264 THE EEFOEMATIOX IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
It is by the combination of a severe creed with severe self-discipline that Calvin became the father of the heroic races of French Huguenots, Dutch Burghers, English Puritans, Scotch Covenanters, and New England Pilgrims, who sacrificed the world for the liberty of conscience. "A little bit of the world's history," says the German historian Hausser,i "was enacted in Geneva, which forms the proudest portion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A number of the most distinguished men in France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain professed her creed ; they were sturdy, gloomy souls, iron characters cast in one mould, in which there was an interfusion of Romanic, Germanic, mediaeval, and modern elements ; and the national and political consequences of the new faith were carried out by them with the utmost rigor and consistency." A distinguished Scotch divine (Principal Tulloch) echoes this judgment when he says : ^ "It was the spirit bred by Calvin's discipline which, spreading into France and Holland and Scotland, maintained by its single strength the cause of a free Protestantism in all these lands. It was the same spirit which inspired the early and lived on in the later Puritans ; which animated such men as Milton and Owen and Baxter ; which armed the Parliament of England with strength against Chai'les I., and stirred- the great soul of Cromwell in its proudest triumphs ; and which, while it thus fed every source of political liberty in the Old World, burned undimned in the gallant crew of the ' ]Ma}'flower,' — the Pilgrim Fathers, — who first planted the seeds of civilization in the great continent of the West." ^
1 The Period of the Reformation, ed. by Oncken, transl. by Mrs. Sturgis (New York, 1874), p. 255.
^ Luther and Other Leaders of the Reformation, p. 264 sq. (3d ed. 1883).
•^ George Bancroft, the historian of the United States, derives the free institutions of America chiefly from Calvinism through the medium of Puritanism. It is certain that, in the colonial period, Calvinism was the most powerful factor in the theology and religious life of America ; but since the close of the eighteenth century, Arminian Methodism fairly divides the field
§ 66. Calvin's place in history. 265
Calvin was intolerant of any dissent, either papal or heretical, and his early followers in Europe and America abhorred religious toleration (in the sense of indifference) as a pestiferous error ; nevertheless, in their conflict with reactionary Romanism and political despotism, they became the chief promoters of civil and religious liberty based upon respect for God's law and authority. The solution of the apparent inconsistency lies in the fact that Calvinists fear God and nothing else. In their eyes, God alone is great, man is but a shadow. The fear of God makes them fearless of earthly despots. It humbles man before God, it exalts him before his fellow-men. The fear of God is the basis of moral selfgovernment, and self-government is the basis of true freedom.^
3. Calvin's influence is not confined to the religious and moral sphere ; it extends to the intellectual and literary development of France. He occupies a prominent position in the history of the French language, as Luther, to a still higher degree, figures in the history of the German language. Luther gave to the Germans, in their own vernacular, a version of the Bible, a catechism, and a hymn-book. Calvin did not translate the Scriptures (although from his commentaries a tolerably complete version might be constructed), and his catechism and a few versified psalms never became
with it and is numerically the strongest denomination in the United States at the present day. The Baptists, who come next in numerical strength, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, and the Dutch and German Reformed rank on the Calvinistic, but the Protestant Episcopalians and Lutherans, predominantly on the Arminian side. The Episcopal Church, however, leaves room for the moderate Calvinism of the Thirty-nine Articles (Art. 17), the high Calvinism of the Lambeth Articles and Irish Articles, and the semi- Catholic tendency of the Prayer-Book. The Lutheran Formula of Concord is Calvinistic in the doctrine of unconditional election of believers and the slavery of the human will, but Arminian in the doctrine of universal atonement and universal vocation, and semi-Catholic in the doctrine of the sacraments (baptismal regeneration and the eucharistic presence). ^ Goethe gives classic expression to this truth in the lines : —
"In der Beschrdnkung erst zeigt sich der Meister, Und das Gesetz mir Icann tins Freiheit geben."