§ 80. FROM BASEL TO FERRAKA. 343
3. " Others desirous of remedying this evil, will leave all mention of predestination to be as it were buried. . . . Though their moderation is to be commended in judging that mysteries ought to be handled with such great sobriety, yet as they descend too low, they leave little influence on the mind of man which refuses to submit to unreasonable restraints. . . . The Scripture is the school of the Holy Spirit, in which as nothing necessary and useful to be known is omitted, so nothing is taught which it is not beneficial to know. . . . Let us permit the Christian man to open his heart and his ears to all the discourses addressed to him by God, only with this moderation, that as soon as the Lord closes his sacred mouth, he shall also desist from further inquiry. . . . 'The secret things,' says Moses (Deut. 29: 29), 'belong unto the Lord our God : but those things which are revealed belong unto us, and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of his law.'
5. " Predestination, by which God adopts some to the hope of life, and adjudges others to eternal death, no one, desirous of the credit of piety, dares absolutely to deny. . . . Predestination we call the eternal decree of God, by which he has determined in himself, what he would have to become of every individual of mankind. For they are not all created with a similar destiny; but eternal life is fore-ordained for some, and eternal damnation for others. Every man, therefore, being created for one or the other of these ends, we say, he is predestinated either to life or to death. This God has not onlj' testified in particular persons, but has given as specimen of it in the whole posterity of Abraham, which should evidently show the future condition of every nation to depend upon his decision (Deut. 32: 8, 9)."
§ 80. From Basel to Ferrara. The Duchess Renee.
Shortly after, if not before, the publication of his great work, in March, 1536, Calvin, in company with Louis Du Tillet, crossed the Alps to Italy, the classical soil of the literary and artistic Renaissance. He hoped to aid the cause of the religious Renaissance. He went to Italy as an evangelist, not as a monk, like Luther, who learned at Rome a practical lesson of the working of the papacy.
He spent a few months in Ferrara at the brilliant court of the Duchess Ren^e or Renata (1511-1575), the second daughter of Louis XII., of France, and made a deep and permanent impression on her. She had probably heard of him through Queen Marguerite and invited him to a visit. She Avas a small and deformed, but noble, pious, and highly accomplished lady, like her friends, Queen Marguerite and Vittoria Colonna. She srathered around her the brightest wits of the
344 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
Renaissance, from Italy and France, but she sympathized still more with the spirit of the Reformation, and was fairly captivated by Calvin. She chose him as the guide of her conscience, and consulted him hereafter as a spiritual father as long as he lived.^ He discharged this duty with the frankness and fidelity of a Chiistian pastor. Nothing can be more manly and honorable than his letters to her. Guizot affirms, from competent knowledge, that '"the great Catholic bishops, who in the seventeenth century directed the consciences of the miofhtiest men in France, did not fulfil the difficult task with more Christian firmness, intelligent justice and knowledge of the world than Calvin displayed in his intercourse ■wdth the Duchess of Ferrara." ^
Renan wonders that such a stern moralist should have exercised a lasting influence over such a lady, and attributes it to the force of conviction. But the bond of union was deeper. She recognized in Calvin the man who could satisfy her spiritual nature and give her strength and comfort to fight the battle of life, to face the danger of the Inquisition, to suffer imprisonment, and after the death of her husband and her return to France (1559) openly to confess and to maintain the evangelical faith under most trying circumstances when her own son-in-law, the Duke of Guise, carried on a war of extermination against the Reformation. She continued to correspond with Calvin very freely, and his last letter in French, twenty-three days before his death, was
^ Beza (xxi. 12.3) : " Illain [Ferrariensem Diicissam] in i-ero pietatis studio conjirmavit, ut eum postea vivum semper dilexerit, ac nunc quoque superstes gratce in defunctum memoriae specimen edat luculentum." Colladon (53) speaks likewise of the high esteem in which the Duchess, then still liring, held Calvin before and after his death. Bolsec in his libel (Ch. v. 30), mentions the visit to Ferrara, but suggests a mercenary motive. " Calvin," he says, " s'en alia vers Allemaigne et Itallie : cherchanf son adveiiture. et passa par la ville de Fen-are, ou il recent quelque aumone de Madame la Durhesse."
- St. Louis and Calvin, p. 207. He adds: "And the duchess was not the only person towards whom he fulfilled this duty of a Christian pastor. His correspondence shows that he exercised a similar influence, in a spirit equally lofty and judicious, over the consciences of many Protestants."
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