CALVIN’S BIOGRAPHERS AND APOLOGISTS.

Among writers nearer our own time there are few who openly and unreservedly uphold Calvin in his conduct to Servetus, none who now advocate persecution unto death for divergence in religious opinion. Even they who hold the memory of Calvin in the highest honour are driven, as we have seen, to find excuses for him in his pursuit of the indiscreet but pious Spaniard. We in these days do, indeed, believe that they who should approve his deed would sin even as he did. Paul Henry, the author of one of the latest lives we have of Calvin, and his measureless partisan and apologist, even with the moderate acquaintance he has with Servetus’ works, feels himself forced at times to pause in the unmitigated condemnation of their author he is disposed to indulge in. Like Farel, in contact with the victim, telling the people that ‘after all the man perhaps meant well;’ Henry says, that ‘from the executed man, der Gerichtete, we hear certain echoes of Christianity which sadden as they flow not from the true faith. But his pyre still gleams portentous to the world, and even when it burned it was a herald of the dawn of better days to come. Servetus, in his steadfast protestation even unto death, became a true Reformer. His fate has for ever impressed the Protestant (Henry has the Evangelical) Church with hate of the besetting sin of the Church of Rome, the crime of dealing with religious error by inflicting death. It has even familiarised the world with the thought that there is a still higher development of the religious principle in man than has yet found expression in either the Roman or Reformed Churches, awaiting a coming time.’

This surely is noble writing. Nor does the apologist pause here, but goes on to speak of him who to Calvin and his age was a blasphemer of God, as being really and in truth ‘a pious man.’ ‘Were an assembly of Deputies from every Christian Church now to meet on Champel,’ says Henry, ‘to take into consideration all that is extant on the life and fate of Servetus, and to review the facts in the light of the times to which they refer, they would speak Calvin free from reproach and pronounce him not guilty; of Servetus, on the other hand, they would say, guilty, but with extenuating circumstances.’ We venture to believe, and trust we have shown cause sufficient to warrant our conclusion, that the sentence would be precisely the reverse. Calvin would be found guilty, but with extenuating circumstances; Servetus not guilty in all but the use of intemperate and sometimes improper language.

Henry, to his honour, goes yet farther; he does not approve of Calvin’s attempt to detract from the horror and pity we feel for Servetus’ fate, by charging him with cowardice in the face of death. ‘Let us observe in Servetus,’ says the biographer of Calvin, ‘those beautiful traces of the true life which he showed at the last: his regret for former tergiversations, his humility, his constancy, his earnest prayer to God, and his forgiveness of his enemies. Had he but had the truth in his heart he would have died a true martyr; but he must tremble in his death hour, for he had blasphemed the Majesty of God.’ But Servetus did not tremble in his death hour, he never blasphemed the Majesty of God, and he died in charity with all men, even with him who had brought him to his untimely end, and who ten years after the death of his victim had no better title for him than Chien et meschant Garnement,—dog and wicked scoundrel!

Mosheim, to whom we owe the gathering and preservation of much that is interesting in connection with Servetus, working in the middle of the bygone century, and referring to what Calvin himself avows, viz., ‘that he would not have persevered so resolutely on the capital charge had Servetus been but modest and not rushed madly on his fate,’ exclaims, ‘What an avowal! Servetus, after all, must burn not because he had outraged the word of God, and infected the world with error, but because he had addressed John Calvin in disrespectful language! Calvin’s avowal is truly a hard knot for those to untie who hold that revenge had nothing to do with the death of Servetus. For my own part I am not bound to weigh all the grounds that tell for or against the Reformer, and I am not, perhaps, altogether impartial. I am minded, however, that they are not wholly in the right who say that Calvin proceeded against the unhappy Spaniard led on by hatred and revenge alone; and I am not so certain that they are in the wrong who think it was not mere religious zeal which suggested and carried the tragedy to its conclusion. What is man! The very best often serve God and themselves when they fancy they are serving God alone.’

With these words of the pious historian of the Church we conclude; tempering the severer criticism suggested by the facts as they present themselves, with the more charitable construction of the ecclesiastic.