154 THE SWISS REFORMATION.
Son of God, who was crucified for us and rose from the dead. Popery and the gospel are as incompatible as darkness and light, as Belial and Christ. No compromise is possible between them. Vergerio was hardly less severe on the cardinals and bishops, although he allowed some honorable exceptions. He attacked and ridiculed the Council of Trent, then in session, and tried to show that it was neither general, nor free, nor Christian. He used the same arguments against it as the Old Catholics used against the Vatican Council of 1870. He repelled the charge of heresy and turned it against his former co-religionists. The Protestants who follow the Word of God are orthodox, the Romanists who follow the traditions of men are the heretics.
His anti-popery waitings were read with great avidity by his contemporaries, but are now forgotten. BuUinger was unfavorably impressed, and found in them no solid substance, but only frivolous mockery and abuse.
As regards the differences among Protestants, Vergerio was inconsistent. He first held the Calvinistic theory of the Lord's Supper, and expressed it in his own Catechism,^ in a letter to BuUinger of Jan. 16, 1554, and even later, in June, 1556, at Wittenberg, where he met Melanchthon and Eber. But in Wiirtemberg he had to subscribe the Augsburg Confession, and in a letter to the Duke of Wiirtemberg, Oct. 23, 1557, he confessed the ubiquitarian theory of Luther. He also translated the Catechism of Brenz and the Wiirtemberg Confession into Italian, and thereby offended the Swiss Zwinglians, but told Ibem that he was merely the translator. He never attributed much importance to the difference, and kept aloof from the eucharistic controversy.^ He was not a profound theologian, but an ecclesiastical politician and diplomatist, after as well as before his conversion.
Vergerio left the Roman Church rather too late, when the
1 Fondamento della religione Christiana per uso della Valtellina. 1553.
2 His views on the Eucharist are discussed by Sixt, 208, 214, and 497 sqq.
§ 39. PROT. IN CHIAVENNA AND THE VALTELLINA. 155
Counter-Reformation Lad already begun to crush Protestantism in Italy. He was a man of imposing personality, considerable learning and eloquence, wit and irony, polemic dexterity, and diplomatic experience, but restless, vain, and ambitious. He had an extravagant idea of his own importance. He could not forget his former episcopal authority and pretensions, nor his commanding position as the representative of the pope. He aspired to the dignity and influence of a sort of Protestant internuncio at all the courts of Europe, and of a mediator between the Lutheran and Reformed Churches. Pallavicino, the Jesuit historian of the Council of Trent, characterizes him as a lively and bold man Avho could not live without business, and imagined that business could not get along without him. Calvin found in him much that is laudable, but feared that he was a restless busybody. Gallicius wrote to BuUinger : " I wish that Vergerio would be more quiet, and persuade himself that the heavens will not fall even if he, as another Atlas, should withdraw his support." Nevertheless, Vergerio filled an important place in the history of his times. He retained the esteem of the Lutheran princes and theologians, and he is gratefully remembered for his missionary services in the two Italian valleys of the Grisons, which have remained faithful to the evangelical faith to this day.
§ 39. Protestantism in Chiavenna and the Valtellina, and its Suppression. The Valtellina 3Iassacre. George Jenatsch.
See literature in §§ 36 and 38, pp. 131 and 144 sq.
We pass now to the Italian dependencies of the Grisons, where Protestantism has had only a transient existence.
At Chiavenna the Reformed worship was introduced in 1544 by Agostino Mainardi, a former monk of Piedmont, under the protection of Hercules von Salis, governor of the province. He was succeeded by Jerome Zanchi (1516-