Such was the constitution in theory; and, if we want to see it at work, we have only to turn to the Register of the Consistory, in which we may read how the citizens were punished for peccadilloes. One woman, we find, got into trouble for saying her prayers in Latin, and another for wearing her hair hanging down her back. One man was punished for wearing baggy knickerbockers in the street; a second for offering his snuff-box to a friend during the sermon; a third for talking business to a neighbour as he was coming out of church; a fourth for calling his cow by the Scriptural name Rebecca; a fifth for likening the braying of his donkey to the chanting of a psalm. There was also the case of a workman whose property was confiscated because he did not relieve the indigence of his aged parents; of a child stood in the pillory and publicly whipped for throwing a stone at its mother; of a mother imprisoned for carelessly dropping her baby on the floor; and of a young lady solemnly arraigned on the charge of casting amorous glances at a minister of the Word.

Not everybody, of course, approved of such elaborate interference with liberty. The Friends of Liberty resisted it as long as they could, and their methods of resistance were not passive. They set their dogs at Calvin; they openly ridiculed him; they came drunk to church and brawled. But Calvin was a match for them. Pierre Amaulx, who said of him that he ‘thought as much of himself as if he were a Bishop,’ was compelled to apologize, bareheaded, in public; and all those who tried, as Calvin put it, to ‘throw off the yoke of the Gospel’ came to a bad end. One of them, Raoul Monnet, was beheaded for inviting young men to look at indecorous pictures; and the party was ultimately broken up as the result of a row in the streets. They were very drunk, and were threatening certain of the Reformers with violence, when Syndic Aubert, hearing their noise, came out and faced them in his nightgown, carrying his staff of office in one hand and a lighted candle in the other. Thus attired and equipped, he placed himself at the head of the watch, summoned the soldiers to his aid, and put the rioters to rout. Some of them were killed in the scuffle; others were captured, tried, and executed; while the remnant escaped into the country, where, for a period, they eked out a precarious existence by means of highway robbery.

From that time forward Calvin’s supremacy was undisputed. The principal use which he made of it was to burn Servetus; but that is a thorny branch of the subject into which it is better not to enter. Our modern Calvinists do not, indeed, hold that Servetus deserved to be burnt, but they do sometimes maintain that Calvin did no great harm in burning him. There might be some risk of putting them to confusion if the topic were pursued; and this is not a controversial work. We shall be on safer ground if we turn aside to consider Calvin’s services to the State as an educationist.