be punished with death; nay, Servetus himself had advocated that opinion. It is, therefore, unfair to single out Calvin as if he had been solitary in his convictions and influence; for to blame him, as indeed he deserved, is only to say that he was not, on this subject, in advance of his age. Servetus had been already convicted and condemned by the popish authorities at Vienna, but had found means of escape. He had come to Geneva, and was about to leave for Zürich when he was discovered and apprehended. His accuser was Nicholas de Fontaine, but Calvin drew up thirty-eight articles of charge. At the second hearing Calvin attended. The council at Vienne demanded back their prisoner, but the poor Spaniard pleaded with tears that the Genevan syndics should retain him; for he was sure that he would be put to death at Vienne, while he had at least a chance of life at Geneva. The charge against him was now handed over to the attorney-general, and treason had as large a space in the accusation as heresy. The libertine party seemed to be growing in influence, and Servetus, rising in hope, craved that an indictment be preferred against Calvin; a document containing these memorable words—till the cause be decided for his death or mine, "pour mort de luy ou de moy." The Helvetic churches unanimously condemned Servetus, but differed as to the amount of the penalty to be inflicted upon him. Servetus was formally sentenced on the 26th of October to be burnt at the stake on the following day. (See Servetus.) Certainly Calvin thought and said that Servetus was worthy of death, and Servetus thought and said the same of him. But Calvin had little influence with the council during the latter portion of the trial. In the document which contains the sentence against Servetus, there is no mention of any assault made by the culprit upon Calvin or any of the Genevan clergy. Calvin acted very wrongly, but only as other good men thought and acted around him, for even Melancthon justified the barbarous execution. When Servetus was burnt at Geneva, five Genevese Calvinists were burned in France. John Knox and Peter Dens use the same argument and illustration for the capital punishment of heretics. Nay, Servetus, in his Christianismi Restitutio, the book for which he had been seized and tried, avers that blasphemy should be punished with death, simpliciter—without dispute. It was not understood in that age that man is responsible to God alone for his belief—that liberty of conscience is a universal birthright—that religious truth and error are beyond the cognizance of the civil magistrate—and that heresy cannot be extirpated by force. Antitrinitarian tenets grew up in Geneva as in the case of Blandrata, Alciat, and Ochino. Might is not right, and free thought can never be quenched in fire or blood. Truth is degraded and her nobleness shamed, when force is employed to punish her enemies, or guard herself from assault. Had Servetus been burned at Vienne, his name would scarcely have been heard of, but his execution in a protestant city has preserved the memory of his fate—a proof that men expected mental emancipation in a place which had won its eminence by free thought and inquiry. Servetus was a restless and daring spiritualist—or rather a pantheist with some tinge of fanaticism. His writings have frightful caricatures of divine things—such as calling the Trinity a Cerberus. It may show what a difference was between him and Calvin, that while Calvin could not bring himself to expound the Apocalypse, Servetus began with it. But yet, let his views and blasphemies be what they might, to the Master alone was he answerable, and not to any human tribunal, and the Place Champel where he was burned will remain a melancholy monument of the injustice and intolerance which the infancy of the reformed church in the theocratic city of Geneva had not been able to shake off.
Calvin was exceedingly anxious for the union of the reformed churches. But the sacramentarian controversy was raging, and his efforts seem only to have increased the fury. His own views were not unlike those of Melancthon, and on the point he would not have quarrelled with the language of the revised Augsburg confession. The simple Zuinglian theory he decidedly condemns, and in one instance, writing to Viret, he calls it "profane." The quarrel of Calvin with Castellio proceeded from excessive zeal, though Castellio's opinions, and some clauses of his biblical translation must have sorely provoked him. As to the question of toleration, involved in the fate of Servetus, the elegant scholar was right; but in questions of pure theology he was no match for the reformer, either in retort or argument.
The labours of Calvin up to the period of his death were incessant, "in season and out of season." Such was his fame, that he had sometimes a thousand hearers in the Genevan academy, for Geneva had become the spiritual metropolis of the reformed churches. The reformer maintained an extensive correspondence on the continent, in Italy, and in England. All the while he lived in frugal simplicity, and was suffering under a terrible complication of maladies. Asthma, hemorrhoids, gout, stone, and fever tormented him. Frequent headaches led to as frequent fastings to relieve them; nocturnal study was carried on with the aid of a dim lamp suspended from a corner of the humble bed on which he lay—so that his frail body was wasted and worn away by the early part of the year 1564. He delivered his last discourse on the 6th of February in that year. Several months more he survived in agony and weakness, and his words and exercises on his deathbed betokened his fortitude and resignation. When the members of the council obeyed his summons and came into his room, he spoke to them of past mercies and jeopardies, and asking their pardon for the trouble he had given them, and for any outbreaks of hasty temper he had manifested among them, and then offering a fervent prayer for them, he solemnly gave his right hand to each of them as he said farewell. He died on the 27th of May, 1564, at the early age of fifty-five. No stone was set to mark his grave—such had been his request in his testament.
As Luther was the orator, and Melancthon the scholar, so Calvin was the divine and dialectician of the Reformation. He had not Luther's hearty eloquence which could move the popular masses as a storm heaves the forest, nor could he employ that style, the spell of which lies in its quaint and homely idiom—the vocabulary of every-day life. Nor had he, like the great German, the "merry heart which doeth good like a medicine," nor that glowing genius which gave outlet and language to its impulses in hymns and songs. Calvin's greatness was that of pure mind—one might almost say of pure spirit, so fully did his intellectual nature gain the mastery over its physical framework, as it revelled in sustained and serious thought which neither lost itself in speculation, nor faded away into mysticism. Yet he was not surly and repulsive, for he had all the courtly and gentle manners of a Frenchman, and ladies never shrank from conversing with him on theological subjects. Nay, he could now and then so far unbend as to play a game at la clef with the magistrates. But thinking was his element. He seldom diverges, but fixes at once on the knotty point of the argument, and discusses it. Extraneous matter is promptly brushed away, and the real merits of the case are eagerly seized and adjusted with a masterly hand, which never wearies through effort or trembles through indecision. His system of theology is compact and logical in all its parts—a powerful reproduction of the Augustinian theology. His numerous commentaries, though of unequal merit, display great acuteness and learning, excelling more in tracing the course and development of thought than in the analysis of idioms and phrases—and they are as concise and simple in style as they are clear, judicious, and discriminating in matter.
The character of Calvin has been variously judged, for he has been the object of fanatical hatred and extravagant eulogy. It is true that his language is not at all times courteous, but Servetus outdoes him in scurrility. Coarse epithets are sometimes heaped upon his antagonists, but his virulence scarcely approaches that of Luther. Only Calvin wrote in comparative calmness what Luther threw out in invectives and violent outbursts. Nor can it be denied that he was conscious of his position, for he was an oracle to Coligny, to the duchess of Ferrara, and to the young King Edward of England. No unworthy feeling of rivalry seems ever to have disturbed him, for he can write concerning Luther—"I have often said it, I would still acknowledge him for a servant of Christ, even though he should call me devil;" and he secured the publication of Melancthon's Loci in French, and wrote a eulogistic preface to it—it being the only book that could come into competition with his own "Institutes." "I leave it to you," says Scaliger, "to judge whether the man was great." Of his infirmities, which were in fact the excesses of his virtues, he was perfectly conscious; "of all conflicts with my faults," says he, "the hardest has been with my impatient temper." Firmness in a man so far before his age is apt to pass into obstinacy, and courage into overbearing zeal, while charity is forgotten in chivalrous devotion to truth. Yet there were elements of deep affection in Calvin's nature.
