CALVIN TAUGHT AT ORLEANS OF GOD AND MAN; BEGINS TO
DEFEND AND PROPAGATE THE FAITH.
(1528.)
Calvin was to receive something more from Wolmar; he was about to begin,
under his guidance, the work of all his life—to learn and to teach
Christ. The knowledge which he acquired at the university of Orleans,
philosophy, law, and even Greek, could not suffice him. The moral
faculty is the first in man, and ought to be the first in the university
also. The object of the Reformation was to found, not an intellectual,
but a moral empire; it was to restore holiness to the Church. This
empire had begun in Calvin; his conscience had been stirred; he had
sought salvation and found it; but he had need of knowledge, of increase
in grace, of practice in life, and these he was about to strive after.
[Sidenote: WOLMAR AND CALVIN STUDY THE EPISTLES.]
Melchior, like Melanchthon, had set himself to study the Holy Scriptures
in the original languages, and in them had found light and peace.
Calvin, on his side, 'having acquired some taste for true piety,' as he
informs us, 'was burning with a great desire to advance.'[30] The most
intimate confidence and the freest communication were established
between the professor and the scholar. Melchior spoke to Calvin of
Germany and the Reformation; he read the Greek Testament with him, set
before him the riches of Christ announced therein, and, when studying
the Epistles of St. Paul, explained to him the doctrine of imputed
righteousness which forms the essence of their teaching. Calvin, seated
in his master's study, listened in silence, and respectfully embraced
that mystery so strange and yet so profoundly in harmony with the
righteousness of God!... 'By faith,' said Wolmar, 'man is united to
Christ and Christ to him, so that it is no longer man whom God sees in
the sinner, but his dearly beloved Son himself; and the act by virtue of
which God makes the sinner an inheritor of heaven, is not an arbitrary
one. The doctrine of justification,' added Wolmar, 'is in Luther's
opinion the capital doctrine, _articulus stantis vel cadentis
Ecclesiæ._'[31]
But Calvin's chief teacher was God. At Orleans he had more of those
struggles, which are often prolonged in strong natures. Some take him
simply for a metaphysical thinker, a learned and subtle theologian; on
the contrary, no other doctor has had more experience of those tempests
that stir up the heart to its lowest deeps. 'I feel myself pricked and
stung to the quick by the judgment of God. I am in a continual battle; I
am assaulted and shaken, as when an armed man is forced by a violent
blow to stagger a few steps backwards.' The light which had rejoiced him
so much when he was in college at Paris, seemed almost to have faded
away. 'I am like a wretched man shut up in a deep dungeon, who receives
the light of day obliquely and in part, only through a high and narrow
loop-hole.' He persevered, however; he fixed his eyes on Jesus, and was
soon able to say: 'If I have not the full and free sight of the sun, I
distinguish however his light afar, and enjoy its brightness.'[32]
People at Orleans soon found out that there was something new and
strange in this young man. It was in this city, in the year 1022, that
the revival of modern times, if we may so speak, had begun among the
heads of a school of theology at that time very celebrated. Priests and
canons had told the people who listened to them, both in Orleans and in
the neighbouring towns, 'that they ought to be filled with the gift of
the Holy Spirit; that this Spirit would reveal to them all the depths
and all the dignity of the Scriptures;[33] that they would be fed with
heavenly food and refreshed by an inward fulness.'[34] These
_heretics_ had been put to death at Orleans. Would they be seen
rising again, after more than five centuries, in the city and even in
the university? Many doctors and students opposed Calvin: 'You are a
schismatic,' they said; 'you are separating from the Church!' Calvin,
alarmed at these accusations, was a prey to fresh anguish.
[Sidenote: CALVIN'S ANGUISH AND HUMILITY.]
Then, as he informs us, he began to meditate on the Psalms, and in the
struggles of David he found an image of his own: 'Ah!' he exclaimed,
'the Holy Spirit has here painted to the life all the pains, sorrows,
fears, doubts, hopes, anxieties, perplexities, and even the confused
emotions with which my mind is wont to be agitated.... This book is an
anatomy of all the parts of the soul.... There is no affection in man
which is not here represented as in a glass.'[35] This man, whom the
Romish and other legends describe as vain, proud, and insensible,
desired to see himself as he was, without screening any of his faults.
'Of the many infirmities to which we are subject,' he said, 'and of the
many vices of which we are full, not one ought to be hidden. Ah! truly
it is an excellent and singular gain, when all the hiding-places are
laid open, and the heart is brought into the light and thoroughly
cleansed of all hypocrisy and foul infection.'[36]
Such are the principles by which the Reformation has triumphed. Its
great organs desired that men's hearts should be 'cleansed of all foul
infection.' It is a singular delusion of those writers who, seeing
things otherwise than they are, ascribe this divine work to vile
interests and base passions. According to them, its causes were jealousy
of the Augustine monks, the ambition of princes, the greed of nobles,
and the carnal passions of priests, which, however, as we have seen, had
but too free scope during the middle ages. A searching glance into the
souls of the Reformers lays bare to us the cause of the revival. If the
writers of whom I have spoken were right, the Reformation ought not to
have waited until Luther for its accomplishment; for there had existed
for ages in christendom ambitious princes, greedy nobles, jealous monks,
and impure priests. But what was really a new thing was to find men who,
like the reformers, opened their hearts to the light of the Holy Spirit,
believed in the Word of God, found Jesus Christ, esteemed everything in
comparison with him as loss, lived the life of God, and desired that
'all hiding-places should be laid open,' and men's hearts cleansed of
all hypocrisy. Such were the true sources of the Reformation.
The adversaries of the Gospel understood the danger incurred by the
Church of Rome from the principles professed by Calvin; and hence they
called him wicked and profane, and, as he says, 'heaped upon his head a
world of abuse.' They said that he ought to be expelled from the Church.
Then the student, 'cast down but not destroyed,' retiring to his
chamber, would exclaim: 'If I am at war with such masters, I am not,
however, at war with thy Church, O God! Why should I hesitate to
separate from these false teachers whom the apostles call thy
enemies?[37]... When cursed by the unrighteous priests of their day, did
not thy prophets remain in the true unity of thy children? Encouraged by
their example, I will resist those who oppress us, and neither their
threats nor their denunciations shall shake me.'[38]
[Sidenote: PHASES OF CALVIN'S CONVERSION.]
The conversion of Calvin, begun at Paris, was completed at Orleans.
There are, as we have said, several phases in this work. The first is
that of the conscience, where the soul is aroused; the second is that of
the understanding, where the mind is enlightened; then comes the last,
where the new man is built up, where he strikes deeper root in Christ,
and bears fruit to God. At Paris, Calvin had heard in his heart the
divine voice calling him to eternal life; at Orleans, he constantly
studied the Holy Scriptures,[39] and became 'learned in the knowledge of
salvation,' as Theodore Beza tells us. The Church herself has gone
through similar phases: the first epoch of her history, that of the
apostolic fathers,[40] was that of simple piety without the scientific
element; the second, the age of the apologists, was that of a christian
understanding seeking to justify its faith in the eyes of reason. Calvin
had followed this road; but he did not give way to an intellectualism
which would have brought back death into his heart. On the contrary, the
third phase began immediately, and from day to day the christian life
became in him more spiritual and more active.
The conversion of Calvin and of the other reformers—we must insist upon
this point—was not simply a change wrought by study in their thoughts
and in their system. Calvin did not set himself the task of inventing a
new theology, as his adversaries have asserted. We do not find him
coldly meditating on the Church, curiously examining the Scriptures, and
seeking in them a means of separating a portion of christendom from
Rome. The Reformation was not the fruit of abstract reasoning; it
proceeded from an inward labour, a spiritual combat, a victory which the
reformers won by the sweat of their brow, or rather ... of their heart.
Instead of composing his doctrine chapter after chapter, Calvin,
thirsting for righteousness and peace, found it in Christ. 'Placed as in
the furnace of God (they are his own words), the scum and filth of his
faith were thus purified.' Calvin was put into the crucible, and the new
truth came forth, burning and shining like gold, from the travail of his
melted soul. In order to comprehend the productions of nature or of art,
we must study closely the secrets of their formation. We have on a
former occasion sought to discover the generative principle of the
Reformation in the heart of Luther; we are now striving to discern it in
Calvin also. Convictions, affections, intelligence, activity—all these
were now in process of formation in that admirable genius under the
life-giving rays of truth.
[Sidenote: 'I SACRIFICE MY HEART TO THEE.']
There came a moment when Calvin, desirous of possessing God alone,
renounced the world, which, from that time, has never ceased to hate
him: 'I have not sued thee by my love, O Christ,' he said; 'thou hast
loved me of thy free will. Thou hast shone into my soul, and then
everything that dazzled my eyes by a false splendour immediately
disappeared, or at least I take no count of it. As those who travel by
sea, when they find their ship in danger, throw everything overboard, in
order that, having lightened the vessel, they may arrive safely in port;
in like manner I prefer being stripped of all that I have, rather than
be deprived of thee. I would rather live poor and miserable than be
drowned with my riches. Having cast my goods into the waves, I begin to
have hope of escape since the vessel is lightened.... I come to thee
naked and empty.... And what I find in thee is not a trifling vulgar
gain: I find everything there.'[41] Thus lifting up his hands to God,
Calvin offered the sacrifice of a heart burning with love. He made this
grand thought the charter of his nobility, his blazon, and engraving
this design on his seal, a hand presenting a heart in sacrifice, he
wrote round it: _Cor meum velut mactatum Domino in sacrificium
offero_—'O Lord, I offer unto thee as a sacrifice my heart immolated to
thee.' Such was his device—such was his life.
The eyes of many began already to be turned upon him with admiration.
The surprising clearness of his mind, the powerful convictions of his
heart, the energy of his regenerated will, the strength of his
reasoning, the luminous flashes of his genius, and the severe beauties
of his eloquence—all betokened in him one of the great men of the age.
'A wonderful mind!' says Florimond de Rémond, one of his chief
adversaries, 'a mind keen and subtle to the highest degree, prompt and
sudden in its imaginations! What a praiseworthy man he would have been,
if, sifting away the vices (heresy), the virtues alone could have been
retained!'[42] There was doubtless something wanting in Calvin: he may
not have had that smiling imagination which, at the age he had now
reached, generally gilds life with the most brilliant colours; the world
appeared to him one wide shipwreck. But, possessing the glance of the
eagle, he discovered a deliverance in the future, and his powerful hand,
strengthened by God, was about to prepare the great transformations of
the Church and of the world.
He was indefatigable in labour. When the day was ended, and his
companions indulged in dissipation or in sleep, Calvin, restricting
himself to a slight repast for fear of oppressing his head, withdrew to
his room and sat down to study the Scriptures. At midnight he
extinguished his lamp,[43] and early in the morning, when he awoke and
before he left his bed, he 'ruminated,' says Beza, on what he had read
and learnt the night before.[44] 'We were his friends, we shared his
room with him,' said Theodore Beza's informants. 'We only tell you what
we have seen.'—'Alas!' adds the reformer, 'these long vigils, which so
wonderfully developed his faculties and enriched his memory, weakened
his health, and laid the foundation of those sufferings and frequent
illnesses which shortened his days.'[45]
[Sidenote: CALVIN SOUGHT AS A TEACHER.]
His taste for Holy Scripture did not divert Calvin from the study of
law. He was unwilling that the labours of his profession should suffer
in any degree from the labours of piety. He made such remarkable
progress in jurisprudence that he was soon looked upon, by both students
and professors, as a master and not as a scholar.[46] One day, Pierre de
l'Etoile begged him to give a lesson in his place; and the young man of
nineteen or twenty discharged his duty with so much skill and clearness,
that he was considered as destined to become the greatest jurist in
France. The professors often employed him as their substitute.[47]
To knowledge he joined communion. While still continuing to follow the
lessons of Etoile, Calvin 'sought the company of the faithful servants
of God,' as he tells us. All the children of God (he thought) should be
united together by a bond of brotherly union. He mixed also with
everybody, even with the gainsayers, and if they attacked the great
doctrines of Gospel truth, he defended them. But he did not put himself
forward. He could discern when, how far, and to whom it was expedient to
speak, and never exposed the doctrine of Christ to the jeers of the
unbeliever by imprudence or by the fears of the flesh. When he opened
his mouth, every one of his words struck home. 'Nobody can withstand
him,' they said, 'when he has the Bible in his hand.'
Students who felt a difficulty in believing, townspeople who could not
understand, went and begged him to teach them.[48] He was abashed. 'I am
but a poor recruit,' he said, 'and you address me as if I were a
general.'[49] As these requests were constantly renewed, Calvin tried to
find some hiding-place where he could read, meditate, and pray, secure
from interruption.[50] At one time it was the room of a friend, a nook
in the university library, or some shady retreat on the banks of the
river. But he was hardly absorbed in meditation or in the study of
Scripture, before he found himself surrounded by persons eager to hear
him, and who refused to withdraw. 'Alas!' he exclaimed, 'all my
hiding-places are turned into public schools.'[51]
Accordingly he sought still more private retreats; for he wished to
understand before he taught. The French love to see clearly into things;
but their defect in this respect is that they often do not go deep
enough, or fail to observe that by going deep they arrive at truths in
whose presence the most eminent minds ought to confess their
insufficiency and believe in the revelation from God. In the middle ages
there had been men who wished to bring the mysteries of the catholic
faith to the test of reason;[52] Abelard was at the head of that
phalanx. Calvin was not a new Abelard. He did not presume to fathom
impenetrable mysteries, but sought in Scripture the light and the life
of his soul.
[Sidenote: HE TEACHES IN PRIVATE FAMILIES.]
His admirers returned to him. Several citizens of Orleans opened their
houses to him, saying: 'Come and teach openly the salvation of man.'
Calvin shrank back. 'Let no one disturb my repose,' he said; 'leave me
in peace.' His repose, that is to say his studies, were his only
thought. But these souls, thirsting for truth, did not yield so easily.
'A repose of darkness!' replied the most ardent; 'an ignoble peace![53]
Come and preach!' Calvin remembered the saying of St. Chrysostom:
'Though a thousand persons should call you, think of your own weakness,
and obey only under constraint.'[54] 'Well, then, we constrain you,'
answered his friends. 'O God! what desirest thou of me?' Calvin would
exclaim at such moments. 'Why dost thou pursue me? Why dost thou turn
and disturb me, and never leave me at rest? Why, despite my disposition,
dost thou lead me to the light and bring me into play?'[55] Calvin gave
way, however, and understood that it was his duty to publish the Gospel.
He went to the houses of his friends. A few men, women, and young people
gathered round him, and he began to explain the Scriptures. It was quite
a new order of teaching: there were none of those distinctions and
deductions of scholastic science, at that time so familiar to the
preachers. The language of the young man possessed an admirable
simplicity, a piercing vitality, and a holy majesty which captivated the
heart. 'He teaches the truth,' said his hearers as they withdrew, 'not
in affected language, but with such depth, solidity, and weight, that
every one who hears him is struck with admiration.' These are the words
of a contemporary of Calvin, who lived on the spot, and in the very
circle in which the Reformer then moved. 'While at Orleans,' adds this
friend, Theodore Beza, 'Calvin, chosen from that time to be an
instrument of election in the Lord's work, wonderfully advanced the
kingdom of God in many families.'[56]
It was at Orleans, therefore, that Calvin began his evangelist work and
manifested himself to the world as a christian. Calvin's activity in
this city is a proof that he was then converted to the Gospel, and that
he had been so for some time; for his was not one of those expansive
natures which immediately display externally what is within them. This
first ministry of the reformer negatives the hypotheses which place
Calvin's conversion at Orleans, or at Bourges somewhat later, or, even
later still, during his second residence at Paris.
Thus the young doctor, growing in knowledge and acting in love, refuted
the objections of the gainsayers, and led to Christ the humble souls who
thirsted for salvation. A domestic event suddenly withdrew him from this
pious activity.
[Footnote 30: Calvin, _Préface aux Psaumes_.]
[Footnote 31: ('The touch-stone of a standing or of a falling Church.')
'Wolmarus lutheranum virus Calvino instillabat.'—Flor. Rémond, _Hist. de
l'Hérésie_, liv. vii. ch. ix.]
[Footnote 32: Calvin, _Institution_, liv. iii. ch. ii. 17-19.]
[Footnote 33: 'Sancti Spiritus dono repleberis, qui scripturarum omnium
profunditatem ac veram dignitatem te docebit.'—Mansi, _Gesta Synodi
Aurelianensis_, xix. p. 376.]
[Footnote 34: 'Deinde cœlesti cibo pastus, interna satietate
recreatus.'—Ibid.]
[Footnote 35: Calvin, _Préface des Commentaires sur les Psaumes_.]
[Footnote 36: Ibid.]
[Footnote 37: 'Quos pronuntiabant apostoli esse habendos pro hostibus,
ab iis cur dubitassem me sejungere?'—_Opusc. Lat._ p. 124; _Franç._
p. 169.]
[Footnote 38: _Opuscules._]
[Footnote 39: 'Interea tamen ille sacrarum litterarum studium simul
diligenter excolere in quo tantum etiam promoverat.'—Bezæ _Vita
Calvini_.]
[Footnote 40: From 70 to 130 A.D.]
[Footnote 41: Calvin, _in Ep. Johan._; _Pauli ad Philip._ &c.]
[Footnote 42: Flor. Rémond, _Hist. de l'Hérésie_, liv. vii. ch. x.]
[Footnote 43: 'Ad mediam usque noctem lucubrare.'—Bezæ _Vita
Calvini_.]
[Footnote 44: 'Mane vero, quæ legisset, in lecto veluti concoquere.'—
Ibid.]
[Footnote 45: 'Et tandem etiam intempestivam mortem attulit.'—Ibid.]
[Footnote 46: 'Doctor potiusquam auditor haberetur.'—Ibid.]
[Footnote 47: 'Quum sæpissime obiret ipsorum doctorum vices.'—Bezæ
_Vita Calvini_.]
[Footnote 48: 'Omnes purioris doctrinæ cupidi ad me, discendi causa,
ventitabant.'—_Præf. in Psalm._]
[Footnote 49: 'Novitium adhuc et tyronem.'—Ibid.]
[Footnote 50: 'Tunc latebras captare.'—Ibid.]
[Footnote 51: 'Ut mihi secessus omnes instar publicæ scholæ essent.'—
_Præf. in Psalm._]
[Footnote 52: 'Catholicæ fidei mysteria ratione investiganda.'—Abelard,
_Introd. ad Theol._ p. 1059.]
[Footnote 53: 'Ignobile otium colere.'—_Præf. in Psalm._]
[Footnote 54: Chrysostomus, _De Sacerdotio_, lib. iv.]
[Footnote 55: Calv. _Præf. in Psalm._ p. 3.]
[Footnote 56: Théod. de Bèze, _Histoire des Eglises Réformées_, p. 6.]