Andrew Martin Fairbairn

“ Theodore Beza was head of College and Academy, or school and university, together; and Calvin himself was a professor of theology. The success of the College was great; the success of the Academy was greater. Men came from all quarters-English, Italians, Spanish, Germans, Russians, ministers, jurists, old men, young men, all with the passion to learn in their blood-to jostle each other among the thousand hearers who met to listen to the great Reformer. But France was the main feeder of the Academy ”

“ The sects that rose within the Reformed Church, such as the Socinian and the Remonstrant, justified their schism as a protest against views which they described as equally dishonouring to God and belittling to man. But though Calvin's theology occasioned the hottest and bitterest controversies known to Christian history, yet it is here that his mind is least original and his ideas are most clearly derivative. Without Augustine we should never have had Calvinism, which is but the principles of the anti-Pelagian treatises developed, systematised, and applied. ”

“ The heretic may be a man of irreproachable character; but if heresy be treason against the law, a character without reproach may aggravate rather than extenuate the crime. The man of imperfect morals may be too feeble of will to differ in opinion from the constituted authority, and his intellectual conformity may save him from the sentence which his moral weakness deserves. And time alone was needed to make it obvious how imperfectly Geneva could attain either unity of faith or purity of life by turning her Church into a city governed by positive law. ”

“ In any case the figures witness to the fierceness of the fires that scorched the Reformed Church in France, and explain if they do not justify "its passion of religious hate," while they drew to it the pity and awakened for it the admiration of all its sister and daughter communities. To define policy and shape character in their own and other lands, for their own and later ages, has ever been the prerogative of the persecuted. And this prerogative the Huguenot has exercised as a splendid revenge. He had no opportunity of becoming a loyal citizen; the State would not allow him. ”

“ Erasmus is in Calvin's eyes the ornament of letters, though his large edition of Seneca is not all it ought to have been; but even Erasmus could not at twenty-three have produced a work so finished in its scholarship, so real in its learning, or so wide in its outlook.
What gives the book significance is the nature that shines through it; the humanist is a man with a passion for conduct, moral, veracious, strenuous, who has loved labour and bestowed it without grudging on the classical writer with whom he has most affinity. ”

“ Moreover, by the easy acquisition of the wealth which lower races had accumulated, there was begotten in the Latin peoples so fierce and intolerant an avarice that their highest ambitions appeared ignoble, in contrast with the magnanimity and the enterprise of the Teutonic nations that became Protestant.
And just as the history of man's past lengthened and the earth around him broadened and with it his horizon, so the nature beneath him and the heavens above began by telling him their secrets to throw over him their spell. ”

“ The Consistory may be described as Calvin's method for moralising through the Church the life of man and the State to which he belonged. He may in the manner of the jurist have imagined that regulation by positive law was the most efficient means of governing conduct; but if he legislated as a jurist, he thought and purposed as a Reformer. It is here, where injustice is easiest, that we ought to be most scrupulously just. Calvin was resolved, so far as he had power, to make the Church what it had not been but what it ought to be, an institution organised for the creation of a moral mankind. ”

“ A constitution has a way of working in a fashion either better or worse than, considered à priori, would have seemed possible; and this because the people are ever a greater factor of harmony or disorder than the laws they live under. Hence, so long as Geneva was inspired by one spirit, the anomalies of the constitution did not breed discontent; but, when new energies and new ambitions awoke, these anomalies became fruitful of disaster to the State. So long as the Bishop and the people had common aims and interests, loyalty to both was easy ”

“ French Protestantism was more a lay than a clerical revolt; the men who led and who formed it were without the mental habits or the associations of the priest. At first indeed it was termed, just as if it had been imported from Germany, "the Lutheran heresy"; but the most notable of the early French martyrs, Louis de Berquin, was a pupil of Erasmus rather than of Luther. The men who made the psalms which the French Protestants loved to sing, were not of the priestly order, while their two most illustrious teachers were both jurists and scholars. ”

“ Hence, men who came to be known as "libertines," though they were both patriotic and moral and only craved freedom, rose and said, "This is an intolerable tyranny; we will not allow any man to be lord over our consciences." And about the same time Calvin's orthodoxy was challenged. Two Anabaptists arrived and demanded liberty to prophesy; and Peter Caroli charged him with heresy as to the Trinity. He would not use the Athanasian Creed; and he defended himself by reasons that the scholar who knows its history will respect. ”

“ Rome did not indeed understand at once what had happened; but she understood enough to see how Luther and the communities he had founded could best be dealt with. An ancient Church which has governed man for centuries, instructed him, organised and administered his worship, consecrated him from his birth and comforted him in his death, has always an enormous reserve of energy. Man is a being with an infinite capacity for reverence ”

“ Out of Luther's Reformation came the Church which bears his name; out of Zwingli's the Church which is specially termed the Reformed. This Church was born in Switzerland, but named in France; and the name signified that while it was a Church Protestant and Evangelical like the Lutheran, it was yet ancient and continuous like the Roman, able to change its form or accidents without losing its essence. Being Swiss by birth it was republican in polity and democratic in spirit, a Church freely chosen by a free people and capable of living amid free institutions. ”

“ The humblest pastor had the right, which was laid upon him as a duty, to criticise the bearing or the action of the most eminent; and responsibility was so personal and yet so collective, at once so concentrated and so distributed, that while it belonged to all, each individual was made to feel as if he alone bore it. Thus in Geneva the ministers formed the Venerable Company, correspondent to the Smaller Council, which was, as it were, the cabinet or executive of the Greater; and every week it met in Congregation, as it was called, to study the Scriptures, discuss doctrine, and review conduct. ”

“ With the new knowledge of nature came new hopes which looked more to the energies that were creating the future than to the authorities that had fashioned the past. Faith in man as man, and not simply as King or noble, as Pope or priest, was reborn ”

“ Hence there emerged a twofold difference between the Reformations accomplished by Luther and by Zwingli: one personal, which mainly affected the faith or creed of the Church, another social or civil, which mainly affected its polity. Luther, a schoolman while a Reformer, created out of his learning and experience a faith suited to his personal needs; but Zwingli, a Reformer because a humanist, came to religion through the literature which embodied the mind of Christ and the Church of the Apostles. ”

“ One young woman who sang profane songs was banished, and another who sang them to psalm-tunes was scourged. Heresy became as much an offence as immorality. If a creed or confession becomes a law of the State as well as of the Church, to speak or agitate against it becomes treason. In other words, if opinion is established by law, heresy is turned into crime. And this Geneva soon discovered. ”

“ It drove men out of France without expelling their love of France; they only loved her the more that she had made them fugitives for conscience' sake. Men like John Calvin and Theodore Beza did not cease to be sons of France though they became citizens of Geneva; and they used their foreign citizenship to serve their mother land more effectually than they could have done in any of her own cities. The Protestants failed in France, yet it is doubtful whether without their failure there the Reformed Church could have prospered. ”

“ Liberty is said to consist in three things: freedom from the law as a means of acceptance with God, the spontaneous obedience of the justified to the Divine will, and freedom either to observe or neglect those external things which are in themselves indifferent. ”

“ A sovereign may ravage like a wild beast, but his reign will be robbery and oppression, and the robber is ever the enemy of man. Cruelty makes a king execrable; and he will be loved only as he imitates the gentleness of God. ”

“ Cicero and even Juvenal teach us that it is a vice not to be able to weep. And the doctrine becomes in Calvin's hands social; man pitiful to men will be sensible of their rights and his own duties. Conscience is necessary for us, but his good name is necessary to our neighbour; and we must not so follow our conscience as to injure his good name. We ought so to follow nature that others may see the reason in the nature that we follow. ”

“ It has been a subject of perhaps equal reproach among his enemies and praise by his friends that, as Beza says, Calvin " in doctrine made scarcely any change." For a young man at twenty-six to reach his final conclusions in the realms of thought and belief, especially after a radical revolution of mind, would be matter of congratulation for his enemies rather than for his admirers. But the judgment rests on a double mistake, biographical and historical. As a matter of fact, few men may have changed less; but few also have developed more. ”

“ Infallibility is not the only system that makes heresy culpable and the heretic guilty. If the Church will be a State, and enforce its laws, which must affect both conduct and belief, by the only method a State can follow, then it must bear the reproach of being more cruel, and therefore more unjust, than any purely civil power. ”

“ The conscience made the intellect constructive, the intellect made the conscience imperious-at once individual, architectonic, and collective. In Calvin the historical sense of the humanist, and the spiritual passion of the Reformer, are united; he knows the sacred literature which his reason has analysed, while his imagination has seen the Apostolic Church as an ideal which his conscience feels bound to realise. ”

“ Calvin soon found that the Reformed faith could live in a democratic city only by an enlightened pulpit speaking to enlightened citizens, and that an educated ministry was helpless without an educated people. His method for creating both entitles him to rank among the foremost makers of modern education. As a humanist he believed in the classical languages and literatures-there is a tradition which says that he read through Cicero once a year-and so "he built his system on the solid rock of Graeco-Roman antiquity." Yet he did not neglect religion ”

“ The Ordinances may indeed be termed a method for making and guiding a Reformed ministry, a clergy that, without any priestly character, should yet be more efficient than the ancient priesthood. Hence where the Roman placed the Church, Calvin set the Deity, and made a man's right to enter the ministerial office depend on his vocation by God. But this belief in a Divine choice and call was to be tested by a threefold process, Examination, Election, Institution or Introduction. ”

“ No man ever clung with more tender intensity to the customs and beliefs that could be saved from the wreckage of the past. But he did his work as a Reformer the more thoroughly because he did it from nature rather than from choice. It is doubtful if in the whole of history any man ever showed more of the insight that changes audacity into courage. By the publication of his Theses he proclaimed a doctrine of grace that broke up the system which Europe had for centuries believed and obeyed. ”

“ Erasmus has compelled him to compare the ideal of Christ with the Church of his own day; and Luther has given him a notion of Grace which has convinced his reason and taken possession of his imagination. He has thus ceased to be a humanist and a Papist, but has not yet become a Reformer. And a Reformer was precisely what his conscience, his country, and his reason compelled him to become. Francis was flagrantly immoral, but a fanatic in religion; and mercy was not a virtue congenial to either Church or State. Calvin had seen the Protestants from within ”

“ The Council legislated, disciplined, and excommunicated as if the State were a Church, or, what may be the same thing, as if there were no Church in the State. The extent to which a man could sin and yet remain a citizen was a matter of statutory regulation: no citizen was allowed to keep more than one mistress, and every convicted adulterer was banished. The prostitutes had a quarter where they dwelt, special clothing which they wore, and a " queen " who was responsible for the good order of her community. The clergy were a kind of moral police, responsible for the citizens and to the city ”