§ 57. Calvin's Work (part 2 of 2)

Bossuet, Möhler, and other Roman Catholic divines saw in this a return to the hierarchy, with Calvin as its pope. He has sometimes been compared to Hildebrand; and Kampschulte remarks that the dominion of the spiritual sovereignty was more thoroughly carried out in Geneva than by the Gregories and Innocenses in the Middle Ages. But Calvin's theocracy differed essentially from the Roman Catholic by its popular (though by no means democratic) basis: it was not priestcraft ruling over statecraft, but a self-governing Christian commonwealth. Geneva was an aristocratic republic, ruled by the clergy and the people in orderly representation and friendly co-operation. The highest civil and executive power was lodged in the 'Little Council' of twenty-four syndics, the highest ecclesiastical power in the 'Consistory,' composed (at first) of six pastors and double that number of lay-elders.⁸⁷⁸

RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.

Unfortunately Calvin inherited from the Theodosian Code and the Catholic Church the worst feature of the theocratic system, namely, the principle of appeal to the secular arm for the temporal, and, if necessary, capital punishment of spiritual offenses, as being offenses against the order and peace of society. This principle is inconsistent with liberty of conscience (which Beza called a diabolical dogma), and justifies all manner of persecution, as duty or policy may suggest. With his intense antagonism to the papal tyranny, he might have thrown off this relic of the Middle Ages, if it had not been for his conviction of the perpetual validity of the Mosaic civil code and his theocratic theory. He thought that the burning of innocent people by Romanists was no good reason why Protestants should spare the guilty.

It was the misfortune of Calvin that this false theory, which confounds two distinct spheres and ignores the spiritual nature of Christ's kingdom, was brought to its severest test and explosion under his own eye, and to the perpetual injury of his fair fame. "We mean, of course, the terrible theological tragedy of the Spanish physician Michael Servetus, a restless fanatic, a pantheistic pseudo-reformer, and the most audacious and even blasphemous heretic of the sixteenth century, who attacked the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as tritheistic and atheistic, as the greatest monstrosity, and the source of all corruption in the Church. After being condemned to death, and burned in effigy by the Roman Catholic authorities in France,⁸⁷⁹ he fled to Geneva, was arrested, tried, and executed at the stake, for heresy and blasphemy, by the civil government, with the full consent of Calvin, except that he made an ineffectual plea for a mitigation of the punishment (by a substitution of the sword for the fagot).⁸⁸⁰

Severely as we must condemn the great Reformer, from the standpoint of our modern civilization, for this the saddest mistake of his life, it is evident that even here he acted consistently and conscientiously, and that the blame attaches not to his personal character (for towards sincere and earnest heretics, like Lælius Socinus, he showed marked courtesy and leniency), but to his system, and not to his system alone, but to the inherited system of his age, which had not yet emerged from the traditions of the Romish pseudo-theocracy. The burning of Servetus was fully approved by all the Reformers—Beza, Farel, Bucer, Bullinger, even the mild and gentle Melanchthon.⁸⁸¹ If Romanists condemned Calvin, they did it from hatred of the man, and condemned him for following their own example even in this particular case. The public opinion of Christendom at that time and down to the eighteenth century justified the right and duty of civil government not only to protect but to support orthodoxy, and to punish heresy by imprisonment, exile, and death; and this right was exercised, with more or less severity, in all countries of Europe, and even in Puritan New England during the colonial period. Protestants differed from Romanists only in their definition of heresy, and by greater moderation in its punishment. Protestants complained of being innocently persecuted in France, Spain, Holland, and under the bloody Mary in England; and Catholics raised the same complaint against the systematic cruelty of the penal code of Queen Elizabeth, which looked to the utter extermination of Romanism and Puritanism alike.

A protest against the principle of persecution, first raised by Justin Martyr and Tertullian in the early Church, but forgotten as soon as the Church ascended the throne of the Cæsars, was revived by heretical Anabaptists and Socinians, who themselves suffered from it, without having a chance to persecute their persecutors, and who thus became martyrs of religious freedom. All honor to them, even to Servetus, for the service they rendered under this view to future generations. Liberty is the sweet fruit of bitter persecution. During the seventeenth century this feeble and isolated protest was considerably strengthened by Arminians, Baptists, and Quakers for the same reason; and during the eighteenth century Christian liberality and philanthropy on the one hand, and religious indifferentism and infidelity on the other, made such progress that the doctrinal foundations of persecution were gradually undermined, and toleration (as it was first patronizingly and condescendingly called, and is still called in despotic countries) became the professed policy of civilized governments. But this is not enough: all Christian governments should legally recognize and protect liberty of conscience, as an inherent and inalienable right of every immortal soul; and this requires for its full realization a peaceful separation of Church and State, or an equality of all denominations before the law.

In view of this radical revolution of public opinion on the subject of persecution, it becomes a practical question whether those sections of the Protestant confessions of faith which treat of the relation of Church and State should not be reconstructed and adapted to the principle of religious freedom, all the more since the Papal Syllabus has consistently condemned it, as being one of the errors of modern times. Such a change, at all events, is necessary in the United States, and has actually been made in the American revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and of the Westminster Confession.

The principle of religious liberty does not necessarily, as was formerly supposed, imply indifference to truth or a weakening of intensity of conviction. It follows legitimately from a sharper discrimination between the secular and spiritual sphere, between the Old and the New Testaments, between the law of Moses and the gospel of Christ, and from the spirit and example of Him who said, 'My kingdom is not of this world,' and who commanded the carnal-minded Peter to 'put up his sword into the sheath.' God alone is Lord of the conscience, and allows no one with impunity to interfere with his sovereign right. Religion flourishes best in the atmosphere of freedom, and need not fear error as long as truth is left free to combat it.

It is nevertheless true that Calvinism, by developing the power of self-government and a manly spirit of independence which fears no man, though seated on a throne, because it fears God, the only sovereign, has been one of the chief agencies in bringing about this progress, and that civil and religious liberty triumphed first and most completely in Calvinistic countries. 'Calvin,' says Guizot, 'is undoubtedly one of those who did most towards the establishment of religious liberty.'