§ 107. THE EXEKCISE OF DISCIPLINE IN GENKVA. 493
all sorts of offences amounted to four hundred and fourteen — a very large proportion for a population of 20,000.
The enemies of Calvin — liolsec, Audin, Galiffe (father and son) — make the most of these facts, and, ignoring all the good he has done, condemn the great Reformer as a heartless and cruel tyrant.^
It is impossible to deny that this kind of legislation savors more of the austerity of old heathen Rome and the Levitical code than of the gospel of Christ, and that the actual exercise of discipline was often petty, pedantic, and unnecessarily severe. Calvin was, as he himself confessed, not free from impatience, passion, and anger, which were increased by his physical infirmities ; but he was influenced b}- an honest zeal for the purit}' of the Church, and not by personal malice. When he was threatened by Perrin and the Favre family with a second expulsion, he wrote to Perrin : " Such threats make no impression upon, me. I did not return to Geneva to obtain leisure and profit, nor will it be to my sorrow if I should have to leave it again. It was the welfare and safety of the Church and State that induced me to return." ^ He must be judged by the standard of his own, and not of our, age. The most cruel of those laws — against witchcraft, heresy, and blasphemy — were inherited from the Catholic Middle Ages, and continued in force in all countries of Europe,
1 Take the following rhetorical caricature of Calvin's and Colladon's politico-religious code of laws from Audin {Life of Calvin, ch. XXXVI. .354, Am. ed.) : "There is but one word heard or read: Dcatli. Death to everyone guilty of high treason against God ; death to every one guilty of high treason against the State ; death to the son that strikes or curses his father ; death to the adulterer ; death to heretics. . . . During the space of twentyyears, commencing from the date of Calvin's recall, the history of Geneva is a bloody drama, in which pit}-, dread, terror, indignation, and tears, by turns, appear to seize upon the soul. At each step we encounter chains, thongs, a stake, pincers, melted pitch, fire, and sulphur. And throughout the whole there is blood. One imagines himself in Dante's Hell, where sighs, groans, and lamentations continually resound."
- This letter to Perrin is undated, but is probably from April, 1546. See Opera, XII. 338 sq. and Bonnet, II. 42 sq.
494 THE EEFOKMATION IN FEENCH SWITZERLAND.
Protestant as well as Roman Catholic, down to the end of the seventeenth century. Tolerance is a modern virtue. We shall return to this subject again in the chapter on Servetus.
§ 108. Calvin s Struggle with the Patriots and Libertines.
Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins qui se tiomnient Spirituelz. Geneva, 1545 ; 2d ed. 1547. Reprinted in Opera, vol. VII. 145-252. Latin version by Nic. des Gallars, 1546. Farel also wrote a French book against the Libertines, Geneva, 1550.
The works of J. A. Galiffe and J. B. G. Galiffe on the Genevese families and the criminal processes of Perrin, Ameaux, Berthelier, etc., quoted above, p. 224. Hostile to Calvin. — Audin, chs. XXXV., XXXVI., and XLIII. Likewise hostile.
F. Trechsel : Libertiner, in the first ed. of Herzog's Encykl., VIII. 375-380 (omitted in the second ed.), and his Antitrinitarier , I. 177 sqq. — Henry II. 402 sqq. — Hundeshagen in the " Studien und Kritikeu," 1845, pp. 866 sqq. — Dyer, 177, 198,368,390 sqq. — Stahelin, I. 382 sqq.; 457 sqq. On the side of Calvin.
Charles Schmidt: Les Libertins spirituels, Bale, 1876 (pp. xiv. and 251). From a manuscript autograph of one J. F., an adept of the sect, written between 1547 and 1550. An extract in La France Protest. III. 590 sq.
It required a ten years' conflict till Calvin succeeded in carrying out his system of discipline. The opposition began to manifest itself in 1545, during the raging of the pestilence ; it culminated at the trial of Servetus in 1553, and it finally broke down in 1555.
Calvin compares himself in this controversy with David fighting against the Philistines. " If I should describe," he says in the Preface to his Commentary on the Psalms (1557),^ "the course of my struggles by which the Lord has exercised me from this period, it would make a long story, but a brief reference may suffice. It affords me no slight consolation that David preceded me in these conflicts. For as the Philistines and other foreign foes vexed this holy king by continual wars, and as the wickedness and treachery of the faithless of his own house grieved him still more, so was I on all sides assailed, and had scarcely a moment's rest from out-
1 Opera, vol. XXXI. 27.