SOURCE: "The Reformation in Switzerland," in The Reformation of the 16th Century: In Its Relation to Modern Thought and Knowledge, 1883. Reprint by The University of Michigan Press, 1962, pp. 225–61.

The history of Swiss Protestantism is peculiar in the fact that it follows a double line of development. It boasts two names of the first rank, Zwingli and Calvin: it had two centres, Zürich and Geneva. And it is obvious to remark that one of these is German, the other French; that standing in close relation to the Rhineland, this to France, Italy, Savoy. The movement in Switzerland divides itself into two parts, chronologically as well as geographically. Zwingli was born on the 1st of January, 1484, and was therefore less than two months younger than Luther. He was at work in his own way—a way which I shall try to describe presently—as early as Luther was. The scene of his activity was the northern and German-speaking Cantons of Switzerland, Glarus, Zürich, St. Gall, Schaffhausen, and afterwards Basel and Bern; while many of the free cities on the German side of the frontier, Strasburg, Constanz, Ulm, Augsburg, Reutlingen, adopted with more or less unanimity his opinions on the Eucharist. But when in 1531 he fell in the Battle of Cappel, in which Zürich was defeated by the five Forest Cantons, and his friend and helper Œcolampadius died a few weeks after, it seemed as if the cause of Swiss Protestantism would fall from the comparatively feeble hands of their successors. It was at this moment of crisis that a young refugee from northern France, John Calvin, stepped into the breach and held it victoriously. He was a full generation younger than Zwingli and Luther: born in 1509, the first edition of his "Institution" was published in 1536, five years after Zwingli's death: the period of his theocratic sway at Geneva extended from 1541 to his death in 1564. Henceforth the little free city on Lake Leman is the centre of Swiss, I had almost said of European Protestantism. Here were gradually developed that scheme of theological thought, that method of ecclesiastical organization, those principles of church discipline, which, in more or less modified form, were destined to so wide a prevalence. There is little direct intellectual relation to be traced between Calvin and Zwingli; indeed, the great systematizer was wont to speak in higher terms of the Saxon Reformer than of his own immediate forerunner. But not the less was his work a continuation of Zwingli's. The leading ideas of Calvinism are ideas which Zwingli had already put forward in a less precise and systematic form. There is a well-marked sense in which the Swiss theology as a whole can be compared and contrasted with the German. It would serve no good purpose were I to attempt in this place to define the shades of difference which in the middle years of the sixteenth century separated the Swiss churches from one another, and all from the Saxon Reformers. They led to many controversies; they are embodied in many confessions. But the final result was that the Calvinistic type of doctrine prevailed, especially in the foreign churches. The Confession of La Rochelle, the Decrees of the Synod of Dordt, the Westminster Confession, have nothing in them which can be called distinctively Zwinglian. But it is at least an allowable speculation that the milder, more rational, humaner spirit of the great Reformer of Zürich reappeared in the Arminian theology which in the seventeenth century was so powerful a factor of European thought.

The doctrine of Zwingli was Lutheranism with a difference. Like Luther, he substituted the authority of the Bible for the authority of the Church; like Luther, he preached justification by faith alone; like Luther, he maintained the true priesthood of every Christian man. Under the influence of the same forces, the Reformation, all over Europe, assumed the same forms: Lutheranism, Zwinglianism, Calvinism, even when the most is made of their differences, resemble each other much more than any of them the faith of the Church to which they were all opposed. And we should miss a significant fact if we failed to note that Zwingli was a religious phenomenon parallel with Luther, but not dependent on him. While the Reformer of Zürich speaks in admiring language of the Reformer of Wittenberg, he will not be called a Lutheran: he drew his doctrine, he said, from the Scriptures; he had preached it before ever he heard the name of Luther: why should he not rather be called by the name of Paul or of Christ? At the same time there were differences in the original constitutions of the men, as well as in the training which they had received, which influenced their apprehension and presentation of what was substantially the same group of truths. We can find in Zwingli no trace of the mysticism which Luther had learned from Tauler and the Theologia Germanica. There is nothing in his life-history at all answering to the spiritual crisis which drove Luther into the monastery at Erfurt, and there left him to his almost solitary struggle for deliverance and peace. He bears about with him no marks of conflict. He does not, as Luther did, retire into the darkness for a season, coming back trembling and chastened. There is an admirable and cheerful good sense about him, a keen apprehension of the simplicities of piety, a firm grasp of religion on the ethical and practical side. But the sense of mystery does not weigh upon him: the contemplation of divine things neither excites him to paradox nor awakens him to rapture.

The fact is that, much more than Luther, Zwingli was a humanist. First at school, at Basel and at Bern, next for two years at the University of Vienna, then for four years more again at Basel, he gave himself up to the studies of the day. It was at Basel, already a centre of busy literary activity, that he fell under the influence of Thomas Wyttenbach,¹ one of those grave scholars of the Rhineland who found the keenest admiration of ancient literature not inconsistent with an earnest Christian faith, and who directed his pupil to the study of the Scriptures apart from scholastic commentary. At a later period he learned for this purpose first Greek and then Hebrew, copying out with his own hand all the Epistles of Paul, that he might know them through and through. But he was not on this account untrue to his first classical preferences. He learned Valerius Maximus off by heart. Thucydides and Aristotle, Plutarch and Lucian, were familiar to him. He thought Plato had drunk at the fountain of Divine Wisdom; he extolled the piety of Pindar;² he gave the great heroes and poets of pagan antiquity a place in the Christian heaven. When Luther, in the first ardour of his Biblical zeal, was forswearing all philosophy, Zwingli was burying himself in the speculations of Pico della Mirandola. In relation to these and similar facts, the word Switzerland is apt to lead us astray. What we have really to do with are not the narrow valleys, the lofty pastures, the sparse population of the Forest Cantons, so much as the wide and fertile Rhineland, a great highway of nations, having on either side a broad belt of cities, free, wealthy, enlightened, the region of central Europe where civilization had reached its highest point, the chosen home of the German revival of letters. Here were the oldest Universities, the most celebrated schools: here had taught the mystics: here the mediaeval sects had honeycombed society: here art went hand in hand with letters: here the citizens of many little republics had learned the secret of a life in loosest dependence on the Church. On the other hand, the learning and civilization of Saxony, and of North Germany in general, were of later origin, and had penetrated the popular life less deeply: society was constituted on more aristocratic principles: the prince went for more, the burgher for less. It would be difficult to think of Erasmus at Wittenberg, nor had Luther ever a firm hold on the Rhineland.

In this connection I must point out that the republican constitution of Switzerland gave direction and colour to all Zwingli's activity. He was born only seven years after the Confederates had vindicated their independence in leaving Charles the Bold dead under the walls of Nancy; and the patriotic glow which that marvellous event had kindled in men's hearts must have been fresh as he grew up to manhood. But this victory and those which preceded it taught the Swiss a fatal lesson, in making them acquainted with the strength of their right arms and the force of their disciplined onset: they were brave and they were poor: what more natural than that they should sell their swords? So a system grew up pregnant with national demoralization: now the Pope, now the King of France, recruited in the mountains an army of lanzknechts, whose courage decided many a battle: the spoils of war corrupted the simplicity of republican life: rival potentates bound their friends to their cause by pensions and gratuities: foreign and interested influences turned the currents of Confederate politics. Against this system Zwingli set his face at the very beginning of his career. He had been required as army chaplain to attend more than one expedition into Italy; he had been present at the Battle of Marignano, and as patriot and reformer he deplored the evils which he could not choose but see in their true colours. These things provided him with a policy which the forms of republican life enabled him to carry out. He aimed at concentrating the life of the Confederacy within its own frontiers, at detaching its several members from foreign alliances, at raising the chief citizens of its republics to a sense of national dignity, and its incompatibility with royal pensions and mercenary service. His friend and biographer Myconius describes his object as the restoration of ancient virtue. After the Battle of Pavia in 1525, in which the Swiss soldiers suffered severely, Zwingli, standing in the Minster pulpit of Zurich, drew from the misfortune a trenchant political moral.³ He told his hearers that when, of old time, their life had been simple and pious, God had given them great victories, and that unless they returned to their former way, there was nothing before them but Divine wrath and utter ruin. All his life long he had a double purpose, the reformation of the Church and the reformation of the State, which were indeed in his view but one. You may say, if you will, that he took religion more on the social, Luther more on the personal side; that while the latter thought of individual salvation and the soul's union with God, the former had before him the ideal of a well-ordered state, a righteous and peaceful community. But this is the answer to the reproach sometimes directed against Zwingli that he was a politician, and as such degraded religion by bringing it down to the level of earthly intrigue and passion. It is not easy to see what else he could be. He was the first citizen of Zürich, as Calvin afterwards of Geneva; and in that capacity endeavoured to guide the policy of the Republic to the advantage of righteousness and the interests of the Protestant Church. Would he not have been justly open to the imputation of cowardice if, sheltering himself behind his clerical character, he had always worked by others' hands and others' voices, and so thrown on his colleagues the responsibility of measures which were really his own? It is impossible now to say that he did not sometimes succumb to the peculiar temptations of politics, and give himself to widely-reaching schemes of European alliance and attack: let the statesman bear the blame of the stateman's errors. Had Zürich conquered on that field of Cappel where Zwingli left his life, had the tide of Swiss Reformation in consequence risen over the whole land, her Reformer might have escaped heavy censure and much invidious comparison with Luther.

These facts stand in close relation, on the one hand, with the popular character of ecclesiastical government in the Reformed Churches; on the other, with the ethical type of Zwinglian religion. Calvin in Geneva worked under substantially the same political conditions as Zwingli in Zürich, and the result is that the organization of the churches which descend from him is neither Episcopal nor Consistorial, but Presbyterian. To take the instance with which we are most familiar, it is easy to trace a likeness between the Presbyteries, Synods and Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and the greater and lesser Councils of Zurich or Bern, deriving their power from the citizens at large. I do not mean that one set of institutions is the direct copy of the other, or that the Presbyterian organization of the Church does not sincerely claim for itself the authority of scriptural precedent and primitive example. But men are unconsciously swayed by the circumstances in which they have been brought up, and easily find in the Bible what they go there to look for. On the other hand, Zwingli's application of religion to the reform and guidance of the State, partly shows how ethical his conception of it was, partly made it more ethical still. One of the distinctions that may be drawn between Lutheran and Zwinglian religion is, that the former is more than anything else a justification of the sinner effected by faith; the latter, a law of God which asks obedience of all believers. And in accordance with this, we find in Zwingli's works many ethical definitions of religion in which an experienced ear will detect the absence of any Lutheran ring.

"Piety," he says, "is a fact and an experience, not a doctrine or a science."⁴ "The Christian life is innocence…. But no soil produces innocence more richly than contempt of oneself."⁵ "All the writings of the apostles are full of this opinion, namely, that the Christian life is none other than a firm hope in God through Jesus Christ, and an innocent life after Christ's pattern."⁶

There is a little work of Zwingli's, covering only a few pages, "Quo pacto adolescentes formandi," addressed to his step-son, Gerald Meyer, in which he depicts a noble ideal of active manliness:

"For God, as He is an Energy, which, itself unmoved, turns and moves all things, will not suffer to be slothful one whose heart He hath drawn to Himself. And the truth of this is approved, not by reasoning, but by experience, for only the faithful know how Christ allows no ease to his own, and how cheerfully and joyfully they engage in toil."⁷

Again:

"An ingenuous mind will in the first place think thus with itself, that as Christ offered himself for us and is made ours, so it behoves thee to be offered for all, to think thyself not thine own but another's; for we are not born that we may live to ourselves, but that we may be all things to all men. These things alone, justice, fidelity, constancy, will it meditate from its tender years, in what things it may profit the Christian commonwealth, in what its native country, in what all mankind, one by one. Those are languid minds which look only to the attainment of a quiet life; nor are they so like God as those who study, even at their own risk, to do good to all."⁸

And once more:

"It is the part of a Christian man not to talk magnificently of doctrines, but always, with God, to do great and hard things."⁹

In Zwingli's view, the church and the state were practically one body under different aspects. How the realization of this idea is facilitated by republican institutions is clear at first sight. In Germany it was a necessity of the case that the subject should follow the religion of his ruler: but for the succession of three devoutly Protestant Electors, the Reformation could not have subsisted in Saxony. When Duke Henry succeeded Duke George, his people abandoned Catholicism at once: with the best will in the world, Protestantism was unable to maintain itself in Austria and Bavaria. But in Zürich, in Basel, in Bern, the church and the state were administered through the same institutions by the same persons. Each step in the process of revolt against Catholicism, of the adoption of Protestantism, was marked by a public debate, and a solemn decision arrived at by the authorities of the city. The change in religion, with all that it involved, was the will of the people, and therefore held to be binding upon the people, in the same way as any regularly enacted law, any legally concluded alliance. It is in this light that we have to look at that persecution of Anabaptists which throws a dark shadow upon this phase of religious administration. They were held to be offenders against the expressed will of the commonwealth, and therefore justly liable to be treated like any other criminals. They were fined, they were banished, they were imprisoned; and it was only upon their repeated and impenitent obstinacy that at least some of their leaders were made to pay the forfeit of their lives. And from the same idea of the identity of church and state follows that conception of ecclesiastical discipline as a thing to be enforced by the secular arm, which was afterwards worked out with such relentless logic by Calvin in Geneva. Here, as in so many instances more, the beginnings of Calvinism are to be traced back to Zwingli. If the citizens of a particular state are also members of the church of Christ, what more natural and expedient than that the laws of the church should be enforced in the same way and by the same means as the laws of the state? Nor if it is true that the prosperity of the state is built upon the righteousness of the people, is the attainment of the political, possible except in the attainment of the moral and religious ideal. In this connection, the Proclamation which was issued on the 26th of March, 1530, by the Burgomaster, in conjunction with the greater and lesser Councils of the city of Zürich, is a curious and significant document.¹⁰ It prescribes that all the people shall go to church, remain there till the sermon is over, and refrain from talking against the preacher. The number of taverns is to be diminished. All kinds of games—not cards and dice only, but others which lead less directly to gambling—are forbidden. Profane swearing is made an offence against the law. All these moral delinquencies are punished by fines of greater or less amount. In some cases the culprits are to be excluded from their guild, or forbidden the exercise of their trade or calling within the city. These things, as we shall presently see, were carried much further in Geneva, but the principle of Calvinistic discipline is already conceded in Zürich.

Zwingli adopted to the full the Reformation principle of the authority of Scripture. In the public disputations or conferences, which were the republican way of settling all controversies approved at Zürich, the Bible was solemnly put forward as the rule of faith and practice. Each of these disputations, as, for instance, that in which Zwingli defended his doctrine against the Pope's Vicar,¹¹ those against the Anabaptists,¹² that which secured the alliance of Bern,¹³ was therefore a public re-assertion of this fundamental principle. But a distinction has been drawn between Luther's attitude to Scripture and Zwingli's, which, if not easy to support by specific quotations from their writings, is, I think, a legitimate deduction from their practice. Luther, it is said, was willing to abide by any existing doctrine or usage which he did not find expressly forbidden in Scripture, while Zwingli demanded distinct warrant of Scripture for whatever he was willing to allow. It is easy to see that the latter rule is of much more sweeping application than the former, and to trace to its operation the more rigid severity of worship in the Reformed than in the Lutheran Church. But if Zwingli was more precise than Luther in bringing all matters of faith and practice to the test of Scripture, he also took a wider view of what Scripture was. He was more Biblical than Pauline. While in the main agreeing with Luther in his conception of spiritual religion, he did not so exclusively take his gospel from the Pauline Epistles and then read it into the whole Bible. He had a scheme of scriptural instruction, which he explains more than once, as if its use were habitual to him.¹⁴ It began with the Gospel of Matthew, which was succeeded first by the Acts of the Apostles and then by the two letters to Timothy. Only when he had laid this foundation of gospel teaching and primitive practice, did he proceed to explain the Epistle to the Galatians, followed by the Epistles of Peter and that to the Hebrews. It is significant that the Epistle to the Romans finds no place in this series. This method, which makes a selection from the New Testament in which most of the varied elements of its teaching are fairly represented, would evidently lead to a different result than that which begins and almost ends with Paul.

The religious faith which Zwingli was engaged in establishing—and it must not be forgotten that we are criticising an incomplete and violently interrupted work—has frequently been charged with containing a rationalizing element. If the word rationalism be used in the definite sense now attached to it, this is no more true of Zwinglianism than of the other great presentations of Reformation theology. Zwingli neither declaims against reason like Luther, nor, like Luther, erects his own theological preferences, his own untaught insight, into a rule of Biblical criticism. What he might have done had he lived longer, we cannot tell; but as a fact he did not call in the aid of human reason, as did Calvin, to pour the fluid and indeterminate elements of his thought into the rigid mould of a system. But at the same time there is a breezy atmosphere of good sense about his religion. It was meant for every-day use among the affairs of men. Its ultimate object was practical: if it aspired to soar on wings of faith into the heavenly abyss of the Divine decrees, it always came back to earth with a message of innocence and purity and justice between man and man. Zwingli's sympathy with Erasmus and the scholars of the Rhineland, which never failed him, both prevented him from becoming narrowly ecclesiastical and helped to keep him human. His conception of baptism, as a pledge of fidelity on the part of the recipient rather than as a mystical channel of grace—that explanation, in the words of institution, of "is" by "signifies," which so vexed the soul of Luther—his designation of original sin as a disease (morbus) rather than as an offence (peccatum)—his substitution of a mere figure of rhetoric for the mysterious transference of qualities from the divine to the human nature of Christ, which the Lutherans knew as the communicatio idiomatum—are all instances of what we may call his religious common sense. To this answered the character of the man, strong, kindly, sincere. He was of untiring energy both in study and in affairs, taking delight in simple pleasures, a musician like Luther, and a performer upon several instruments.¹⁵ His disposition and habits were social: his campaigns, no less than his active participation in politics, had given him a large knowledge of men: he mingled with the citizens in their guilds, with the peasants at their merry-makings, and had an acceptable word for all. What would have been the course of events had he lived—whether he would have been drawn more and more into the whirlpool of Confederate or European politics—whether he would have thrown his thought into a more systematic form, or worked out his principles of faith to further consequences—who can say? When Œcolampadius died, no man of originating power was left to take Zwingli's place: Bullinger, Myconius, Leo Jud, fell naturally into the second rank; and after a few years of wrangling controversy on their part, with Geneva on the one side, with Germany on the other, it was clearly seen that the task of moulding and guiding Swiss Protestantism henceforth belonged to Calvin.¹⁶

It is, however, impossible to understand Calvin's place and work in the church, until we clearly apprehend that he belongs to a later stage in the development of the Reformation than Luther and Zwingli. The period of his commanding influence in Geneva stretches from 1541 to his death in 1564. The epoch of creative religious thought is now past. But the process of doctrinal development is still going on: systems are being built up and shaped into symmetry: the churches are only just entering upon a period of arid and minute and bitter controversy. The conflict with Rome is without remedy or recall, and the line of battle, from which after ages have found it difficult to depart, is determined. Nor is the Reformation any longer a merely national thing, Saxon or Swiss: in France, in Holland, in England, in Scotland, in the Northern kingdoms, everywhere indeed, the struggle is going on with more or less violence, and the time is rapidly coming at which Europe will find itself divided into two camps, a Protestant and a Catholic, owning the force of neither alliances nor enmities but such as spring from this distinction. Think now of the movements and changes of fortune in the religious world upon which Calvin looked out from his fortress under the shadow of the Alps! The twenty-three years of his rule at Geneva comprehended in Germany the death of Luther, the Schmalkaldic War, the defeat of Mühlberg, the melancholy period of the Interim, the abdication of Charles V., and the settlement of Passau. Just as it closed, Philip II. and the Duchess Margaret were making ready for Alva in the Netherlands; while in Scotland, Mary Stuart was contending with John Knox, and in all the insolence of power and beauty preparing the tragedy of her own downfall. During these years the first generation of Huguenots in France are maintaining an unequal fight with Catharine de Medici and the Guises, and the day of St. Bartholomew is soon to follow. They cover in English history almost exactly the interval between the Six Articles of Henry VIII. and the Thirty-nine of Elizabeth: what a time of hope, and feverish expectation, and wild terror, and good cheer renewed, lies between! The Council of Trent met for the first time in 1545, and was finally dissolved in December, 1563: to it, the Church of Geneva and the "Institution of the Christian Religion" were the most resolute and the most complete answer of the Reformation. When Calvin's theocratic rule began, Paul III., a Farnese, the last of the old line of Popes who founded families and clutched their own advantage in utter disregard of the interests of Christendom, sat in the fisherman's chair: when it ended, Pius IV. had succeeded Paul IV., both, by comparison, grave and austere Pontiffs, the Inquisition had been re-founded, and the Counter Reformation had begun. For already in 1540, Paul III. had sanctioned the incorporation of the Society of Jesus; and in command of these new and splendid soldiers of the faith, the Church of Rome, stunned and perplexed for the moment by the brilliant onset of Luther, had recovered her courage and advanced once more to the attack.

During these years, then, Calvin gradually grew to the height of a commanding figure in Europe. He is the only one of the great Reformers who can justly be called international. Though he never re-entered France after his first flight from it, he is the director of the French Reformation, dictating, as it were, to the Huguenots both their theology and their church government. During the reign of Edward VI. he is the adviser to whom Somerset and Cranmer listen with the deepest respect, while it is from Geneva that John Knox goes out to mould and to teach Scotland. Among the Swiss Reformers he is something more than primus inter pares: when Luther is gone, and Melancthon is more and more the mark for the rage of theologians, he represents the Reformation in the eye of Pope and Emperor. And I do not think that we shall do him justice unless we look upon Geneva as a fortified post of the Reform, to be held against all comers, and within whose walls, always open to attack, the sternest discipline is necessary. When Calvin took it and made it his own, it was just struggling into independent political life. Originally a free city, subject to its Bishop, it had fallen under the dominating influence of the House of Savoy, which it shook off only after many struggles. The Reformation introduced a new line of division among its citizens: the partizans of Genevese independence were mostly Protestant; the friends of Savoy clung to the old faith; while there were many who, without any faith at all, disliked the new austerity of manners, the stern restraint of license. Calvin failed in his first attempt to impose his theocracy on the mixed and mobile population of Geneva: I am not sure that if he had had to deal with it alone, he would ever have succeeded. But Geneva soon became a city of refuge. From France especially, and from Italy, men fled for their lives to this secure haven, where they could worship God in their own way (so long as it happened to be Calvin's way too), and bring up their children in the saving knowledge of the gospel. And these men naturally gathered round Calvin, and upheld him in all his measures. His convictions were their convictions, and they found it no hardship to submit to his ecclesiastical rule, however sharp it might seem to be to those who remembered and loved the easy days of old. Between them, they made Geneva at once a city of God after their own pattern, and a frontier fortress of the Reformation. I suppose that, little by little, cruel persecution and stern, steady repression crushed out the rebellious elements of Genevese life: the partizans of the old régime; the sect of the Libertines, in whom wild Pantheistic speculation is said to have undermined all moral conviction; the genuine lovers of freedom, who rebelled against the tyranny of preachers and an inquisition disguised under the name and forms of consistory. But whatever Geneva became, Calvin must have the credit or the shame of it. It is a mistake to suppose, as some seem to do, that he held the reins of power in his own hands and openly wielded the authority of a dictator. It is equally a mistake to attempt to lift from his shoulders the responsibility of what was done at Geneva, by pointing to the civil institutions of the place. His was the kind of influence, the most powerful, the most pervading of all, which bends independent minds to itself, and works by the hands of others. There were councils of various kinds, syndics, a consistory; but from 1541 to 1564, Geneva was John Calvin.

Of Calvin as a systematizing theologian I shall have to speak at another time: we are concerned with him now as the founder and governor of a church. It has been said, with as much truth as such antitheses usually contain, that Catholicism is a religion of priests, Lutheranism of theologians, Calvinism of the believing congregation. And it is obvious at first sight that Calvin availed himself of the republican constitution of Geneva to establish a religious community as distinct in its outline, as definite in its faith, as rigid in its administration, as the Papal system itself had been in its palmiest days. It is not, with Luther, "the freedom of the Christian man" on which he insists; much more he delights to magnify the office and authority of the church. With him, the individual depends on the community; the unit is part of a well-ordered whole. Have not the following words, which stand at the beginning of his exposition of the theory of the church, more of a Catholic than a Protestant sound?¹⁷

"But because our rudeness and slothfulness, yea, and vanity of wit, do need outward helps, whereby faith in us may both be engendered and grow and increase in proceeding towards the mark whereunto it tendeth, God hath also added them thereby to provide for our weakness. And that the preaching of the gospel might flourish, He hath left this treasure with the church. He hath appointed pastors and teachers, by whose merits He might teach them that be His: He hath furnished them with authority: finally, He hath left nothing undone that might avail to the holy consent of faith and right order…. I will begin at the church, into whose bosom God will have His children to be gathered together, not only that they should by her help and ministry be nourished while they are infants and young children, but also be ruled by her motherly care till they grow to riper age and at length come to the mark of faith. For it is not lawful that those things be served which God hath conjoined; that to whom He is a Father, the church be also their mother; and that, not only under the Law, but also since the coming of Christ, as Paul witnesseth, which teacheth that we are the children of the new and heavenly Hierusalem."

This is a very different tone from that of the Saxon Reformers, who were satisfied with an ecclesiastical constitution which had shaped itself according to circumstances, or even of Hooker, who strove to penetrate, and as it were to interpret by his own theory, one which had just weathered the storm of reformation. It is the utterance of the self-confident legislator who rejoices to be able to go back to first principles and to apply them upon new ground. And not only was Calvin's theory of the relation between church and state definite enough, but he was prepared to carry it out by the use of a discipline which did not yield for weight and edge to any weapon that Catholic Bishop or Inquisitor ever wielded.

Discipline is the constant dream of churchmen of every kind. Give them but power enough, they say, and they will cleanse the church of all heresies and unfaithfulnesses, transforming her into the likeness of the pure Bride of Christ, without blemish and without taint. In their rage against error, they forget the wheat and the tares that are to grow together till the final harvest. In their anger against open manifestations of vice, they overlook the subtler sins which no inquisition can detect, which no severity can cast out, but which not the less canker the Christian life at its core. But Europe, in the sixteenth century, had had enough of discipline as administered by clerics; and when the whole system by whose terrors it had been enforced crumbled into ruins, there was no basis on which to erect another. Princes would not, and churchmen could not, take up again the rod that had fallen from Papal hands. Error indeed might be repressed, but vice was perforce left to itself. So deeply, however, is this passion for moral judgment engrained in the hearts of theologians, that I doubt not Luther and Melancthon would gladly have set up, if they could, a discipline analogous to that of Rome, if perchance milder: fortunately for themselves and the church, they were compelled to rely upon moral and religious influence alone. Still the Reformation had everywhere to contend against a relaxation of morals which its enemies put down to its own account, which its friends declared to be a legacy of the past: perhaps in Geneva, with its mixed population, with its southern blood, with the turbulence of its recent history, things were worse than elsewhere. However this may have been, reformation of morals was henceforth a matter of life and death struggle between the Genevese and their new pastor. He had come to Geneva for the first time in 1536, and had been expelled from it, on this very quarrel, in 1538: when in 1541 he was recalled, it was on the understanding that the life of the city was to be controlled and organized as he would have it.

I cannot here enter into the particulars of the ecclesiastical constitution which Calvin established, or define with accuracy the different functions of the Councils and the Consistory. He calmly lays it down in the "Institution" that the church knows of no punishment save exclusion from the Lord's Supper. "For the church hath not the power of the sword to punish or restrain, no empire to command, no prison, no other pains which the magistrate is wont to lay upon men."¹⁸ But what if the state, penetrated through and through with the spirit of the church, acts upon its information, makes crimes of its offences, and is prompt to inflict the severest punishments upon its criminals? Two things are especially to be noticed in the holy reign of terror which Calvin established and left behind him as a legacy to Geneva: first, the vast extension given to the idea of crime, and next, the worse than Draconian severity of the punishments inflicted. Adultery was repeatedly punished with death. A child was beheaded for having struck father and mother. Banishment, imprisonment, in some cases drowning, were penalties inflicted on unchastity. To sing or even to have in one's possession lewd songs was a crime: to laugh at Calvin's sermons, or to have spoken hot words of him in the street, was a crime: to wear clothes of forbidden stuff or make was a crime: to give a feast to too many guests or of too many dishes was a crime: to dance at a wedding was a crime:—to all of which, with many others of like sort, appropriate punishments were meted out. Everybody was obliged to attend public worship: everybody was required to partake of the Lord's Supper: no sick man might lie in bed for three days without sending for the minister of the parish. Do not let it be thought that these penalties were of infrequent enforcement, unwelcome breaks in a smooth current of civic life: in the years 1558 and 1559 alone, there were in the little city four hundred and fourteen of such prosecutions.¹⁹ Now and then, as might be expected, there was a sharp spasm of rebellion against so grinding a tyranny. The Libertines were not wholly suppressed. The old spirit of Genevese freedom was not quite dead. Some man, or as often some woman, was goaded into open revolt, which almost inevitably took such a form as gave a plausible pretext for fresh severity on the part of the guardians of faith and order. Then the prison, the pillory, the scaffold, did their work, and the reign of repressive holiness was resumed.

Did this method of church government succeed or fail? This question will be answered differently according to the side from which it is approached. It must not be forgotten that its story has been chiefly told by Calvin and his friends; and, in particular, that his book against the Libertines is still quoted as the best, and indeed almost the only authority for their false and immoral doctrines. But it is never safe to accept against heretics the testimony of the orthodox doctor who glories in having put them down: heresy, in the common judgment, always involves a taint of immorality, and is only too easily associated with it. The Genevese must have been either more or less than human if the rigid and minute discipline of the Consistory had not now driven sin beneath the surface, and again excited it to bravado: an over-strained severity of criminal jurisprudence is quite as much provocative as remedial. In opposition to the writers who hold up the Geneva of Calvin and Beza as a model community, there are others who, relying on the irrefragable evidence of public records, assert that at no period was its immorality fouler or more deeply seated than when it was covered over with the thickest varnish of religious observance. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that in some respects Calvin largely succeeded in reaching his own ideal. Geneva was to all external appearance sound in the faith. The majority of the inhabitants submitted willingly to the new discipline, while those who hated it maintained, with occasional outbreaks, a sullen silence. Refugees, if only they reached the standard of Genevese orthodoxy, were safe beneath the shelter of the city walls. A flourishing University became the centre from which the Calvinistic theology was diffused. Geneva was, as it were, the High Change of Protestant thought and action: hither came missionaries to be instructed and inspired: hence they issued, to preach all over Europe the gospel of the Divine decrees. But in spite of the admiration which this polity still continues to excite in some minds, we must pronounce the Geneva which Calvin created but a poor and mechanical imitation of the City of God. The true holiness is that which men live and grow into in the strength of high principles and noble affections, not that which is bolstered up by regulations and protected by penalties. I do not even discuss the question whether the ideal of life was in itself a lofty one: the polity by which it was sought to be promoted condemns itself.

Calvin's principles of church government led straight to persecution. In this respect he was neither before nor behind his age: he differed from other Reformers, if at all, in the calm and logical outspokenness with which he defended his position. If sins and crimes are obnoxious to the same kind of judgment—if adultery is punishable with death, reading loose books with imprisonment, neglect of divine ordinances with a fine—why should not heresy, the immoral character of which orthodoxy is always ready to assume, receive the same treatment? Who can be a greater offender in a theocratic state than the heresiarch who is active in the propagation of his soul-destroying errors? Then there is that distinction between heresy and blasphemy of which I have already spoken, and the duty, as to the obligation of which Calvin never entertained a doubt, of being jealous for the honour of God. The chief victims of this theory of upholding religious truth and repressing religious error were Gruet and Servetus. No doubt Gruet was a scoffing unbeliever of a very coarse type; but the evidence on which this fact rests was not discovered till three years after long torture had crushed out of him a confession which led him to the scaffold:²⁰ while the crime for which he actually suffered was that of having affixed to Calvin's pulpit at St. Peter's a scurrilous and threatening placard. The case of Servetus I shall not re-open. All the world, except the few persons who are determined to clear Calvin's fame by any means, is agreed about it. His only defence lies in the proof afforded by the approval of Melancthon and the Swiss churches, that the act was not out of accord with the spirit of the age. He wanted to give the world at large, and the Papacy in especial, an assurance of the fact that such heresy as that of Servetus was no more tolerable in Geneva than in Rome, and bade men read his witness in the smoke that went up to heaven from the faggots of Champmel. Two damning facts, neither of which can be denied or explained away, blacken the deed with special infamy: first, that terrible phrase in Calvin's letter to Farel of February, 1546, seven years before its threat was fulfilled, "nam si venerit, modo valeat mea auctoritas, vivum exire nunquam patiar; " and next, that Servetus was only a stranger in Geneva, taking it as one temporary resting-place on his flight into Italy, over whom therefore neither Consistory nor Council had any pretence of jurisdiction. But the lurid light which surrounds the death of Servetus, and the controversy which it continues to excite, have done much to draw away attention from the fact that it was only part of a system and the logical outcome of a theory. In a long letter to the Protector Somerset, written in the name and with assumption of the authority of Christ, Calvin lays down with great distinctness the duty of repressing heresy by force:²¹

"From what I understand, my Lord, you have two kinds of rebels who have risen up against the King and the State of the realm. The one are fantastic people, who under colour of the gospel would cast all into confusion; the other, obstinate adherents to the superstitions of the Roman Antichrist. Both alike well deserve to be repressed by the sword which is committed to you, seeing that they attack not the King only, but God who has seated him upon the throne, and has entrusted to you the protection as well of his person as of his majesty."

In the latter part of the same letter, the Protector is exhorted for the honour of God "to punish the crimes which men are not accustomed to hold in much account," adultery, unchastity, blasphemy, drunkenness. The state, however theoretically independent of or even superior to the church, is practically to be its instrument in enforcing a scheme of doctrine, in carrying out a method of polity, which are assumed to be in complete accordance with the mind and purpose of God.

To turn to considerations of a more general kind, the Calvinistic type of theology differs from the Lutheran, not so much in the doctrines which it includes, as in the relative importance which it gives to such as are common to both. Its centre of gravity is not the same. Both are Augustinian in their origin and essence: both assume the absolute foreknowledge and determining power of God, the servitude of the human will, the corruption and incapacity of man's nature. But while Lutheranism crystallizes round the idea of justification by faith, and is, so to speak, anthropological, Calvinism, beginning and ending with the supremacy of God, is theological. Another side of this distinction has been expressed in the statement, that while Lutheranism chiefly opposed itself to the Judaizing element in the Papal system by cutting at the root of ceremonial piety, Calvinism stood in stronger contrast to its Paganism by merging all forms of idolatry in the awe of the Supreme. In the one, the main thing is the sinner's personal relation to Christ, his appropriation of the Saviour's work, his resurrection from sin and death to holiness and life; in the other, the majesty of God, who is over all and in all, and the awful omnipotence of the Divine decree fixing the unalterable succession of events, and rigidly determining the eternal fate of men from a period before time was. And when we come to look a little more closely at the constituents of Calvinistic theology, we see how this master-thought runs through it all. In the process of salvation, it at once shuts out all co-operation of the human will, and assures the final perseverance of the elect: shall not God begin, round off, complete His own work? We have no doctrine here of a communicatio idiomatum: the attributes of the deity of Christ cannot be transferred to his manhood. The sacraments may be signs or seals or what you will; a veil of words may be drawn over the too naked simplicity of the Zwinglian conception; but no true Calvinist could admit an actual presence of the Living God under the species of bread and wine. To the same source may be traced the bareness of Calvinistic worship and its unwillingness to charm the soul through the senses: God, the Omnipotent and the Omnipresent, will choose and occupy and mould His own, without the vain help of audible and visible things. The one thought of God dominates, almost engulfs, all others; and it is a God whose will binds the world and men in bonds of adamant.

It would seem at first sight as if such a conception of religion must be fatal to morals. If the essence of Calvinism be, as John Wesley put it, that the elect shall be saved, do what they will, and the reprobate damned, do what they can, what motive is left for self-restraint in the one, for effort in the other? In what does the convinced Calvinist differ from the Moslem fatalist who resigns himself with Allah Ackbar, to be a counter in the hands of Omnipotence? Yet so far is Calvinism from producing slackness of will and feebleness of character, that Calvinists have been among the most strenuous of men: Calvin himself, John Knox, William of Nassau, Oliver Cromwell. The secret lies in that communication between earth and heaven for which Mohammedanism makes no provision, except in the case of the world's great prophets. No true Calvinist, save one perhaps here and there, ever believes that he is finally reprobate: as in the case of Cowper, "that way madness lies:" on the contrary, he feels himself to be an instrument of the Omnipotent Will, and bends to whatever toil he undertakes in the unshakable conviction that he is on the side of God. How copious a spring of energy lies in this thought I need not tell you; nor is it without a power of moral consecration too. It is customary to say that Calvinism is a more distinctively ethical form of religion than Lutheranism: that while the latter represents it as a grace that is imparted, the former holds it up as a law to be obeyed. But does not the ethical efficacy of Calvinism take a direction of its own, and act within limits? There are specific moral dangers in the absolute identification of God's will with our own conception of it, from which, it seems to me, neither Calvin nor some of the most eminent of his followers have been able to escape. Nothing is more difficult than to be jealous for the Divine honour and to abate all personal pretension. To hate the enemies of God and to love one's own, are practically incompatible precepts.

The relations of Calvinist and Lutheran theology to the Bible are in theory the same. Luther and Calvin alike appealed from the authority of Pope, Church, Schoolmen, Tradition, to that of the Scriptures themselves. The Genevese Reformer, as I have already pointed out, true to his systematizing instinct, developed the theory of Biblical authority into a somewhat more definite form; but in the general both stand upon the same ground. Yet Calvin, it must be confessed, was the more consistent scripturalist of the two. He was a not less industrious expositor of Scripture than Luther, and probably more acute and systematic; while the literary and theological difficulties which the latter found in the Bible, and cut asunder rather than solved by his trenchant good sense, did not trouble him. He believed that all Scripture was written under the direct dictation of the Holy Spirit, and was to be received by the church as a living voice from heaven. So given to men, it could not possibly contain discrepancy or contradiction: to question its genuineness, was simple rebellion against God. Calvin went to the New Testament for his theory of church government, and claimed a Divine sanction for Presbyterianism; while Luther in setting up his Consistories did not look beyond the practical necessities of the case and the prejudices of his pious Electors. And, like Zwingli, Calvin took the Bible much more as a whole than Luther did. He was full of a Hebrew spirit: he went back willingly to Jewish precedents, and used them to modify the too great humanity of the gospel. The apologists for some of his questionable actions defend him on this line: "Whoso ventures to judge him," says a late biographer, "judges the Hebrew Prophets too." When the Duchess Réné of Ferrara alleges that the example of David in hating his enemies is not applicable to those who live under the milder dispensation of the gospel, he sternly replies²² that "such a gloss would upset all Scripture," and alleges that the Holy Ghost has in this respect set David before us as a pattern. "And, in fact," so he continues, "it is declared to us that in this ardour he is the type of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, if we assume to surpass in sweetness and humanity him who is the fountain of piety and compassion, woe be unto us!" What of this kind the English Puritans thought and said is known to all, and how in the seventeenth century the Old Testament, the Mosaic legislation, the Jewish kingdom and church, assumed a place in religious thought and practice to which the earlier history of Christianity offers little that is like. This particular phase of Calvinistic thought has in the main passed away; nor do fanatical politicians or wild social reformers now, as under the Commonwealth, borrow the language of the Old Testament. But Calvin's way of looking at Scripture still survives in much uncritical apprehension of the relation between the Old Testament and the New, and a method of exposition which takes little account of differences of age and authorship.

To conclude: Calvinism is the last word of what may be called the orthodox Protestant Reformation. It stands further from Rome than Lutheranism, and is at the same time a compacter system, a more reasoned protest, a more pronounced antithesis. In its appeal to the authority of Scripture over the whole ground of faith and practice, it breaks more decisively with tradition. Whatever we may think of Calvin's attempt to find a middle place between Luther and Zwingli for his doctrine of sacraments, Calvinistic, in a very different way from Lutheran churches, have always been opposed to Rome in that great and critical controversy. Partly in the line of natural development, partly in that of reaction, the process of doctrinal decay in the Reformed Church has often led to rationalism. Calvinism is an intellectual system, proceeding by logical method from premiss to conclusion, having all its parts duly subordinated to the whole, and held together by the strongest argumentative cement. But when thought is once encouraged to activity, who shall prescribe limits? And, on the other hand, there are demands upon belief of such a kind as to provoke unqualified rejection, if they do not meet with submissive assent. From the beginning, Calvinism has been at the opposite pole from Rome in the application of art to the service of religion: it rejects all symbolism, it sets up no cross, it lights no candles, it has inspired no architecture, it distrusts even music. Lutheran hymnology began with Luther, and from the first put forth a strong and sweet luxuriance; but it was only in the eighteenth century that Calvinism learned how to write hymns, the help of which Scottish piety does not even yet value. But while it is almost Papal in its theory of the church, and would, if it could, exercise as rigid a rule as Rome over men's minds and actions, it stands in long historical opposition to Papal politics. "No Bishop, no King,"²³ said James I. at the Hampton Court Conference; and, on the other hand, your true Calvinist is always on the side of freedom and national independence. He has not been as tender of others' rights as strenuous to maintain his own: the children of the Dutchmen who had withstood Alva, exiled the Remonstrants: the Puritans, who had fled for freedom of worship to New England, banished Baptists and branded Quakers. But in the incidental mention of these names, I have done enough to vindicate for Calvinism an honourable place in history. It was the form of faith in the strength of which the Dutch Republic was sustained and the American Republic was founded: to propagate which, Tyndale gave to the English people the Bible in their own tongue, and with it his life: which formed the royal intellect of Cromwell, and inspired the majestic verse of Milton. Shall I say more, or is not this enough?

Notes

¹ In connection with the passage above quoted, Zwingli says that it was from Wyttenbach, and not from Luther, that he learned the true character of indulgences: "dann ich vorhin von dem ablass bericht was, wie es ein betrug und farbe wär, us einer disputation die doctor Thomas Wytembach von Biel, min herr und geliebter trüwer leerer, vor etwas zyten ze Basel gehalten hatte, wie wol in minem abwesen." Opp. I. p. 254.

² Vid. Zwingli's preface to an edition of Pindar, edited by Cœporinus: Opp. IV. 159.

³ Bullinger: Reformationsgeschichte, I. 259.

⁴De Vera et falsa religione: Opp. III. 202.

⁵ Ibid. III. 285.

⁶ Ibid. III. 201.

⁷Quo pacto adolescentes formandi: ibid. IV. 152.

⁸Quo pacto adolescentes formandi: Opp. IV. 155.

⁹ Ibid. IV. 158.

¹⁰ Bullinger: Reformationsgeschichte, II. 277.

¹¹ January 29, 1523.

¹² January 17, March 20, 1525.

¹³ January 6, 1528.

¹⁴Apologeticus Archeteles adpellatus: Opp. III. 48. Conf. I. 151, 485, for slightly differing forms of the same statement.

¹⁵ Bullinger: Reformationsgeschichte, I. 31.

¹⁶ I may refer here to an excellent essay in the Theologische Studien und Kritiken for 1862, p. 631, by Hundeshagen, "Zur Charakteristik Ulrich Zwingli's und seines Reformationswerkes unter Vergleichung mit Luther und Calvin." Another essay in the same periodical, to which I am under obligation throughout this Lecture, is one by Ullmann, "Zur Charakteristik der Reformirten Kirche," 1843, p. 749.

¹⁷Instit. Christ. Rel. IV 1. I have adopted Norton's translation.

¹⁸Instit. Christ. Rel. IV. 11, 3.

¹⁹ I lay no stress upon the fact that the registers of the city of Geneva show that within the space of sixty years a hundred and fifty poor wretches were burned for witchcraft; that the application of the torture was an incident of almost all criminal trials; that thirty-one persons were burned at one time for the fantastic offence of spreading the plague. These cruelties, these popular terrors, were common to all Europe, and cannot be specially laid to the charge of either Calvin or Geneva. Yet they belong to the delineation of this City of God, upon which so much strange admiration has been spent, and must be suffered to remain and to darken the picture.

²⁰ Gruet was executed in July, 1547: it was not until April, 1550, that a MS. book of his handwriting was discovered under the roof of his house, severely characterized by Calvin in a still extant document, and ordered to be burned by the Syndics. Henry: Leben Calvin's, II. 439 et seq.; Beilage 16, p. 120.

²¹ The letter is dated October 22, 1548. Henry: Leben Calvin's, II.; Beilage 4, p. 26 et seq.

²² Henry: Calvin's Leben, I. 452, 453.

²³ Fuller: Church History of Britain, III. 180.