which the mind and soul are subjected whenever theological deductions
are invested with the same authority as belongs to original declarations
of Scripture; and which, so far from being systematized, do not even
always apparently harmonize. Almost any system of belief can be
logically deduced from Scripture texts. It should be the work of
theologians to harmonize them and show their general spirit and meaning,
rather than to draw conclusions from any particular class of subjects.
Any system of deductions from texts of Scripture which are offset by
texts of equal authority but apparently different meaning, is
necessarily one-sided and imperfect, and therefore narrow. That is
exactly the difficulty under which Calvin labored. He seems, to a large
class of Christians of great ability and conscientiousness, to be narrow
and one-sided, and is therefore no authority to them; not, be it
understood, in reference to the great fundamental doctrines of
Christianity, but in his views of Predestination and the subjects
interlinked with it. And it was the great error of attaching so much
importance to mere metaphysical divinity that led to such a revulsion
from his peculiar system in after times. It was the great wisdom of the
English reformers, like Cranmer, to leave all those metaphysical
questions open, as matters of comparatively little consequence, and fall
back on unquestioned doctrines of primitive faith, that have given so
great vitality to the English Church, and made it so broad and catholic.
The Puritans as a body, more intellectual than the mass of the
Episcopalians, were led away by the imposing and entangling dialectics
of the scholastic Calvin, and came unfortunately to attach as much
importance to such subjects as free-will and predestination--questions
most complicated--as they did to "the weightier matters of the law;" and
when pushed by the logic of opponents to the _decretum horribile_, have
been compelled to fall back on the Catholic doctrine of mysteries, as
something which could never be explained or comprehended, but which it
is a Christian duty to accept as a mystery. The Scriptures certainly
speak of mysteries, like regeneration; but it is one thing to marvel how
a man can be born again by the Spirit of God,--a fact we see every
day,--and quite another thing to make a mystery to be accepted as a
matter of faith of that which the Bible has nowhere distinctly
affirmed, and which is against all ideas of natural justice, and arrived
at by a subtle process of dialectical reasoning.
But it was natural for so great an intellectual giant as Calvin to 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 Abélard, 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
firesides, 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 Calvinisine; Calvin's Works; Ruchat; D'Aubigné'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."