262 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
God in Christ is the true key to his character and works, and offers the only satisfactory solution of the dark mystery of sin. Arminianism is a reaction against scholastic Calvinism, as Rationalism is a more radical reaction against scholastic Lutheranism.^
Calvin did not grow before the public, like Luther and Melanchthon, who passed through many doctrinal changes and contradictions. He adhered to the religious views of his youth unto the end of his life.^ His Institutes came like Minerva in full panoply out of the head of Jupiter. The book was greatly enlarged and improved in form, but remained the same in substance through the several editions (the last revision is that of 1559). It threw into the shade the earlier Protestant theologies, — as Melanchthon's Loci^ and Zwingli's Commentary on the True and False Religion, — and it has hardly been surpassed since. As a classical production of theological genius it stands on a level with Origen's De Principiis, Augustin's De Civitate Dei, Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologice^ and Schleiermacher's Der Ch-istliehe Grlaube.
2. Calvin is, in the next place, a legislator and disciplinarian. He is the founder of a new order of Church polity, which consolidated the dissipating forces of Protestantism, and fortified it against the powerful organization of Romanism on the one hand, and the destructive tendencies of sectarianism and infidelity on the other.
In this respect we may compare him to Pope Hildebrand, but with this great difference, that Hildebrand, the man of iron, reformed the papacy of his day on ascetic principles,
^ Harnack excludes Calvinism and Arminianism from his Dogmengeschichte, while he devotes to Socinianism, which is not nearly as important, no less than thirty-eight pages (III. 653-691). A strange omission in this important work, completed in 1890. He explains this omission (in a private letter to me, dated March 3, 1891) on the ground that he includes Calvinism and Arminianism in the Enticickluncjsgeschichte des Protestantismus, which he did not intend to treat in his Dogmengeschichte.
- Beza says : " In the doctrine which he delivered at first, Calvin persisted steadily to the last, scarcely- making any change."
§ 66. Calvin's place in history. 263
and developed the mediae val theocracy on the hierarchical basis of an exclusive and unmarried priesthood ; while Calvin reformed the Church on social principles, and founded a theocracy on the democratic basis of the general priesthood of believers. The former asserted the supremacy of the Church over the State ; the latter, the supremacy of Christ over both Church and State. Calvin united the spiritual and secular powers as the two arms of God, on the assumption of the obedience of the State to the law of Christ. The last form of this kind of theocracy or Christocracy was established by the Puritans in New England in 1620, and continued for several generations. In the nineteenth centur}-, when the State has assumed a mixed religious and non-religious character, and is emancipating itself more and more from the rule of any church organization or creed, Calvin would, like his modern adherents in French Switzerland, Scotland, and America, undoubtedly be a champion of the freedom and independence, of the Church and its separation from the State.
Calvin found the commonwealth of Geneva in a condition of license bordering on anarchy: he left it a well-regulated community, which John Knox, the Reformer of Scotland, from personal observation, declared to be " the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles," and which Valentin Andrese, a shining light of the Lutheran Church, likewise from personal observation, half a century after Calvin's death, held up to the churches of Germany as a model for imitation.^
The moral discipline which Calvin introduced reflects the severity of his theology, and savors more of the spirit of the Old Testament than the spirit of the New. As a system, it has long since disappeared, but its best results remain in the pure, vigorous, and high-toned morality which distinguishes Calvinistic and Presbyterian communities.
^ See these and other remjirkahU- judgments quoted more fully in § 110.