he held that God must proceed in his government of
his creatures according to a definite plan; that that plan he had formed
unalterably and unchangeably from everlasting; that it embraced not merely the
grander issues of Providence, but the whole array of means by which these issues
are reached; that this plan God fully carries out in time; and that, though
formed according to the good pleasure of his will, it is based on reasons
infinitely wise and righteous, although these have not been made known to us.
Such was Calvin's first and fundamental position.
This larger and wider
form of the question, to which is given the name of predestination, embraces and
disposes of the minor one, namely, election. If God from everlasting
pre-ordained the whole history and ultimate fate of all his creatures, it
follows that he pre-ordained the destiny of each individual. Calvin taught, as
Augustine had done before him, that out of a race all equally guilty and
condemned, God had elected some to everlasting life, and that this decree of the
election of some to life, implied the reprobation of the rest to death, but that
their own sin and not God's decree was the reason of their perishing. The
Reformer further was careful to teach that the election of some to life did not
proceed on God's fore-knowledge of their faith and good works, but that, on the
contrary, their election was the efficient cause of their faith and
holiness.
These doctrines the Reformer embraced because it appeared to
him that they were the doctrines taught in the Scriptures on the point in
question; that they were proclaimed in the facts of history; and that they were
logically and inevitably deducible from the idea of the supremacy, the
omnipotence, and intelligence of God. Any other scheme appeared to him
inconsistent with these attributes of the Deity, and, in fact, a dethroning of
God as the Sovereign of the universe which he had called into existence, and an
abandonment of its affairs to blind chance.
Such was the positive or
affirmative side of Calvin's views. We shall now briefly consider the negative
side, in order to see his whole mind on the question. The Reformer abhorred and
repudiated the idea that God was the Author of sin, and he denied that any such
inference could be legitimately drawn from his doctrine of predestination. He
denied, too, with the same emphasis, that any constraint or force was put by the
decree upon the will of man, or any restraint upon his actions; but that, on the
contrary, all men enjoyed that spontaneity of will and freedom of action which
are essential to moral accountability. He repudiated, moreover, the charge of
fatalism which has sometimes been brought against his doctrine, maintaining that
inasmuch as the means were fore-ordained as well as the end, his teaching had
just the opposite effect, and instead of relaxing it tended to brace the soul,
to give it a more vigorous temper; and certainly the qualities of perseverance
and indomitable energy which were so conspicuously shown in Calvin's own life,
and which have generally characterised those communities who have embraced his
scheme of doctrine, go far to bear out the Reformer in this particular, and to
show that the belief in predestination inspires with courage, prompts to
activity and effort, and mightily sustains hope.
The Reformer was of
opinion that he saw in the history of the world a proof that the belief in
pre-destination that predestination, namely, which links the means with the
end, and arranges that the one shall be reached only through the other is to
make the person feel that he is working alongside a Power that cannot be
baffled; that he is pursuing the same ends which that Power is prosecuting, and
that, therefore, he must and shall finally be crowned with victory. This had, he
thought, been exemplified equally in nations and in individuals.
Calvin
was by no means insensible to the tremendous difficulties that environ the whole
subject. The depth as well as range of his intellectual and moral vision gave
him a fuller and clearer view than perhaps the majority of his opponents have
had of these great difficulties. But these attach, not to one side of the
question, but to both; and Calvin judged that he could not escape them, nor even
diminish them by one iota, by shifting his position. The absolute fore-knowledge
of God called up all these difficulties equally with his absolute
pre-ordination; nay, they beset the question of God's executing all things in
time quite as much as the question of his decreeing all things from eternity.
Most of all do these difficulties present themselves in connection with what is
but another form of the same question, namely, the existence of moral evil. That
is all awful reality. Why should God, all-powerful and all-holy, have created
man, foreseeing that he would sin and be lost? why not have created him, if he
created him at all, without the possibility of sinning? or why should not God
cut short in the cradle that existence which if allowed to develop will, he
foresees, issue in wrong and injury to others, and in the ruin of the person
himself? Is there any one, whether on the Calvinistic or on the Arminian side,
who can give a satisfactory answer to these questions?
Calvin freely
admitted that he could not reconcile God's absolute sovereignty with man's free
will; but he felt himself obliged to admit and believe both; both accordingly he
maintained; though it was not in his power, nor, he believed, in the power of
any man, to establish a harmony between them. What he aimed at was to proceed in
this solemn path as far as the lights of revelation and reason could conduct
him; and when their guidance failed, when he came to the thick darkness, and
stood in the presence of mysteries that refused to unveil themselves to him,
reverently to bow down and adore.[1]
We judged it
essential to give this brief account of the theology of the Institutes. The book
was the chest that contained the vital forces of the Reformation. It may be
likened to the living spirits that animated the wheels in the prophet's vision.
The leagues, battles, and majestic movements of that age all proceeded from this
center of power these arcana of celestial forces. It is emphatically the
Reformation. The book, we have said, as it first saw the light in Basle in 1536
was small (pp. 514); it consisted of but six chapters, and was a sketch in
outline of the fundamental principles of the Christian faith. The work grew into
unity and strength, grandeur and completeness, by the patient and persevering
touches of the author, and when completed it consisted of four books and
eighty-four chapters. But as in the acorn is wrapped up all that is afterwards
evolved in the full-grown oak, so in the first small edition of the Institutes
were contained all the great principles which we now possess, fully developed
and demonstrated, in the last and completed edition of 1559.
CHAPTER
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CALVIN'S APPEAL TO FRANCIS
I.
Enthusiasm evoked by the appearance of the InstitutesMarshals the
Reformed into One Host Beauty of the Style of the InstitutesOpinions
expressed on it by Scaliger, Sir William Hamilton, Principal Cunningham, M.
Nisard The Institutes an Apology for the Reformed In scathing Indignation
comparable to Tacitus Home-thrusts He Addresses the King of France Pleads
for his Brethren They Suffer for the Gospel Cannot Abandon it Offer
themselves to Death A Warning Grandeur of the Appeal Did Francis ever Read
this Appeal?
THUS did a strong arm uplift before the eyes of all
Europe, and throw loose upon the winds, a banner round which the children of the
Reformation might rally. Its appearance at that hour greatly inspirited them. It
showed them that they had a righteous cause, an energetic and courageous leader,
and that they were no longer a mere multitude, but a marshalled host, whose
appointed march was over a terrible battle-field, but to whom there was also
appointed a triumph worthy of their cause and of the kingly spirit who had
arisen to lead them. "Spreading," says Felice, "widely in the schools, in the
castles of the gentry, the homes of the citizens, and the workshops of the
common people, the Institutes became the most powerful of preachers."[1]
The style of the
work was not less fitted to arrest attention than the contents. It seemed as if
produced for the occasion. In flexibility, transparency, and power, it was akin
to the beauty of the truths that were entrusted to it, and of which it was made
the vehicle. Yet Calvin had not thought of style. The great doctrines he was
enunciating engrossed him entirely; and the free and majestic march of his
thoughts summoned up words of fitting simplicity and grandeur, and without
conscious effort on his part marshalled them in the most effective order, and
arranged them in the most harmonious periods. In giving France a religion,
Calvin at the same time gave France a language.
Men who have had but
little sympathy with his theology have been loud in their praises of his genius.
Scaliger said of him, three hundred years ago, "Calvin is alone among
theologians; there is no ancient to compare with him." Sir William Hamilton in
our own day has indorsed this judgment.
"Looking merely to his learning
and ability," said this distinguished metaphysician, "Calvin was superior to all
modern, perhaps to all ancient, divines. Succeeding ages have certainly not
exhibited his equal." Dr. Cunningham, a most competent judge, says: "The
Institutes of Calvin is the most important work in the history of theological
science ..... It may be said to occupy, in the science of theology, the place
which it requires both the Novum Organum of Bacon and the Principia of Newton to
fill up in physical science."[2] "Less learned," says Paul
Lacroix of his style, "elaborate, and ornate than that of Rabelais, but more
ready, flexible, and skillful in expressing all the shades of thought and
feeling. Less ingenious, agreeable, and rich than that of Amyot, but keener and
more imposing.
Less highly coloured and engaging than that of Montaigne,
but more concise and serious and more French.[3] Another French writer of
our day, who does not belong to the Protestant Church, but who is a profound
thinker, has characterised the Institutes as "the first work in the French
tongue which offers a methodical plan, well-arranged matter, and exact
composition. Calvin," he says, "not only perfected the language by enriching it,
he created a peculiar form of language, the most conformable to the genius of
our country." And of Calvin himself he says: "He treats every question of
Christian philosophy as a great writer. He equals the most sublime in his grand
thoughts upon God, the expression of which was equalled but not surpassed by
Bossuet."[4]
A scheme of
doctrine, a code of government, a plan of Church organisation, the Institutes
was at the same time an apology, a defense of the persecuted, an appeal to the
conscience of the persecutor. It was dedicated to Francis I.[5] But the dedication did not
run in the usual form. Calvin did not approach the monarch to bow and gloze, to
recount his virtues and extol his greatness, he spoke as it becomes one to speak
who pleads for the innocent condemned at unrighteous tribunals, and for truth
overborne by bloody violence. His dedication was a noble, most affecting and
thrilling intercession for his brethren in France, many of whom were at that
moment languishing in prison or perishing at the stake.
With a nobler
indignation than even that which burns on the pages of Tacitus, and in a style
scarcely inferior in its rapid and scathing power to that of the renowned
historian, does Calvin proceed to refute, rapidly yet conclusively, the leading
charges which had been advanced against the disciples of the Reformation, and to
denounce the terrible array of banishments, proscriptions, fines, dungeons,
torturing, and blazing piles, with which it was sought to root them out.[6] "Your doctrine is new," it
was said. "Yes," Calvin makes answer, "for those to whom the Gospel is new." "By
what miracle do you confirm it?" it had been asked. Calvin, glancing
contemptuously at the sort of miracles which the priests sometimes employed to
confirm the Romish doctrine, replies, "By those miracles which in the early age
so abundantly attested the divinity of the Gospel the holy lives of its
disciples." "You contradict the Fathers," it had been farther urged. The
Reformer twits his accusers with "adoring the slips and errors" of the Fathers;
but "when they speak well they either do not hear, or they misinterpret or
corrupt what they say." That is a very extraordinary way of showing respect for
the Fathers. "Despise the Fathers!" "Why, the Fathers are our best friends." He
was a Father, Epiphanius, who said that it was an abomination to set up an image
in a Christian temple. He was a Father, Pope Gelasius, who maintained that the
bread and wine remain unchanged in the Eucharist. He was a Father, Augustine,
who affirmed that it was rash to assert any doctrine which did not rest on the
clear testimony of Scripture. But the Fathers come faster than Calvin can
receive their evidence, and so a crowd of names are thrown into the margin, who
all with "one heart and one mouth" execrated and condemned "the sophistical
reasonings and scholastic wranglings" with which the Word of God had been made
void.[7]
Turning round on
his accusers and waxing a little warm, Calvin demands who they are who "make war
with such savage cruelty in behalf of the mass, of purgatory, of pilgrimages,
and of similar follies," and why it is that they display a zeal in behalf of
these things which they have never shown for the Gospel? "Why?" he replies, "but
because their God is their belly, and their religion the kitchen."[8] a rejoinder of which it
is easier to condemn the coarseness than to impugn the truth.
If their
cause were unjust, or if their lives had been wicked, they refused not to die;
but the Reformer complains that the most atrocious calumnies had been poured
into the ears of the king to make their tenets appear odious, and their persons
hateful. "They plotted," it was said, "to pluck the scepter from his hand, to
overturn his tribunals, to abolish all laws, to make a spoil of lordships and
heritages, to remove all the landmarks of order, and to plunge all peoples and
states in war, anarchy, and ruin."[9] Had the accusation been
true, Calvin would have been dumb; he would have been covered with shame and
confusion before the king. But raising his head, he says, "I turn to you, Sire .
. Is it possible that we, from whom a seditious word was never heard when we
lived under you, should plot the subversion of kingdoms? And, what is more, who
now, after being expelled from our houses, cease not nevertheless to pray to God
for your prosperity, and that of your kingdom." As regards their cause, so
defamed by enemies, it was simply the Gospel of Jesus Christ. their only crime
was that they believed the Gospel. They who were maintaining it were a poor,
despicable people nay, if the king liked it, "the scum of the earth;" but
though its confessors were weak, the cause was great; "it is exalted far above
all the power and glory of the world; for it is not ours, but that of the living
God and his Christ, whom God has made King to rule from sea to sea, and from the
rivers unto the ends of the earth." he had not come before the king to beg
toleration for that cause the men of those days could no more conceive of a
government tolerating two opposing religions than of a judge deciding in favor
of two rival claimants what Calvin demanded was that their cause should
receive that submission which is the right of truth; that the king should
embrace, not tolerate.
But if this may not be, Calvin says in effect, if
injustice shall still be meted out to us, be it known unto you, O king, that we
will not abandon the truth, or bow down to the gods that Rome has set up. As
sheep appointed unto the slaughter, we shall take meekly whatever sufferings you
are pleased to inflict upon us. We offer our persons to your prisons, our limbs
to your racks, our necks to your axes, and our bodies to your fires; but know
that there is One in whose sight our blood is precious, and in shedding it you
are removing the firmest defenders of your throne and of your laws, and
preparing for your house and realm a terrible overthrow.
The years will
quickly revolve; the cup will be filled up; and then but let us quote the very
words in which the young Reformer closes this appeal to the great monarch: "I
have set before you the iniquity of our calumniators. I have desired to soften
your heart to the end that you would give our cause: a hearing. I hope we shall
be able to regain your favor, if you should be pleased to read without anger
this confession, which is our defense before your Majesty. But if malevolent
persons stop your ears; if the accused have not an opportunity of defending
themselves; if impetuous furies, unrestrained by your order, still exercise
their cruelty by imprisonments and by scourging, by tortures, mutilation, and
the stake .... verily, as sheep given up to slaughter, we shall be reduced to
the last extremity. Yet even then we shall possess our souls in patience, and
shall wait for the strong hand of the Lord. Doubtless, it will be stretched
forth in due season. It will appear armed to deliver the poor from their
afflictions, and to punish the despisers who are now making merry so
boldly.
"May the Lord, the King of kings, establish your throne in
righteousness and your seat in equity."[10]
In penning this
appeal Calvin occupied one of the sublimest positions in all history. He stood
at a great bar the throne of France. He pleaded before a vast assembly all
Christendom; nay, all ages; and as regards the cause which he sustained at this
august bar, and in presence of this immense concourse of nations and ages, it
was the greatest in the world, inasmuch as it was that of the Gospel and of the
rights of conscience. With what feelings, one naturally asks, did Francis I.
read this appeal? Or rather did he read it at all? It is commonly thought that
he did not. His heart hardened by pleasure, and his ears preoccupied with evil
counsellors, this cry of a suffering Church could find no audience; it swept
past the throne of France, and mounted to the throne of heaven.
But
before the "strong arm" to which Calvin had alluded should be "stretched forth"
more than two centuries were to pass away. These martyrs had to wait till "their
brethren" also should be slain as they had been. But meanwhile there were given
unto them the "white robes" of this triumphant vindication; for scarcely were
their ashes cold when this eloquent and touching appeal was pleading for them in
many of the tongues of Europe, thrilling every heart with the story of their
wrongs, and inspiring thousands and tens of thousands to brave the tyrant's
fury, and at the risk of torture and death to confess the Gospel. This was their
"first resurrection." What they had sown in weakness at the stake rose in power
in the Institutes. Calvin, gathering as it were all their martyr-piles into one
blazing torch, and holding it aloft, made the splendor of their cause and of
their names to shine from the east even unto the west of Christendom.
The
publication of the Institutes placed Calvin in the van of the Reformed hosts, he
was henceforward the recognised chief of the Reformation. His retreat was now
known, and this city on the edge of the Black Forest, on the banks of the Rhine,
could no longer afford him the privacy he sought. Men from every country were
beginning to seek him out, and gather round him. Rising up, he hastily quitted
Basle, and crossing "Italy's snowy wall" (by what route is not known), and
holding on his way across the plain of Lombardy till he reached the banks of the
Po, he found an asylum at the court of Renee, daughter of Louis XII. of France,
and Duchess of Ferrara, who, like Margaret of Valois, had opened her heart to
the doctrines of the Reformation. Calvin disappears for awhile from the
scene.
Book 14 Index
FOOTNOTES
VOLUME SECOND
BOOK THIRTEENTH
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 1
[1] Fleury, Hist. Eccles., tom. 15., pp. 87, 88; Paris, 1742. 1060
[2] Mezeray, tom. 4.
[3] "I will destroy the name of Babylon." (Thauni, Hist., lib. 1., p. 11; ed. Aurel, 1626.)
[4] Platina, Vit. de Pont. Jul. II., p. 259. Fleury, Hist. Eccles., tom. 25., p. 203.
[5] Mezeray, tom. 4., p. 457.
[6] Fleury, Hist. Eccles., tom. 25., p. 204.
[7] Guicciardini, lib. 11., p. 395. Laval., vol. 1., p. 10.
[8] Beza, Hist. des Eglises Reformers au Royaume de France, tom. 1.,p. 1, Lille, 1841.
[9] History of the Protestants of Prance, by G. D. Felice, D.D.; vol. 1., p. 2; Lond., 1853.
[10] D'Aubigne, vol. 3., p. 339.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 2
[1] D'Aubigne, vol. 3., pp. 339 344.
[2] Felice, Hist. of Protestants of France, vol. 1., p. 3.
[3] Farel, GaIeoto. D'Aubigne, vol. 3., p. 345.
[4] Beza, Icones.
[5] Felice, vol. 1., pp. 1, 2.
[6] Beza, Hist. des Eglises Reformees, tom. 1., p. 4.
[7] Beza, tom. 1., p. 3.
[8] Baptista Mantuan, a Carmelite, wrote thus on Rome: "Vivere qui sancte cupiris, discedite Roma. Omnia cum liceant, non licet esse bonum" that is, "Good and virtuous men, make haste and get out of Rome, for here virtue is the one thing ye cannot practice: all else ye may do."
[9] Fe1ice, vol. 1., p. 4.
[10] MS. Bibl. Royale. Paris ex D'Aubigne, vol. 3., p. 353,
[11] Laval., vol. 1., p. 22.
[12] Ben, tom. 1., p. 2.
[13] Guizot, Hist. of France, vol. 3., p. 2; Lond., 1874.
[14] Brantome, Vie des Femmes IIustres, p. 341.
[15] Fe1ice, vol. 1., p. 6. The correspondence between Margaret and Briconnet is still preserved in MS. in the Royal Library at Paris. The MS., which is a copy, bears this inscription Lettres des Marguerite, Reine de Navarre, and is also marked Supplement Francais. No. 337, fol.1. It is a volume containing not less than 800 pp.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 3
[1] Beza, tom. 1., p. 1.
[2] D'Aubigne, vol. 3., p. 337.
[3] Fe1ice, vol. 1., p. 5.
[4] Beza, tom. 1., p. 4.
[5] Acres des Martyrs, p. 182 a chronicler of the fifteenth century, quoted by D'Aubigne, vol. 3., p. 378.
[6] Felice, vol. 1., p. 5.
[7] Acres des Martyrs, p. 182 D'Aubigne, vol. 3., p. 379.
[8] Laval. vol. 1., p. 22.
[9] Felice, vol. 1., p. 6.
[10] D'Aubigne, vol. 3., p. 379.
[11] Felice, vol. 1., p. 6.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 4
[1] The only known copy of this work is in the Royal Library of Stuttgart.
[2] Guizot, Hist. of France, vol. 3., p. 170; Lond., 1874.
[3] Bayle, Dictionnarie, art, Marot, notes N, O, P.
[4] Apelogic pour les Reformateurs, etc., tom. 1., p, 129; Rotterdam, 1683.
[5] M'Crie, Life of John Knox. vol. 1., p, 378; Edin., 1831.
[6] Filice, vol. 1., p. 8.
[7] Sismondi, Hist. de Francais, 16. 387. Guizot, Hist. of France, vol. 3., pp. 193, 194.
[8] Felice, vol. 1., p. 9.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Galliard, Hist. de Francois I.
[11] Laval., vol. 1., p. 8., Dedication.
[12] Ibid., vol. 1., p. 22.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 5
[1] Felice, vol. 1., p. 17.
[2] Crespin, Martyrol., p. 102. D'Aubigne, Hist. Reform. under Calvin, vol. 1., pp. 573, 574.
[3] Felice, vol. 1., p. 11.
[4] Beza, tom. 1., p. 4.
[5] Crespin, Acres des Martyrs, p. 183.
[6] Beza, tom. 1., p. 4. Laval., vol. 1., p. 23. Fe1ice, vol. 1., p. 10. Guizot, vol. 3., p. 196.
[7] Beza, Icones. Laval., vol. 1., p. 23. Guizot, vol. 3., p. 196
[8] Psalm 115:4-9
[9] Laval. vol. 1. p. 38.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 6
[1] Johannis Calvin Vita a Theodora Beza; Geneva, 1575. (No paging.)
[2] "La famille Cauvin etait d'origine normande; le grand-pere du Reformateur habitait Pont l'Eveque; il etait tonnelier." Ferdinand Rossignol, Les Protestants Illustres; Paris, 1862. M. Rossignol adds in a foot-note: "Chauvin dans le dialecte Picard on prononqait Cauvin le Reformateur signa les oeuvres latines Calvinus, et, faisant passer cette orthographe dans le franqais, se nomma lui-meme Calvin."
[3] "Ego qui natura subrusticus, umbram et otium semper amavi," says he of himself in his Epistle to the Reader in his Commentarey on the Psalms. (Calvini Opp., vol 3.; Amsterdam, 1667)
[4] "Ac primo quidem quum superstitionibus Papatus magis pertinaciter addictus essem" (I was at first more obstinately attached than any one to Papal superstions). Calvini Opp., vol. 3.
[5] Beza, Vita Calvini.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] France had a cardinal who was only sixteen, Odel de Chatillon, brother of the famous admiral. Portugal had one of only twelve; and Leo X., who nominated him, had himself been created Archbishop of Aix at five years of age.
[9] Desmay, Vie de Calvin, p. 31.
[10] Ann. de Noyon, p. 1160.
[11] Beza, Vita Calvini.
[12] Florimond de Raemond, History of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Heresy of his Age.
[13] Bungener, Life of Calvin, p. 13; Edin. 1863.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 7
[1] Beza, Vita Calvini.
[2] Calvini Opusc., p. 125.
[3] Calvini Opusc., p. 125.
[4] Ibid.: "Non sine gemitu ac lacrymis."
[5] D'Aubigne, Reform. in. Europe, bk. 2., chap. 7.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 8
[1] Desmay says that it was at Orleans, and Raemond that it was at Bourges, that Calvin first acquired a taste for heresy. Both are mistaken: Calvin brought that taste with him to the old city of Aurelian.
[2] He became afterwards President of the Parliament of Paris. "He was accounted," says Beza, "the most subtle jurisconsult of all the doctors." (Hist. des Eglises Reformees, tom. 1., p. 6.)
[3] Beza, Hist. des Eglises Ref., tom. 1., p. 6.
[4] Bungener, Life of Calvin, p. 18.
[5] Beza, Vita Calvini. Laval., Hist. Reform in France, vol. 1., p. 25. Beza, Hist. des Eglises Ref., tom. 1., p. 6.
[6] Calvin, Instit., lib. 3., cap. 2.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 9
[1] Laval., Hist. Reform. in France, vol. 1., p. 24.
[2] "Me Deus ab obscuris tenuibusque principiis extractum, hoc tam honorifico munere dignatus est, ut Evangelii praeco essem ac minister." (Comment. in Lib. Psalm. Calvini Opp., vol. 3., Epist. ad Lect.; ed. Amsterdam, 1667.)
[3] Beza, Hist. des Eglises Ref., tom. 1., p. 7.
[4] Beza, Hist. des Eglises Ref., tom. 1., p. 7. Galliard, Hist. de Francois I., tom. 7., p. 3; Paris, 1769.
[5] Beza, Vita Calvini. Beza speaks of Gerard Chauvin's death as sudden "repentina mors."
[6] Beza, Hist. des Eglises Ref., tom. 1., p. 5.
[7] Crespin, Hist. des Mart., p. 96. Felice, vol. 1., p. 2.
[8] Beza, Icones.
[9] Erasmi Epp., tom. 2., p. 1206.
[10] Felice, vol. 1., p. 14.
[11] D'Aubigne, Reform. under Calvin, vol. 2., p. 47.
[12] Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris, p. 381 quoted by D'Aubigne.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Felice, vol. 1., p. 15. Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris, p. 382.
[15] Crespin, Hist. des Mart.
[16] "At ego mortem subere, quam veritatis damnationem, vel tacitus approbare velim." (Beza, Icones.)
[17] Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris, p. 383 quoted by D'Aubigne.
[18] Erasmi Epp., p. 1277.
[19] Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris. p. 384.
[20] Felice, Hist. of Prot., vol. 1., p. 16.
[21] Beza relates that Dr. Merlin, then Penitentiary of Paris, who had accompanied Berquin to the stake and saw him die, confessed before all the people that for a hundred years there had not died a better Christian than Berquin. The same historian also relates that on the night following his martyrdom (St. Martin's Eve) the wheat was smitten with hoar-frost, and there followed therefrom famine and plague in France. (Hist. des Eglises. Ref., tom. 1., p. 5.)
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 10
[1] Beza, Vita Calvini.
[2] Beza, Hist. des Eglises Ref., tom. 1., p. 4. Laval., Hist. Reform. in France, vol 1., p. 18.
[3] Seckendorf, lib. 3., sec. 1; additio 1.
[4] D'Aubigne, Reform. in Europe, bk. 2., chap. 19.
[5] Ibid., bk. 2., chap. 21.
[6] Herbert, Life of Henry VIII., p. 366. Du Bellay, Memoires, pp. 171 174. Brantome, Memoires, tom. 1., p. 235 quoted by D'Aubigne, Reform. in Europe, bk. 2., pp. 137 140.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 11
[1] Laval., Hist. Reform., vol. 1., p. 28.
[2] D'Aubigne, Hist. Reform. in Europe, vol. 2., p. 159.
[3] Laval., Hist. Reform., vol. 1., p. 29.
[4] Fromant, Actes et Gestes de Geneve, p. 74. D'Aubigne, Hist. Reform. in Europe, bk. 2., chap. 32.
[5] Crespin, Martyrologie, fol. 107.
[6] Ibid.
[7] "Quibus omnibus ita confectis rebus, erant, vel monachi, qui dicerent, Si hic salvus non esset, neminem salvum fore mortalem. Alii vero discedentes percutiebant pectus, discebantque gravem illi factam injuriam." (Acta Martyrum, ann. 1560, 4., p. 62 et seq. ex Gerdesio, tom. 4., p. 86.)
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 12
[1] It is a curious fact that during the lifetime of Calvin a conflagration broke out in his native town of Noyon, and destroyed the entire quarter in which the house he was born in was situated, the house itself excepted, which remained uninjured in the midst of the vast gap the flames had created.
[2] Beza, Vita Calvini.
[3] Ibid., p. 14. See also Calvini Opp.
[4] This discourse was discovered some years ago by Dr. Bonnet in the Library of Geneva, where it is still preserved. It was first given to the public by Dr. D'Aubigne, in his History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin. (See vol. 2., bk. 2., chap. 30.)
[5] Beza, Vita Calvini.
[6] Maimbourg, Hist. du Calvinisme, p. 58.
[7] Gaillard, Hist. de Francois, tom., 1., livr. 4. p. 274.
[8] D'Au'bigne, Hist. Reform. in Europe, vol. 2., p. 279. Felice, Hist. Prot. in France, vol. 1., p. 35.
[9] Beza. Vita Calvini.
[10] Felice, Hist. Prot. In France, vol. 1., p. 35.
[11] Flor. Raemond, Hist. Heres., vol. 2., p. 246 ex D'Aubigne, Hist. Reform. in Europe, vol. 3., p. 12.
[12] Beza, Vita Calvini. Lefevre is said to have expressed in his last days bitter regret for not having more openly professed the truth. See Bulletin de la Soc. de l'Hist. Prot. Fr. 11. 215.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 13
[1] Beza, Hist. des Eglises Ref., vol. 1., p. 63. Flor. Raemond, Hist. Heres., vol. 7., p. 919.
[2] The late Count Alexander de St. George, for many years President of the Evangelical Society of Geneva, was a lineal descendant of Abbot Ponthus. (D'Aubigne.)
[3] "In horto illo primum Calvinisticum celebratum fuit concilium in Gallia." (Flor. Raemond, Hist. Heres., vol. 2., p. 252.)
[4] D'Aubigne, vol. 3., p. 59.
[5] Lievre, Hist. du Protestantisme du Poitou, vol. 1., p. 23. Flor. Raemond, Hist. Heres., vol. 2., p. 253. D'Aubigne, vol. 3., p. 61.
[6] "In locis illis secretis prima Calvinistea Coena celebrata fuit." (Flor. Raemond, Hist. Heres., vol. 2., p. 253.) "Raemond declares," says D'Aubigne, "that he had spared no pains to trace out all Calvin's career in France," but the historian adds "that this has not prevented him from occasionally seasoning his narrative with abuse and calumny."
[7] Flor. Raemond, Hist. Heres. vol. 2., p. 253.
[8] Ibid., vol. 2., chap. 9.
[9] This is attested by the Lettre de Ste. Marthe a Calvin, found by Jules Bonnet in the Library at Gotha (MSS. No. 401).
[10] In the autumn of 1869 the author passed along the great valley of the Loire on his way to Spain, visiting the places where Calvin had sojourned, and more especially Poictiers.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 14
[1] Pallavicino, Istoria, etc., lib. 3., cap. 12, p. 224; Napoli, 1757.
[2] Sleidan, Hist. Reform., bk. 9., p. 169.
[3] Pallavicino, Istoria, etc., lib. 3., cap. 12. Ranke, Hist. of the Popes, bk. 1., chap. 3.
[4] Du Bellay, Memoires, p. 278; quoted by D'Aubigne, Hist. Reform. in Europe, vol. 2., pp. 198, 199. The secret articles of this treaty are in the Bibliotheque Imperiale at Paris (MSS., Bethune, No. 8,541, fol. 36. D'Aubigne).
[5] The author describes the landscape around Fiesole as he himself has noted it on repeated visits.
[6] Those of our readers who have visited Florence, and seen the statue of this Lorenzo, the father of Catherine, in the gorgeous mausoleum of the Medici in the Church of San Lorenzo, cannot but have been struck with the air of meditation and thought which it wears.
[7] Sleidan, Hist. Reform., bk. 9., pp. 163, 169.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 15
[1] "Cardinal Medici was always on the side of the emperor," says Ranke. (Hist. of the Popes, vol. 1., p. 76.)
[2] The Romans, in the time of Clement and even to our own age, reckoned their day from one of the afternoon to the same hour next day, and, of course, went on numbering up to the twenty-fourth hour.
[3] Platina, Hist. Sommi Pontifici, p. 269; Venetia, 1500.
[4] Ranke, Hist. of the Popes, vol. 1., p. 97; Bohn's ed.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 16
[1] D'Aubigne, Hist. Reform. In Europe, 2. 285.
[2] Du Bellay, Memoires, p. 206.
[3] Robertson, Hist. Charles V., bk., 5., p. 184; Edin., 1829.
[4] Du Bellay, Memoires, p. 210.
[5] Robertson, bk. 5., p. 184. D'Aubigne, vol. 2., p. 301.
[6] Sleidan, Hist. Reform., bk. 9., pp. 172, 173; Lond., 1689. Robertson, Hist. Charles V., bk. 5., p. 184.
[7] D'Aubigne vol. 2., pp. 347 350.
[8] Gerdesius, Hist. Evang. Renov., tom. 4., p. 124.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 17
[1] Gerdesius, Hist. Evang. Renov., tom. 4., p. 124.
[2] Ibid.
[3] "Non integri, verum mutilati," says Gerdesius of the king's edition of the articles.
[4] Gerdesius, tom. 4., p. 124.
[5] Gerdesius, tom. 4., p 125.
[6] D'Aubigne, vol. 2., p. 379.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 18
[1] Calvini Opusc., p. 90. D'Aubigne, vol. 3., p. 76.
[2] Desmay, Vie de Calvini Heresiarque, pp. 48, 49. Le Vasseur, Annal. de Noyon, pp. 1161 1168. D'AuBigne, vol. 3., p. 78.
[3] Henricus Ab. Allwoerden, Historia Michaelis Serveti, pp. 4, 5; Helmstadt, 1727.
[4] Beza, Hist. Eglises Rgf., tom. 1, p. 9.
[5] Allwoerden, Hist. Michaelis Serveti, pp. 9, 29.
[6] Ibid., p. 35.
[7] Beza, Vita Calvini, and Hist. Eglises Ref., tom. 1, p. 9.
[8] Bungener, Calvin: his Life, etc., p. 34; Edin., 1863.
[9] Bucer to Blaarer. Strasburg MS., quoted by D'Aubigne, Hist. Reform. in Europe, vol. 2, p. 308.
[10] Crespin, Martyrol., fol. 112. Beza, Hist. Eglises Ref., tom. 1, p. 13. D'Aubigne, vol 3, p. 83.
[11] Crespln, Martyrol., fol. 113.
[12] D'Aubigne, vol. 3, p. 85.
[13] Beza, Hist. Eglises Ref., tom. 1, p. 13.
[14] Crespin, Martyrol., fol. 113, verso.
[15] Beza, Hist. Eglises Ref., tom. 1, p. 13.
[16] D'Aubigne, vol. 3, p. 87.
[17] Calvin makes special mention of Coppin from Lille, and Quentin from Hainault, who brought to the advocacy of their cause an ignorance that did not suffer them to doubt, and an impudence that would not permit them to blush. These pioneers of communism liked good living better than hard work; they made their bread by talking, as monks by singing, though that talk had neither, says Calvin, "rhyme nor reason" in it, but was uttered oracularly, and captivated the simple. (Calvini Opp., tom. 8, p. 376; Amstel, 1637.)
[18] Inst. Adv. Libertin., cap. 15,16. Calvini Opp., tom. 8, p. 386.
[19] "Relicta patria, in Germaniam concessi, ut in obscuro aliquo angulo abditus, quiete diu negata fruerer." (Calvini Opp., tom.3, Praef. ad Psalmos; Amstel. ed.)
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 19
[1] Felice, Hist. Prot. France, vol. 1, p. 27.
[2] Crespin, the martyrologist, and Florimond Raemond, the Popish historian, attribute the authorship of the placard to Farel. The latter, however, gives it as the common report: "Famoso libello a Farelo, ut creditur, composito," are his words. (Hist. Heres., livr. 7, cap. 5, Lat. ed.) Bungener says the author "has never been known." (Calvin, p. 35; Edin., 1863.) Herminjard (Correspondance des Reformateurs, 3, 225) believes him to have been Antoine de Marcourt.
[3] According to the Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris, p. 440. Fontaine in his Histoire Catholique gives the 18th October. See D'Aubigne, vol. 3, p. 114.
[4] Felice, Hist. Prof. France, vol. 1, p. 28.
[5] Corp. Ref., 2, p. 856.
[6] Crespin, Mart. Beza, Hist. Ref. Eglises, tom. 1, p. 10.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 20
[1] Laval., Hist. Reform. France, vol 1, p. 30. Beza, Hist. Reform. Eglises, tom. 1, p. 10.
[2] Beza, Hist. Reform. Eglises, tom. 1, p. 10.
[3] Journal d'un Bourg., p. 44. D'Aubigne, vol. 3, p. 129.
[4] Crespin, Martyrol, fol. 112.
[5] Calvini Opp. Felice, Hist. Prot. France, vol. 1, p. 28.
[6] Crespin, Martyrol., 43.
[7] Journ. d'un Bourg., p. 445, D'Aubigne vol. 4, p. 142.
[8] Crespin, Martyrol., fol. 113, verso. D'Aubigne, 3, 143.
[9] Laval., Hist. Reform. France, vol. 1, p. 31.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 21
[1] Chronique du Roi Francois I, p. 113, quoted by D'Aubigne, vol. 3, p. 149.
[2] Fe1ice, vol. 1, p. 29.
[3] Chronique du Roi Francois I., p. 114.
[4] Felice, vol. 1, p. 30.
[5] Felice, vol. 1, p. 30. D'Aubigne, vol. 3, pp. 152-154.
[6] Garnier, Hist. de France, 24, p. 556. D'Aubigne, vol. 3, p. 154.
[7] This procession has been described by several French chroniclers among others, Florimond Raemond, Hist. Heres., 2:229; Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris; Fontaine, Hist. Catholique; Maimbourg; and the Chronique du Roi Francois I.
[8] Chronique du Roi Francois I.
[9] Ibid., p. 125.
[10] D'Aubigne, vol. 3, p. 161.
[11] Sleidan, bk. 9, p. 175.
[12] Ibid., bk. 9, p. 178
[13] Crespin, Martyrol.
[14] D'Aubigne, vol. 3, p. 165.
[15] The German forces shortly afterwards left the land, and with marvellous rapidity, under the skilled guidance of the illustrious Thiers, the gallant nation recovered its position among the countries of Europe.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 22
[1] Sleidan, bk. 9, p. 179.
[2] Bulletin de la Societe de la Histoire du Protestantisme, Francois L, p. 828 D'Aubigne, vol. 3, p. 167.
[3] Sismondi, Hist. des Francois, 16, p. 455.
[4] "Ut in obscuro aliquo angulo abditus quiete diu negata fruerer." (Praefatio ad Psalmos-Calvini Opp.)
[5] Misson, A New Voyage to Italy, vol. 2, part 2, p. 493.
[6] The watermen when they descended the Rhine weekly sold their boats at Strasburg and returned on foot, the strength of the current not permitting them to row their craft against it. (Fynes Moryson, Travels, part 1, bk. 1, ch. 2; fol.; Lond., 1617.)
[7] Misson, New Voyage, vol. 2, part 2, p. 502.
[8] The tomb of (Ecolampadius is to be seen in the Cathedral, with the following epitaph, according to Misson: "D. Joh. Oecolampadius, professione theologus; trium linguarum peritissimus; auctor Evangelicm doctrinse in hac urbe primus; et templi hujus verus episcopus; ut doctrina, sic vitse sanctimoniβ pollentissimus, sub breve saxum hoc reconditus est. Anno salutis ob. 21 November, 1531. Aet. 49." (Dr. John (Ecolampadius, by profession a divine; most skillful in three languages; first author of the Reformed religion in this city, and true bishop of this church; as in doctrine so in sanctity of life most excellent, is laid under this short stone. He died in the year of our Lord, 21st November, 1531, aged forty-nine years.)
[9] See ante, vol. 1, bk. 8, ch. 5, p. 428.
[10] Erasmus died in 1536; he was buried in the Cathedral of Basle, and his epitaph, on a pillar before the choir, indicates his age by the single term septaeagenarius, about seventy. The exact time of his birth is unknown.
[11] The interview has been related by a chronicler of the same century Flor. Remond, Hist. Heres., 2, p. 251.
[12] Ibid.
[13] "Cum incognitus Basileae laterem." (Preface to Comment on Psalms.)
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 23
[1] D'Aubigne, vol. 3, p. 203.
[2] Pro Confessione Fidei offertur, says the title-page of the first edition of the Institutes, now before us, dated Basileae1536.
[3] Calvin: his Life, his Labours, and his Writings, p. 43.
[4] The following valuable note was communicated to the Author by the late Mr. David Laing, LL.D. Than Mr. Laing's there is no higher authority upon the subject to which it refers, and his note may be regarded as setting finally at rest the hitherto vexed question touching the publication of the Institutes: "It is now a long while ago, when I was asked by Dr. McCrie, senior, to ascertain in what year the first edition appeared of Calvin's Institutes. At the time, although no perfect copy of the 1536 volume was accessible, the conclusion I came to was that the work first appeared in a small volume, pp. 519, with the title Christianae Religionis Institutio, etc. Joanne Calvino, Autore. Basileae, MDXXXVI. At the end of the vohme are added the names of the printers at Basle and the date 'Mense Martio, Anno 1536.' During the many subsequent years, with inquiries at various great public libraries, both at home and abroad, I have not been able to find anything to make me change this opinion, or to imagine that an earlier edition in French had ever existed. In the dedication there is a variation in the date between the French and Latin copies, apparently accidental. In the Latin it is dated 'Basileae, X Calendas Septembres [1535] that is, August 23, 1535 while in the French translation by the author, in his last revised translation of 1559, the date is given 'De Basle, le premier jour d'Aoust, mil cinq cens trente cinq.'
"I have subsequently obtained a perfect copy, and have seen two or three others. The former possessor of my copy has a note written perhaps a century ago, as to its great rarity: ' Editio ista albis corvis rarior, princeps sine dubio, quidquid dicat P. Baylius, cujus exemplaria ita sunt rarissima, ut ipsa Bibliotheca Genevensis careat integro qui ipse asservatur ibidem tantum mutilum.' [This edition, rarer than a white crow, is without doubt the first. Instances of it, as P. Bayle says, are so very rare, that in the Library of Geneva even there is not a perfect copy; the one there preserved is mutilated.] "I may add, the copy in the Library at Geneva is mutilated, the noble dedication to Francis the First having been cut out. The first enlarged edition is the one at Strasburg, 'Argenterati,' 1539, folio. Some copies have the pseudonym 'Auctore Alcuino.'
"The earliest edition of this French version has neither place nor date, but was published between 1540 and 1543; and in a subsequent edition printed at Geneva, 1553, 4to, the title reads, Institution de la Religion Chrestienne: composee en Latin par Jean Calvin, et translatee en Francois par luymesme, et encores de nouveau reveue et augmentee. This seems conclusive that the work was originally written in Latin, dated 1535, published 1536, and afterwards translated by the author."
[5] "Vera hominis sapientia sita est in cognitione Dei Creatoris et Redemptoris." (Calvini Opp., vol. 9.)
[6] Cunningham, The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation, p. 342; Edin., 1862.
[7] Cunningham, Reformers and Theol. of Reform., p. 343.
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 24
[1] This difficulty has been equally felt and acknowledged by writers on the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity. For instance, we find Locke (vol. 3, p. 487; fol. ed., 1751) saying, "I cannot have a clearer perception of anything than that I am free, yet I cannot make freedom in man consistent with omniscience and omnipotence in God, though I am as fully persuaded of both as of any truth I most firmly assent to." Locke in philosophy was a necessitarian. Sir William Hamilton, a libertarian, expresses similar views on this question: "How, therefore, I repeat, moral liberty is possible in man or God, we are utterly unable speculatively to understand. But, practically, the fact that we are free is given to us in the consciousness of an uncompromising law of duty, in the consciousness of our moral accountability." "Liberty is thus shown to be inconceivable, but not more than its contradictory necessity; yet, though inconceivable, liberty is shown also not to be impossible." (Discussions, pp. 624, 630.)
VOLUME SECOND- BOOK THIRTEENTH- CHAPTER 25
[1] Fe1ice, Hist. Prof. France, vol. 1, p. 36.
[2] Cunningham, Reformers and Theol. of Reform., p. 295.
[3] Paul Lacroix-Bungener, Calvin, p. 57.
[4] M. Nisard, Hist. of French Lit.
[5] "Potontissimo Illustrissimoque Monarchae, Francisco, Francorum Regi Christianissimo, Principi suo, Joannes Calvinus, pacem ac salutem in Christo precatur." (Praefatio ad Regem GalliaeCalvini Opp., vol. 9.)
[6] Praefatio ad Regem Galliae.
[7] Praefatio ad Regem Galliae.
[8] "Cur? Nisi quia illis Deus venter est, culina religio."(Praefatio ad Regem Galiae.)
[9] Praefatio ad Regem Galiae.
[10] Praefatio ad Regem Galliae.