make his startling deductions from the great truths he meditated
upon with so much seriousness and earnestness. Only a very lofty
nature would have revelled as he did, and as Augustine did before
him and Pascal after him, in those great subjects which pertain to
God and his dispensations. All his meditations and formulated
doctrines radiate from the great and sublime idea of the majesty of
God and the comparative insignificance of man. And here he was not
so far apart from the great sages of antiquity, before salvation
was revealed by Christ. "Canst thou by searching find out God?"
"What is man that Thou art mindful of him?"
And here I would remark that theologians and philosophers have ever
been divided into two great schools,--those who have had a tendency
to exalt the dignity of man, and those who would absorb man in the
greatness of the Deity. These two schools have advocated doctrines
which, logically carried out to their ultimate sequences, would
produce a Grecian humanitarianism on the one hand, and a sort of
Bramanism on the other,--the one making man the arbiter of his own
destiny, independently of divine agency, and the other making the
Deity the only power of the universe. With one school, God as the
only controlling agency is a fiction, and man himself is infinite
in faculties; the other holds that God is everything and man is
nothing. The distinction between these two schools, both of which
have had great defenders, is fundamental,--such as that between
Augustine and Pelagius, between Bernard and Abelard, and between
Calvin and Lainez. Among those who have inclined to the doctrine
of the majesty of God and the littleness of man were the primitive
monks and the Indian theosophists, and the orthodox scholastics of
the Middle Ages,--all of whom were comparatively indifferent to
material pleasure and physical progress, and sought the salvation
of the soul and the favor of God beyond all temporal blessings. Of
the other class have been the Greek philosophers and the
rationalizing schoolmen and the modern lights of science.
Now Calvin was imbued with the lofty spirit of the Fathers of the
Church and the more religious and contemplative of the schoolmen
and the saints of the Middle Ages, when he attached but little
dignity to man unaided by divine grace, and was absorbed with the
idea of the sovereignty of God, in whose hands man is like clay in
the hands of the potter. This view of God pervaded the whole
spirit of his theology, making it both lofty and yet one-sided. To
him the chief end of man was to glorify God, not to develop his own
intellectual faculties, and still less to seek the pleasures and
excitements of the world. Man was a sinner before an infinite God,
and he could rise above the polluting influence of sin only by the
special favor of God and his divinely communicated grace. Man was
so great a sinner that he deserved an eternal punishment, only to
be rescued as a brand plucked from the fire, as one of the elect
before the world was made. The vast majority of men were left to
the uncovenanted mercies of Christ,--the redeemer, not of the race,
but of those who believed.
To Calvin therefore, as to the Puritans, the belief in a personal
God was everything; not a compulsory belief in the general
existence of a deity who, united with Nature, reveals himself to
our consciousness; not the God of the pantheist, visible in all the
wonders of Nature; not the God of the rationalist, who retires from
the universe which he has made, leaving it to the operation of
certain unchanging and universal laws: but the God whom Abraham and
Moses and the prophets saw and recognized, and who by his special
providence rules the destinies of men. The most intellectual of
the reformers abhorred the deification of the reason, and clung to
that exalted supernaturalism which was the life and hope of blessed
saints and martyrs in bygone ages, and which in "their contests
with mail-clad infidelity was like the pebble which the shepherd of
Israel hurled against the disdainful boaster who defied the power
of Israel's God." And he was thus brought into close sympathy with
the realism of the Fathers, who felt that all that is valuable in
theology must radiate from the recognition of Almighty power in the
renovation of society, and displayed, not according to our human
notions of law and progress and free-will, but supernaturally and
mysteriously, according to his sovereign will, which is above law,
since God is the author of law. He simply erred in enforcing a
certain class of truths which must follow from the majesty of the
one great First Cause, lofty as these truths are, to the exclusion
of another class of truths of great importance; which gives to his
system incompleteness and one-sidedness. Thus he was led to
undervalue the power of truth itself in its contest with error. He
was led into a seeming recognition of two wills in God,--that which
wills the salvation of all men, and that which wills the salvation
of the elect alone. He is accused of a leaning to fatalism, which
he heartily denied, but which seems to follow from his logical
conclusions. He entered into an arena of metaphysical controversy
which can never be settled. The doctrines of free-will and
necessity can never be reconciled by mortal reason. Consciousness
reveals the freedom of the will as well as the slavery to sin. Men
are conscious of both; they waste their time in attempting to
reconcile two apparently opposing facts,--like our pious fathers at
their New England fire-sides, who were compelled to shelter
themselves behind mystery.
The tendency of Calvin's system, it is maintained by many, is to
ascribe to God attributes which according to natural justice would
be injustice and cruelty, such as no father would exercise on his
own children, however guilty. Even good men will not accept in
their hearts doctrines which tend to make God less compassionate
than man. There are not two kinds of justice. The intellect is
appalled when it is affirmed that one man JUSTLY suffers the
penalty of another man's sin,--although the world is full of
instances of men suffering from the carelessness or wickedness of
others, as in a wicked war or an unnecessary railway disaster. The
Scripture law of retribution, as brought out in the Bible and
sustained by consciousness, is the penalty a man pays for personal
and voluntary transgression. Nor will consciousness accept the
doctrine that the sin of a mortal--especially under strong
temptation and with all the bias of a sinful nature--is infinite.
Nothing which a created mortal can do is infinite; it is only
finite: the infinite belongs to God alone. Hence an infinite
penalty for a finite sin conflicts with consciousness and is
nowhere asserted in the Bible, which is transcendently more
merciful and comforting than many theological systems of belief,
however powerfully sustained by dialectical reasoning and by the
most excellent men. Human judgments or reasonings are fallible on
moral questions which have two sides; and reasonings from texts
which present different meanings when studied by the lights of
learning and science are still more liable to be untrustworthy. It
would seem to be the supremest necessity for theological schools to
unravel the meaning of divine declarations, and present doctrines
in their relation with apparently conflicting texts, rather than
draw out a perfect and consistent system, philosophically
considered, from any one class of texts. Of all things in this
wicked and perplexing world the science of theology should be the
most cheerful and inspiring, for it involves inquiries on the
loftiest subjects which can interest a thoughtful mind.
But whatever defects the system of doctrines which Calvin
elaborated with such transcendent ability may have, there is no
question as to its vast influence on the thinking of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. The schools of France and Holland and
Scotland and England and America were animated by his genius and
authority. He was a burning and a shining light, if not for all
ages, at least for the unsettled times in which he lived. No
theologian ever had a greater posthumous power than he for nearly
three hundred years, and he is still one of the great authorities
of the church universal. John Knox sought his counsel and was
influenced by his advice in the great reform he made in Scotland.
In France the words Calvinist and Huguenot are synonymous.
Cranmer, too, listened to his counsels, and had great respect for
his learning and sanctity. Among the Puritans he has reigned like
an oracle. Oliver Cromwell embraced his doctrines, as also did Sir
Matthew Hale. Ridicule or abuse of Calvin is as absurd as the
ridicule or abuse with which Protestants so long assailed
Hildebrand or Innocent III. No one abuses Pascal or Augustine, and
yet the theological views of all these are substantially the same.
In one respect I think that Calvin has received more credit than he
deserves. Some have maintained that he was a sort of father of
republicanism and democratic liberty. In truth he had no popular
sympathies, and leaned towards an aristocracy which was little
short of an oligarchy. He had no hand in establishing the
political system of Geneva; it was established before he went
there. He was not even one of those thinkers who sympathized with
true liberty of conscience. He persecuted heretics like a
mediaeval Catholic divine. He would have burned a Galileo as he
caused the death of Servetus, which need not have happened but for
him. Calvin could have saved Servetus if he had pleased; but he
complained of him to the magistrates, knowing that his condemnation
and death would necessarily follow. He had neither the humanity of
Luther nor the toleration of Saint Augustine. He was the
impersonation of intellect,--like Newton, Leibnitz, Spinoza, and
Kant,--which overbore the impulses of his heart. He had no
passions except zeal for orthodoxy. So pre-eminently did intellect
tower above the passions that he seemed to lack sympathy; and yet,
such was his exalted character, he was capable of friendship. He
was remarkable for every faculty of the mind except wit and
imagination. His memory was almost incredible; he remembered
everything he ever read or heard; he would, after long intervals,
recognize persons whom he had never seen but once or twice. When
employed in dictation, he would resume the thread of his discourse
without being prompted, after the most vexatious interruptions.
His judgment was as sound as his memory was retentive; it was
almost infallible,--no one was ever known to have been misled by
it. He had a remarkable analytical power, and also the power of
generalization. He was a very learned man, and his Commentaries
are among the most useful and valued of his writings, showing both
learning and judgment; his exegetical works have scarcely been
improved. He had no sceptical or rationalistic tendencies, and
therefore his Commentaries may not be admired by men of "advanced
thought;" but his annotations will live when those of Ewald shall
be forgotten; they still hold their place in the libraries of
biblical critics. For his age he was a transcendent critic; his
various writings fill five folio volumes. He was not so voluminous
a writer as Thomas Aquinas, but less diffuse; his style is lucid,
like that of Voltaire.
Considering the weakness of his body Calvin's labors were
prodigious. There was never a more industrious man, finding time
for everything,--for an amazing correspondence, for pastoral
labors, for treatises and essays, for commentaries and official
duties. No man ever accomplished more in the same space of time.
He preached daily every alternate week; he attended meetings of the
Consistory and of the Court of Morals; he interested himself in the
great affairs of his age; he wrote letters to all parts of
Christendom.
Reigning as a religious dictator, and with more influence than any
man of his age, next to Luther, Calvin was content to remain poor,
and was disdainful of money and all praises and rewards. This was
not an affectation, not the desire to imitate the great saints of
Christian antiquity to whom poverty was a cardinal virtue; but real
indifference, looking upon money as impedimenta, as camp equipage
is to successful generals. He was not conscious of being poor with
his small salary of fifty dollars a year, feeling that he had
inexhaustible riches within him; and hence he calmly and naturally
took his seat among the great men of the world as their peer and
equal, without envy of the accidents of fortune and birth. He was
as indifferent to money and luxuries as Socrates when he walked
barefooted among the Athenian aristocracy, or Basil when he retired
to the wilderness; he rarely gave vent to extravagant grief or joy,
seldom laughed, and cared little for hilarities; he knew no games
or sports; he rarely played with children or gossiped with women;
he loved without romance, and suffered bereavement without outward
sorrow. He had no toleration for human infirmities, and was
neither social nor genial; he sought a wife, not so much for
communion of feeling as to ease him of his burdens,--not to share
his confidence, but to take care of his house. Nor was he fond,
like Luther, of music and poetry. He had no taste for the fine
arts; he never had a poet or an artist for his friend or companion.
He could not look out of his window without seeing the glaciers of
the Alps, but seemed to be unmoved by their unspeakable grandeur;
he did not revel in the glories of nature or art, but gave his mind
to abstract ideas and stern practical duties. He was sparing of
language, simple, direct, and precise, using neither sarcasm, nor
ridicule, nor exaggeration. He was far from being eloquent
according to popular notions of oratory, and despised the jingle of
words and phrases and tricks of rhetoric; he appealed to reason
rather than the passions, to the conscience rather than the
imagination.
Though mild, Calvin was also intolerant. Castillo, once his
friend, assailed his doctrine of Decrees, and was obliged to quit
Geneva, and was so persecuted that he died of actual starvation;
Perrin, captain-general of the republic, danced at a wedding, and
was thrown into prison; Bolsec, an eminent physician, opposed the
doctrine of Predestination, and was sentenced to perpetual
imprisonment; Gruet spoke lightly of the ordinances of religion,
and was beheaded; Servetus was a moral and learned and honest man,
but could not escape the flames. Had he been willing to say, as
the flames consumed his body, "Jesus, thou eternal Son of God, have
mercy on me!" instead of, "Jesus, thou son of the eternal God!" he
might have been spared. Calvin was as severe on those who refused
to accept his logical deductions from acknowledged truths as he was
on those who denied the fundamental truths themselves. But
toleration was rare in his age, and he was not beyond it. He was
not even beyond the ideas of the Middle Ages in some important
points, such as those which pertained to divine justice,--the wrath
rather than the love of God. He lived too near the Middle Ages to
be emancipated from the ideas which enslaved such a man as Thomas
Aquinas. He had very little patience with frivolous amusements or
degrading pursuits. He attached great dignity to the ministerial
office, and set a severe example of decorum and propriety in all
his public ministrations. He was a type of the early evangelical
divines, and was the father of the old Puritan strictness and
narrowness and fidelity to trusts. His very faults grew out of
virtues pushed to extremes. In our times such a man would not be
selected as a travelling companion, or a man at whose house we
would wish to keep the Christmas holidays. His unattractive
austerity perhaps has been made too much of by his enemies, and
grew out of his unimpulsive temperament,--call it cold if we must,--
and also out of his stern theology, which marked the ascetics of
the Middle Ages. Few would now approve of his severity of
discipline any more than they would feel inclined to accept some of
his theological deductions.
I question whether Calvin lived in the hearts of his countrymen, or
they would have erected some monument to his memory. In our times
a statue has been erected to Rousseau in Geneva; but Calvin was
buried without ceremony and with exceeding simplicity. He was a
warrior who cared nothing for glory or honor, absorbed in devotion
to his Invisible King, not indifferent to the exercise of power,
but only as he felt he was the delegated messenger of Divine
Omnipotence scattering to the winds the dust of all mortal
grandeur. With all his faults, which were on the surface, he was
the accepted idol and oracle of a great party, and stamped his
genius on his own and succeeding ages. Whatever the Presbyterians
have done for civilization, he comes in for a share of the honor.
Whatever foundations the Puritans laid for national greatness in
this country, it must be confessed that they caught inspiration
from his decrees. Such a great master of exegetical learning and
theological inquiry and legislative wisdom will be forever held in
reverence by lofty characters, although he may be no favorite with
the mass of mankind. If many great men and good men have failed to
comprehend either his character or his system, how can a pleasure-
loving and material generation, seeking to combine the glories of
this world with the promises of the next, see much in him to
admire, except as a great intellectual dialectician and system-
maker in an age with which it has no sympathy? How can it
appreciate his deep spiritual life, his profound communion with
God, his burning zeal for the defence of Christian doctrine, his
sublime self-sacrifice, his holy resignation, his entire
consecration to a great cause? Nobody can do justice to Calvin who
does not know the history of his times, the circumstances which
surrounded him, and the enemies he was required to fight. No one
can comprehend his character or mission who does not feel it to be
supremely necessary to have a definite, positive system of
religious belief, based on the authority of the Scriptures as a
divine inspiration, both as an anchor amid the storms and a star of
promise and hope.
And, after all, what is the head and front of Calvin's offending?--
that he was cold, unsocial, and ungenial in character; and that, as
a theologian, he fearlessly and inexorably pushed out his
deductions to their remotest logical sequences. But he was no more
austere than Chrysostom, no more ascetic than Basil, not even
sterner in character than Michael Angelo, or more unsocial than
Pascal or Cromwell or William the Silent. We lose sight of his
defects in the greatness of his services and the exalted dignity of
his character. If he was severe to adversaries, he was kind to
friends; and when his feeble body was worn out by his protracted
labors, at the age of fifty-three, and he felt that the hand of
death was upon him, he called together his friends and fellow-
laborers in reform,--the magistrates and ministers of Geneva,--
imparted his last lessons, and expressed his last wishes, with the
placidity of a Christian sage. Amid tears and sobs and stifled
groans he discoursed calmly on his approaching departure, gave his
affectionate benedictions, and commended them and his cause to
Christ; lingering longer than was expected, but dying in the
highest triumphs of Christian faith, May 27, 1564, in the, arms of
his faithful and admiring Beza, as the rays of the setting-sun
gilded with their glory his humble chamber of toil and spiritual
exaltation.
No man who knows anything will ever sneer at Calvin. He is not to
be measured by common standards. He was universally regarded as
the greatest light of the theological world. When we remember his
transcendent abilities, his matchless labors, his unrivalled
influence, his unblemished morality, his lofty piety, and soaring
soul, all flippant criticism is contemptible and mean. He ranks
with immortal benefactors, and needs least of all any apologies for
his defects. A man who stamped his opinions on his own age and
succeeding ages can be regarded only as a very extraordinary
genius. A frivolous and pleasure-seeking generation may not be
attracted by such an impersonation of cold intellect, and may rear
no costly monument to his memory; but his work remains as the
leader of the loftiest class of Christian enthusiasts that the
modern world has known, and the founder of a theological system
which still numbers, in spite of all the changes of human thought,
some of the greatest thinkers and ablest expounders of Christian
doctrine in both Europe and America. To have been the spiritual
father of the Puritans for three hundred years is itself a great
evidence of moral and intellectual excellence, and will link his
name with some of the greatest movements that have marked our
modern civilization. From Plymouth Rock to the shores of the
Pacific Ocean we still see the traces of his marvellous genius, and
his still more wonderful influence on the minds of men and on the
schools of Christian theology; so that he will ever be regarded as
the great doctor of the Protestant Church.
AUTHORITIES.
Henry's Life of Calvin, translated by Stebbings; Dyer's Life of
Calvin; Beza's Life of Calvin; Drelincourt's Defence of Calvin;
Bayle; Maimbourg's Histoire du Calvinisme; Calvin's Works; Ruchat;
D'Aubigne's History of the Reformation; Burnet's Reformation;
Mosheim; Biographie Universelle, article on Servetus; Schlosser's
Leben Bezas; McCrie's Life of Knox; Original Letters (Parker
Society).
FRANCIS BACON.
A. D. 1561-1626.
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY.
It is not easy to present the life and labors of
"The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind."
So Pope sums up the character of the great Lord Bacon, as he is
generally but improperly called; and this verdict, in the main, has
been confirmed by Lords Macaulay and Campbell, who seem to delight
in keeping him in that niche of the temple of fame where the poet
has placed him,--contemptible as a man, but venerable as the
philosopher, radiant with all the wisdom of his age and of all
preceding ages, the miner and sapper of ancient falsehoods, the
pioneer of all true knowledge, the author of that inductive and
experimental philosophy on which is based the glory of our age.
Macaulay especially, in that long and brilliant article which
appeared in the "Edinburgh Review" in 1837, has represented him as
a remarkably worldly man, cold, calculating, selfish a sycophant
and a flatterer, bent on self-exaltation; greedy, careless, false;
climbing to power by base subserviency; betraying friends and
courting enemies; with no animosities he does not suppress from
policy, and with no affections which he openly manifests when it
does not suit his interests: so that we read with shame of his
extraordinary shamelessness, from the time he first felt the
cravings of a vulgar ambition to the consummation of a disgraceful
crime; from the base desertion of his greatest benefactor to the
public selling of justice as Lord High Chancellor of the realm;
resorting to all the arts of a courtier to win the favor of his
sovereign and of his minions and favorites; reckless as to honest
debts; torturing on the rack an honest parson for a sermon he never
preached; and, when obliged to confess his corruption, meanly
supplicating mercy from the nation he had outraged, and favors from
the monarch whose cause he had betrayed. The defects and
delinquencies of this great man are bluntly and harshly put by
Macaulay, without any attempt to soften or palliate them: as if he
would consign his name and memory not "to men's charitable
speeches, to foreign nations, and to the next ages," but to an
infamy as lasting and deep as that of Scroggs and of Jeffreys, or
any of those hideous tyrants and monsters that disgraced the reigns
of the Stuart kings.