SEBASTIAN CASTELLIO: A FORGOTTEN PROPHET[1]
Reformation history has been far too closely confined to a few main
highways of thought, and few persons therefore realize how rich in
ideas and how complex in typical religious conceptions this spiritual
upheaval really was. The types that prevailed and won their way to
wide favour have naturally compelled attention and are adequately
known. There were, however, very serious and impressive attempts made
to give the Reformation a totally different course from the one it
finally took in history, and these attempts, defeated by the sweep of
the main current, became submerged, and their dedicated and heroic
leaders became forgotten. Many of these spiritual ventures which for
the moment failed and were submerged are in striking parallelism with
currents of thought to-day, and our generation can perhaps appreciate
at their real worth these solitary souls who were destined to see their
cause defeated, to hear their names defamed, and to live in jeopardy
among the very people whom they most longed to help.
Sebastian Castellio is one of these submerged venturers. While he
lived he was so absolutely absorbed in the battle for truth that he
took no pains at all to acquaint posterity with the details of his
life, or to make his name quick and powerful in the ears of men. When
he died {89} and laid down the weapons of his spiritual warfare his
pious opponents thanked God for the relief and did what they could to
consign him to oblivion. But after the long and silent flow of years
the world has come up to his position and can appreciate a spirit who
was too far in advance of the line of march to be comprehended in his
lifetime. He was born in the little French village of St. Martin du
Fresne--not many miles west of Lake Geneva in the year 1515. The home
was pinched with poverty, but somebody in the home or in the village
discovered that little Bastian was endowed with unusual gifts and must
be given the chance to realize the life which his youth forecast; and
that ancient family sacrifice, which has glorified so many homes of
poverty, was made here in St. Martin, and the boy, possessed with his
eager passion for knowledge, was started on his course in the College
de la Trinite in Lyons. He soon found himself bursting into a new
world, the world of classic antiquity, which the Humanists were
restoring to the youth of that period, and he experienced that
emancipating leap of soul and thrill of joy which such a world of
beauty can produce upon a lofty spirit that sees and appreciates it.
Some time during the Lyons period he came also under a still greater
and more emancipating influence, the divine and simple Christ of the
Gospels, whom the most serious of the Humanists had rediscovered, and
to whom Castellio now dedicated the central loyalty of his soul.
At twenty-five years of age, now a splendid classical scholar, radiant
with faith and hope and the vision of a new age for humanity which the
recovered gospel was to bring in, Castellio went to Strasbourg to share
the task of the Reformers and to put his life into the new movement.
Calvin, then living in Strasbourg, received the brilliant recruit with
joy and took him into his own home. When the great Reformer returned
to Geneva in 1541 to take up the mighty task of his life he summoned
Castellio to help him, and made him Principal of the College of Geneva,
which Calvin planned to make one of the {90} foremost seats of Greek
learning and one of the most illuminating centres for the study of the
Scriptures. The young scholar's career seemed assured. He had the
friendship of Calvin, he was head of an important institution of
learning, the opportunity for creative literary work was opening before
him, and he was aspiring soon to fulfil the clearest call of his
life--to become a minister of the new gospel. His first contribution
to religious literature was his volume of "Sacred Dialogues," a series
of vivid scenes out of the Old and New Testaments, told in dialogue
fashion, both in Latin and French.[2] They were to serve a double
purpose: first, to teach French boys to read Latin, and secondly, to
form in them a love for the great characters of the Bible and an
appreciation of its lofty message of life. The stories were really
good stories, simple enough for children, and yet freighted with a
depth of meaning which made them suitable for mature minds. Their
success was extraordinary, and their fine quality was almost
universally recognized. They went through twenty-eight editions in
their author's lifetime, and they were translated into many
languages.[3] His bent toward a religion of a deeply ethical and
spiritual type already appears in this early work, and here he
announces a principle that was to rule his later life and was to cost
him much suffering: "The friend of Truth obeys not the multitude _but
the Truth_."
At the very time this book was appearing, an opportunity offered for
testing the mettle of his courage. One of those ever-recurrent plagues
that harassed former ages, before microbes were discovered, fell upon
Geneva. The minister, who had volunteered to give spiritual comfort to
those who were suffering with the plague in the hospital, was stricken
with the dread disease, and a new volunteer was asked for. The records
of the city show that Castellio, though not yet ordained, and under no
obligation to take such risk, offered himself for the {91} hazardous
service when the ministers of the city declined it. The ordination
through human hands was, however, never to come to him, and a harder
test of courage than the plague was before him. In the course of his
studies he found himself compelled to take the position that the "Song
of Solomon" was an ancient love poem, and that the traditional
interpretation of it as a revelation of the true relation between
Christ and the Church was a strained and unnatural interpretation. He
also felt that as a scholar he could not with intellectual honesty
agree with the statement in the Catechism that "Christ descended into
Hell." Calvin challenged both these positions of Castellio, but his
opposition to him was clearly far deeper than a difference of opinion
on these two points. Calvin instinctively felt that the bold and
independent spirit of this young scholar, his qualities of leadership,
and his literary genius marked him out as a man who could not long be
an easy-minded and supple subordinate. A letter which Calvin wrote at
this time to his friend Viret shows where the real tension lay.
"Castellio has got it into his head," he writes, "that I want to rule!"
The great Reformer may not have been conscious yet of such a purpose,
but there can be no question that Castellio read the signs correctly,
and he was to be the first, as Buisson has said, to discover that "to
resist Calvin was in the mind of the latter, to resist the Holy
Ghost."[4] Calvin successfully opposed his ordination, and made it
impossible for him to continue in Geneva his work as an honest scholar.
To remain meant that he must surrender his right of independent
judgment, he must cease to follow the line of emancipated scholarship,
he must adjust his conscience to fit the ideas that were coming to be
counted orthodox in the circle of the Reformed faith. _That_ surrender
he could no more make than Luther could surrender to the demands of his
opponents at Worms. He quietly closed up his work in the College of
Geneva and went into voluntary exile, to seek a sphere of life where he
might think and speak as {92} he saw the truth and where he could keep
his conscience a pure virgin.
He settled in Basle, where Erasmus had found a refuge, and where, two
years before, the exiled and hunted Sebastian Franck, the spiritual
forerunner of Castellio, had died in peace. For ten years (1545-1555)
he lived with his large family in pitiable poverty. He read proof for
the Humanist printer Oporin, he fished with a boat-hook for drift-wood
along the shores of the Rhine,--"rude labour no doubt," he says, "but
honest, and I do not blush for having done it,"--and he did whatever
honest work he could find that would help keep body and soul together.
Through all these years, every moment of the day that could be saved
from bread-winning toil, and much of his night-time, went into the
herculean task to which he had dedicated himself--the complete
translation of the Bible from its original languages into both Latin
and French.[5] Being himself one of the common people he always had
the interests and needs of the common people in view, and he put the
Bible into current sixteenth-century speech. His French translation
has the marked characteristics of the Renaissance period. He makes
patriarchs, prophets, and the persons of the New Testament live again
in his vivid word-pictures, as the great contemporary painters were
making them live on their canvases. But that which gave his
translation its great human merit and popular interest was a serious
defect in the eyes of the theologians. It was vivid, full of the
native Oriental colour, true in the main to the original, and strong in
its appeal to religious imagination, but painfully weak in its support
of the dogmas and doctrines around which the theological battles of the
Reformation were centring. Still less were the theologians pleased
with the Preface of his Latin Bible, dedicated to the boy-king of
England, Edward VI. Here he boldly insists that the Reformation, {93}
wherever it spreads, shall champion the principle of _free conscience_,
and shall wage its battles with spiritual weapons alone. The only
enemies of our faith, he says, are vices, and vices can be conquered
only by virtues. The Christ who said if they strike you on one cheek
turn the other, has called us to the spiritual task of instructing men
in the truth, and that work can never be put into the hands of an
executioner! "I address you, O king," he concludes, "not as a prophet
sent from God, but as a man of the people who abhors quarrels and
hatred, and who wishes to see religion spread by love rather than by
fierce controversy, by purity of heart rather than by external methods.
. . . Read these sacred writings with a pious and religious heart, and
prepare yourself to reign as a mortal man who must give an account to
immortal God. I desire that you may have the meekness of Moses, the
piety of David, and the wisdom of Solomon."[6]
Two years after this appeal to the new Protestantism to make the great
venture of spreading its truth by love and persuasion, there came from
Geneva the decisive answer in the burning of Servetus, followed by the
famous _Defence_ before the world, written mainly by Calvin, of the
course that had been taken. One month later, a brief Latin work
appeared from the press with the title, _De haereticis, an sint
persequendi, etc._ (Magdeburgi, 1554), followed in very short time by a
French edition (Rouen, 1554). The body of the work contained
impressive passages in favour of toleration from Church Fathers, from
Luther, Erasmus, Sebastian Franck, and others, concluding with a
passage from "Basil Montfort," a name which thinly veils Bastian
Castellio himself. The Preface was addressed to the Duke of
Wurtemberg, bore the name of "Martinus Bellius," and was beyond doubt
written by Castellio, who inspired and directed the entire work, in
which he was assisted by a very small group of refugees in Basle of
similar ideas on this subject to his {94} own. This Preface is one of
the mother documents on freedom of conscience, from which in time came
a large offspring, and it is, furthermore, an interesting
interpretation of a type of Christianity then somewhat new in the
world. Its simplicity, its human appeal, its restrained emotional
power, its prophetic tone, its sincerity and depth of earnestness mark
it as a distinct work of genius, almost in the class with Pascal's
_Provincial Letters_.
"If thou, illustrious Prince, had informed thy subjects that thou wert
coming to visit them at an unnamed time and had requested them to be
prepared in white garments to meet thee on thy coming; what wouldst
thou do, if, on arrival, thou shouldst find that instead of robing
themselves in white they had occupied themselves in violent debate
about thy person--some insisting that thou wert in France, others that
thou wert in Spain; some declaring that thou would come on horseback,
others that thou would come by chariot; some holding that thou would
come with great pomp, others that thou would come without train or
following? And what especially wouldst thou say if they debated not
only with words but with blows of fist and strokes of sword, and if
some succeeded in killing and destroying others who differed from them?
'He will come on horseback.' 'No, he won't; he will come by chariot.'
'You lie.' 'No, I do not; _you_ are the liar.' 'Take _that_'--a blow
with the fist. 'You take _that_'--a sword-thrust through the body. O
Prince, what would you think of such citizens? Christ asked us to put
on the white robes of a pure and holy life, but what occupies our
thought? We dispute not only of the way to Christ, but of His relation
to God the Father, of the Trinity, of predestination, of free will, of
the nature of God, of angels, of the condition of the soul after
death,--of a multitude of matters that are not essential for salvation,
and _matters, in fact, which never can be known until our hearts are
pure, for they are things which must be spiritually perceived_."
With a striking boldness, but with beautiful simplicity of spirit, he
describes "an honest follower of Christ"--and {95} it is himself whom
he is describing--"who believes in God the Father and in His Son Jesus
Christ, and who wants to do His will, but cannot see that will just as
others about him see it, in matters of intellectual formulation and in
matters of external practice." "I cannot," he adds, "do violence to my
conscience for fear of disobeying Christ. I must be saved or lost by
my own personal faith, not by that of another. I ask you, whether
Christ, who forgave those who went astray, and commanded His followers
to forgive until seventy times seven, Christ who is the final Judge of
us all, if He were here, would command a person like that to be killed!
. . . O Christ, Creator and King of the world," he cries out, "dost
Thou see and approve these things? Hast Thou become a totally
different person from what Thou wert? When Thou wert on earth, nothing
could be more gentle and kind, more ready to suffer injuries. Thou
wert like a sheep dumb before the shearers. Beaten, spit upon, mocked,
crowned with thorns, crucified between thieves, Thou didst pray for
those who injured Thee. Hast Thou changed to this? Art Thou now so
cruel and contrary to Thyself? Dost Thou command that those who do not
understand Thy ordinances and commandments as those over us require,
should be drowned, or drawn and quartered, and burned at the stake!"
The Christian world holds this view now. It is a part of the necessary
air we breathe. But at this crisis in modern history it was
unforgivably _new_.[7] One man's soul had the vision, one man's entire
moral fibre throbbed with passion for it, and his rich intellectual
nature pleaded for it as the only course of reason: "To burn a man is
not to defend a doctrine, it is to _burn a man_!" But it was a voice
crying in a wilderness, and from henceforth Castellio was a marked and
dangerous man in the eyes of all who were opposed to "Bellianism "--as
the principle of toleration was nicknamed in honour of Martinus
Bellius--and that included almost all the world. But to the end of his
life, and in almost every one of his multitudinous {96} tracts he
continued to announce the principle of religious liberty, and to work
for a type of Christianity which depended for its conquering power
solely on its inherent truth and on its moral dynamic.
Calvin, who recognized the hand of Castellio in this powerful defence
of freedom of thought, called his opponent "a monster full of poison
and madness," and proceeded to demolish him in a Reply. In his _Contra
libellum Calvini_, which is an answer to this Reply, Castellio declares
that Calvin's act in burning Servetus was a bloody act, and that now
his book is a direct menace to honest, pious people. "I," he adds,
"who have a horror of blood, propose to examine the book. I do not
defend Servetus. I have never read his books. Calvin burned them
together with their author. I do not want to burn Calvin or to burn
his book. I am only going to _answer_ it." He notes that Calvin
complains of "novelties and innovations," a strange complaint, he
thinks, from a man who "has introduced more innovations in ten years
than the entire Church had introduced in six centuries!" All the
sects, he reminds the great Reformer, claim to be founded on the Word
of God. They all believe that their religion is true. Calvin says
that his is _the only true one_. Each of the others says that his is
the only true one. Calvin says that they are wrong. He makes himself
(by what right I do not know) the judge and sovereign arbiter. He
claims that he has on his side the sure evidence of the Word of God.
Then why does he write so many books to prove what is evident? The
truth is surely not evident to those who die denying that it is truth!
Calvin asks how doctrine is to be guarded if heretics are not to be
punished. "Doctrine," cries Castellio, "Christ's doctrine means loving
one's enemies, returning good for evil, having a pure heart and a
hunger and thirst for righteousness. _You_ may return to Moses if you
will, but for us others Christ has come."
Love, he constantly insists, is the supreme badge of any true
Christianity, and the traits of the beatitudes in a person's life are a
surer evidence that he belongs in {97} Christ's family, than is the
fact that he holds current opinions on obscure questions of belief.
"Before God," he writes in his _Defensio_, a work of the year 1562, to
those who wish to hunt him off the face of the earth, "and from the
bottom of my heart, I call you to the spirit of love." "By the bowels
of Christ, I ask and implore you to leave me in peace, to stop
persecuting me. Let me have the liberty of my faith as you have of
yours. At the heart of religion I am one with you. It is in reality
the same religion; only on certain points of interpretation I see
differently from you. But however we differ in opinion, why cannot we
love one another?"
He was, however, never to have the peace for which he pleaded, and he
was never to experience the love and brotherly kindness for which he
longed. Whole sheaves of fiery arrows were shot at him, and in tract
after tract he had to see himself called "monster," "wretch," "dog,"
"pest," "fog-bank," and finally to see himself proclaimed to the world
as a petty thief "who was supporting himself by stealing wood from his
neighbours"! With beautiful dignity Castellio tells the story of how
he fished for public drift-wood on the shores of the Rhine, and how he
kept his family alive by honest toil, when he was living in pitiable
poverty, "to which," he says to Calvin, "everybody knows that thy
attacks had brought me." "I cannot conceive how thou of all persons,
thou who knowest me, can have believed a tale of theft about me, and in
any case have told it to others."[9]
Compelled, as he was, to see the Reformation take what seemed to him
the false course--the course of defending itself by persecution, of
buttressing itself on election, of elevating, through a new
scholasticism, doctrine above life,--he turned more and more, as time
went on, toward interior religion, the cultivation of an inner
sanctuary, the deepening of the mystical roots of his life, and the
perfection of a religion of inner and spiritual life. "I have never
taken holy things lightly," {98} he once wrote, and in the later years
of what proved to be his brief as well as stormy life, he drew nearer
to Christ as the Life of his life, and laboured with deepening passion
to practise and present a religion of veracity, of reality and of
transforming power. "It is certain," he says in his _Contra libellum
Calvini_, "that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and there is
furthermore no doubt about the worth of love--love to God and love to
man. There is no doubt, again, of the worth of forgiveness, of
patience, of pity, of kindness, and of obedience to duty. Why leave
these sure things and quarrel over inscrutable mysteries?"
This point that the things which are essential to salvation are clear
and luminous is a frequently occurring one in his writings.
Impenetrable mysteries do not interest him, and he declares with
reiteration that controversies and divisions are occasioned mainly by
the proclamation of dogma on these inscrutable things. In a remarkable
work, which remains still in manuscript--his _De arte dubitandi et
confidendi, sciendi et ignorandi_,--he pleads for a religion that fits
the facts of life and for the use of intelligence even in these lofty
matters of spiritual experience where most astonishing miracles occur.
He returns, in this writing, to his old position that the truths which
concern salvation are clear and appeal powerfully to human reason.
"There are, I know," he says, "persons who insist that we should
believe even against reason. It is, however, the worst of all errors,
and it is laid upon me to fight it. I may not be able to exterminate
the monster, but I hope to give it such a blow that it will know that
it has been hit. Let no one think that he is doing wrong in using his
mental faculties. It is our proper way of arriving at the truth."[9]
Without entering in detail into the bottomless controversy of those
times, let us endeavour to get an adequate view of Castellio's type of
Christianity, and then we shall be able to form an estimate of the man
who in the {99} strong power of his faith stood almost alone as the
great battle of words raged around him.[10]
Those on the other side of the controversy began always from the
opposite end of the spiritual universe to his point of departure.
_They_ were fascinated with the mysteries of the Eternal Will, and used
all the keys of their logic to unlock the mysteries of foreknowledge,
predestination, and grace which has wrought the miracle of salvation
for the elect. Castellio, on the other hand, in true modern fashion,
starts always with the concrete, the near and the known, to work upward
to the nature of the unknown. We must, he says, try to discover the
Divine attributes and the Divine Character by first finding out what
our own deepest nature implies. If God is to speak to us it must be in
terms of our nature. Before undertaking to fathom with the plummet of
logic the unsoundable mystery of foreknowledge, let us see what we can
know through a return to the real nature of man as he is, and
especially to the real nature of the new Adam who is Christ, the Son of
God. Man, as both Scripture and his own inner self testify, is made
_in the image of God_, is dowered with freedom to determine his own
destiny, may go upward into light, or downward into darkness. Man thus
made, when put to trial, _failed_, followed lower instincts instead of
higher, and experienced the awful penalty of sin, namely its cumulative
power, the tendency of sin to beget sin, and to make higher choices
ever more difficult. Christ, however, the new Adam, has _succeeded_.
He has completely revealed the way of obedience, the way in which
spirit conquers flesh. He is the new kind of Person who lives from
above and who exhibits the cumulative power of goodness. His victory,
which was won by His own free choice, inspires all men who see it with
faith and hope in man's spiritual possibilities. Castellio declines to
discuss Christ's metaphysical nature, except in so far as His life has
revealed {100} it to us. He sees in Him the Heart and Character of
God, the certainty of Divine love and forgiveness, and the way of life
for all who desire to be spiritually saved, which means, for him, the
formation of a new inward self, a purified nature, a morally
transformed man, a will which no longer loves or wills sin. "Christ
alone," he says, "can heal the malady of the soul, but He can heal it."
"There is," he says again, "no other way of salvation for any man than
the way of self-denial. He must put off his old man and put on
Christ--however much blood and sweat the struggle may cost." Man, he
insists, is always wrong when he represents God as angry. Christ
showed that God needed no appeasing, but rather that man needed to be
brought back to God by the drawing of Love, and be reconciled to Him.
Faith--which for every prophet of human redemption is the key that
unlocks all doors for the soul--is for Castellio the supreme moral
force by which man turns God's revelations of Himself into spiritual
victories and into personal conquests of character. It is never
something forensic, something magical. It is, as little, mere belief
of historical facts and events. It is, on the contrary, a moral power
that moves mountains of difficulty, works miracles of transformation,
and enables the person who has it to participate in the life of God.
It is a passionate leap ("elan") of the soul of the creature toward the
Creator; it is a way of renewing strength in Him and of becoming a
participator in His divine nature. It is a return of the soul to its
source. It is a _persistent will_, which multiplies one's strength a
hundredfold, makes Pentecost possible again, and enables us to achieve
the goal which the vision of our heart sees. The only obstacle to this
all-conquering faith is selfishness, the only mortal enemy is
self-will.[11]
There have been, Castellio holds, progressive stages in the Divine
education of the race, and in man's apprehension of God. The mark of
advance is always found in the progress from law and letter to spirit,
and from {101} outward practices and ceremonies to inward experience.
Divine revelations can always be taken at different levels. They can
be seen in a literal, pictorial, temporal way, or they can be read
deeper--by those who are purified by faith and love, and made partakers
of the self-giving Life of God--as eternal and spiritual realities.
The written word of God is the garment of the Divine Thought which is
the real Word of God. It takes more than eyes of flesh to see through
the temporal garment to the inner Life and Spirit beneath. Only the
person who has in himself the illumination of the same Spirit that gave
the original revelation can see through the garment of the letter to
the eternal message, the ever-living Word hidden within.[12] In the
Christianity of the full-grown spiritual man, sacraments and everything
external must be used only as pictorial helps and symbolic suggestions
for the furtherance of spiritual life. Within us, as direct offspring
of God, as image of God, there is a Divine Reason, which existed before
books, before rites, before the foundation of the world, and will exist
after books and rites have vanished, and the world has gone to wreck.
It can no more be abolished than God Himself can be. It was by this
that Jesus Christ, the Son of God--called, in fact, Logos of God--lived
and taught us how to live. It was in the Light of this that He
transcended books and rites and declared, without quoting text, "God is
Spirit and thou shalt worship God in spirit and in truth." This Reason
is in all ages the right investigator and interpreter of Truth, even
though time changes outward things and written texts grow corrupt.[13]
As his life was drawing to a close, he sent forth anonymously another
powerful prophet-call for the complete liberation of mind and
conscience. Ten years before the awful deeds of St. Bartholomew's Day,
he issued his little French book with the title _Conseil a la France
desolee_--Counsel {102} to France in her Distress. It is a calm and
penetrating diagnosis of the evils which are destroying the life of
France and working her desolation. It throbs with noble patriotism and
is full of real prophetic insight, though he spoke to deaf ears and
wrote for blind eyes. The woes of France--her torn and distracted
condition--are mainly due to the blind and foolish method of attempting
to force intelligent men to accept a form of religion which in their
hearts they do not believe is true. There can be no united people,
strong and happy, until the blunder of compelling conscience entirely
ceases. He pleads in tenderness and love with both religious parties,
Catholics and Evangelicals, to leave the outgrown legalism of Moses and
go to the Gospels for a religion which leads into truth and freedom.
"O France, France," he cries--as formerly a greater One had said, "O
Jerusalem, Jerusalem"--"my counsel is that thou cease to compel men's
consciences, that thou cease to kill and to persecute, that thou grant
to men who believe in Jesus Christ the privilege of serving God
according to their own innermost faith and not according to some one
else's faith. And you, that are private people, do not be so ready to
follow those who lead you astray and push you to take up arms and kill
your brothers. And Thou, O Lord our Saviour, wilt Thou give to us all
grace to awake and come to our senses before it is forever too late.
I, at least, have now done my duty and spoken my word of truth." St.
Bartholomew's Day was the answer to this searching appeal, and the
land, deaf to the call of its prophet, was to become more "desolate"
still.
Just as the storm of persecution that had been gathering around him for
years was about to burst pitilessly upon him in 1563, he quietly died,
worn out in body, and "passed to where beyond these voices there is
peace." His students in the University of Basle, where, in spite of
the opposition from Geneva, he had been Professor of Greek for ten
years, bore his coffin in honour on their shoulders to his grave, and
his little band of disciples devoted themselves to spreading, in
Holland and wherever {103} they could find soil for it, the precious
seed of his truth, which had in later years a very wide harvest.[14]
He was not a theologian of the Reformation type. He did not think the
thoughts nor speak the dialect of his contemporaries. They need not be
blamed for thanking God at his death nor for seeing in him an
arch-enemy of their work. They were honestly working for one goal, and
he was as honestly living by the light of a far different ideal. The
spiritual discipline of the modern world was to come through their
laborious systems, but he, anticipating the results of the travail and
the slow spiral progress, and seeing in clear vision the triumph of
man's liberated spirit, with exuberant optimism believed that the
religion of the Spirit could be had for the taking--and he stretched
out his hand for it!
"I am," he cried out beneath the bludgeons, "a poor little man, more
than simple, humble and peaceable, with no desire for glory, only
affirming what in my heart I believe; why cannot I live and say my
honest word and have your love?" The time was not ready for him, but
he did his day's work with loyalty, sincerity, and bravery, and seen in
perspective is worthy to be honoured as a hero and a saint.[15]
[1] F. Buisson, _Sebastien Castellion, sa vie et son oeuvre_ (Paris,
1892), 2 vols.; Charles Jarrin, _Deux Oublies_ (Bourg, 1889); Emile
Broussoux, Sebastien Castellion, sa vie, ses oeuvres, et sa theologie
(Strasbourg, 1867); A. Schweizer, _Die protestantischen Centraldogmen_
(Zuerich, 1854), pp. 311-373.
[2] _Dialogi sacri, latino-gallici, ad linguas moresque puerorum
formandos_. Liber primus. Geneve, 1543.
[3] There were at least three English translations--1610, 1715, and
1743.
[4] Buisson, _op. cit._ i. p. 205.
[5] His Latin Bible appeared in 1551 and the French Bible in 1555.
During this period he also brought out a new edition of his "Sacred
Dialogues," an edition of Xenophon, a translation of the Sibylline
Oracles, a Latin poem on Jonah, and a Greek poem on John the Baptist,
the Forerunner.
[6] Calvin, in striking contrast, had written to the same boy-king in
1548: "Under the cover of the Gospel, foolish people would throw
everything into confusion. Others cling to the superstitions of the
Antichrist at Rome. _They all deserve to be repressed by the sword
which is committed to you_."
[7] Beza called it "diabolical doctrine."
[8] He selected as the title of this book the opprobrious word which
Calvin had used in the charge--_Harpago_, _i.e._ "Boat-hook."
[9] This MS. is in the Bibliotheque de l'Eglise des Remontrants in
Rotterdam. I have used only the extracts given from it in Buisson and
Jarrin.
[10] The main lines of Castellio's Christianity can be found in his
_Dialogi quatuor_: (i.) De praedestinatione, (ii.) De electione, (iii.)
De libero arbitrio, (iv.) De fide (Gouda, 1613) and in his _Scripta
selecta_. (1596).
[11] For Faith see _De fide and De arts dub._ ii. 212.
[12] This idea comes out in his Preface to the Bible, in his _Moses
latinus_, and in his manuscript work, _De arte dubitandi_.
[13] _De arte dubitandi_.
[14] Under the nom-de-plume of John Theophilus, Castellio translated
the _Theologia Germanica_ into Latin, and published it with an
Introduction. His translation carried this "golden book" of mystical
religion into very wide circulation, and became a powerful influence,
especially in England, as we shall see, in reproducing a similar type
of religious thought.
The Quaker William Caton, who spent the latter part of his life in
Holland, cites Castellio seven times in his Tract, _The Testimony of a
Cloud of Witnesses, who in their Generation have testified against that
horrible Evil of Forcing of Conscience and Persecution about Matters of
Religion_ (1662), and he seems very familiar with his writings. He
also cites Schwenckfeld and Franck on pp. 37 and 17 respectively.
[15] Castellio's plea for toleration, _Traite des Heretiques a savoir,
si on les doit persecuter_ (Rouen, 1554), has just been reissued in
attractive form in Geneva, edited by Olivet and Choisy.
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