§ 56. John Calvin. His Life and Character (part 2 of 2)

My only trust, and Saviour of my heart!

Who so much toil and woe

And pain didst undergo,

For my poor, worthless sake:

We pray thee, from our hearts,

All idle griefs and smarts

And foolish cares to take.

'Thou art the true and perfect gentleness,

No harshness hast thou, and no bitterness:

Make us to taste and prove,

Make us adore and love,

The sweet grace found in thee;

With longing to abide

Ever at thy dear side,

In thy sweet unity.

'Poor, banished exiles, wretched sons of Eve,

Full of all sorrows, unto thee we grieve;

To thee we bring our sighs,

Our groanings, and our cries:

Thy pity, Lord, we crave;

We take the sinner's place,

And pray thee, of thy grace,

To pardon and to save.'

TRIBUTES TO CALVIN.

I add some estimates of Calvin's character, which represent very different stand-points.⁸³⁹

Beza, who knew Calvin best and watched at his death-bed, concludes his biography with these words:

'Having been an observer of Calvin's life for sixteen years, I may with perfect right testify that we have in this man a most beautiful example of a truly Christian life and death, which it is easy to calumniate but difficult to imitate.'⁸⁴⁰

Bungener, a pastor of the national Church of Geneva, and author of several historical works, says:⁸⁴¹

'Let us not give him praise which he would not have accepted. God alone creates; a man is great only because God thinks fit to accomplish great things by his instrumentality. Never did any great man understand this better than Calvin. It cost him no effort to refer all the glory to God; nothing indicates that he was ever tempted to appropriate to himself the smallest portion of it. Luther, in many a passage, complacently dwells on the thought that a petty monk, as he says, has so well made the Pope to tremble, and so well stirred the whole world. Calvin will never say any such thing; he never even seems to say it, even in the deepest recesses of his heart: every where you perceive the man, who applies to all things—to the smallest as to the greatest—the idea that it is God who does all and is all. Read again, from this point of view, the very pages in which he appeared to you the haughtiest and most despotic, and see if, even there, he is any thing other than the workman referring all, and in all sincerity, to his Master. . . . But the man, in spite of all his faults, has not the less remained one of the fairest types of faith, of earnest piety, of devotedness, and of courage. Amid modern laxity, there is no character of whom the contemplation is more instructive; for there is no man of whom it has been said with greater justice, in the words of an apostle, "he endured as seeing him who is invisible."'

Jules Michelet, the French historian, remarks:⁸⁴²

'Among the martyrs, with whom Calvin constantly conversed in spirit, he became a martyr himself; he felt and lived like a man before whom the whole earth disappears, and who tunes his last Psalm, his whole eye fixed upon the eye of God, because he knows that on the following morning he may have to ascend the stake.'

Ernest Renan, once educated for the Romish priesthood, then a skeptic, with all his abhorrence of Calvin's creed, pays the following striking tribute to his character:⁸⁴³

Calvin was one of those absolute men, cast complete in one mould, who is taken in wholly at a single glance: one letter, one action suffices for a judgment of him. There were no folds in that inflexible soul, which never knew doubt or hesitation. . . . Careless of wealth, of titles, of honors, indifferent to pomp, modest in his life, apparently humble, sacrificing every thing to the desire of making others like himself, I hardly know of a man, save Ignatius Loyola, who could match him in these terrible transports. . . . It is surprising that a man who appears to us in his life and writings so unsympathetic should have been the centre of an immense movement in his generation, and that this harsh and severe tone should have exerted so great an influence on the minds of his contemporaries. How was it, for example, that one of the most distinguished women of her time, Renée of France, in her court at Ferrara, surrounded by the flower of European wits, was captivated by that stern master, and by him drawn into a course that must have been so thickly strewn with thorns? This kind of austere seduction is exercised by those only who work with real conviction. Lacking that vivid, deep, sympathetic ardor which was one of the secrets of Luther's success, lacking the charm, the perilous, languishing tenderness of Francis of Sales, Calvin succeeded, in an age and in a country which called for a reaction towards Christianity, simply because he was the most christian man of his generation.'

Guizot, a very competent judge of historical and moral greatness, thus concludes his biography:⁸⁴⁴

'Calvin is great by reason of his marvelous powers, his lasting labors, and the moral height and purity of his character. . . . Earnest in faith, pure in motive, austere in his life, and mighty in his works, Calvin is one of those who deserve their great fame. Three centuries separate us from him, but it is impossible to examine his character and history without feeling, if not affection and sympathy, at least profound respect and admiration for one of the great Reformers of Europe and of the great Christians of France.'

Prof. Kahnis, of Leipzig, whose personal and theological sympathies are with Luther, nevertheless asserts the moral superiority of Calvin above the other Reformers:⁸⁴⁵

'The fear of God was the soul of his piety, the rock-like certainty of his election before the foundation of the world was his power, and the doing of the will of God his single aim, which he pursued with trembling and fear. . . . No other Reformer has so well demonstrated the truth of Christ's word that, in the kingdom of God, dominion is service. No other had such an energy of self-sacrifice, such an irrefragable conscientiousness in the greatest as well as the smallest things, such a disciplined power. This man, whose dying body was only held together by the will flaming from his eyes, had a majesty of character which commanded the veneration of his contemporaries.'

Prof. Dorner, of Berlin, the first among the theologians of the age, distinguished by profound learning, penetrating thought, rare catholicity of spirit, and nice sense of justice and discrimination, says:

'Calvin was equally great in intellect and character, lovely in social life, full of tender sympathy and faithfulness to friends, yielding and forgiving towards personal offenses, but inexorably severe when he saw the honor of God obstinately and malignantly attacked. He combined French fire and practical good sense with German depth and soberness. He moved as freely in the world of ideas as in the business of Church government. He was an architectonic genius in science and practical life, always with an eye to the holiness and majesty of God.'⁸⁴⁶

Prof. Gr. T. Fisher, of Yale College, New Haven, gives the following fair and impartial estimate of Calvin:⁸⁴⁷

'When we look at his extraordinary intellect, at his culture—which opponents, like Bossuet, have been forced to commend—at the invincible energy which made him endure with more than stoical fortitude infirmities of body under which most men would have sank, and to perform, in the midst of them, an incredible amount of mental labor; when we see him, a scholar naturally fond of seclusion, physically timid, and recoiling from notoriety and strife, abjuring the career that was most to his taste, and plunging, with a single-hearted, disinterested zeal and an indomitable will, into a hard, protracted contest; and when we follow his steps, and see what things he effected, we can not deny him the attributes of greatness. . . . His last days were of a piece with his life. His whole course has been compared by Vinet to the growth of one rind of a tree from another, or to a chain of logical sequences, He was endued with a marvelous power of understanding, although the imagination and sentiments were less roundly developed. His systematic spirit fitted him to be the founder of an enduring school of thought. In this characteristic he may be compared with Aquinas. He has been appropriately styled the Aristotle of the Reformation. He was a perfectly honest man. He subjected his will to the eternal rule of right, as far as he could discover it. His motives were pure. He felt that God was near him, and sacrificed every thing to obey the direction of Providence. The fear of God ruled in his soul; not a slavish fear, but a principle such as animated the prophets of the Old Covenant. The combination of his qualities was such that he could not fail to attract profound admiration and reverence from one class of minds, and excite intense antipathy in another. There is no one of the Reformers who is spoken of, at this late day, with so much personal feeling, either of regard or aversion. But whoever studies his life and writings, especially the few passages in which he lets us into his confidence and appears to invite our sympathy, will acquire a growing sense of his intellectual and moral greatness, and a tender consideration for his errors.'