§ 110. GENEVA REGENERATED. 517
to prevent the sale of unhealthy food, which was to be cast into the Rhone. Low taverns and drinking shops were abolished, and intemperance diminished. Mendicancy on the streets was prohibited. A hospital and poor-house was provided and well conducted. Efforts were made to give useful employment to every man that could work. Calvin urged the Council in a long speech, Dec. 29, 1544, to introduce the cloth and silk industry, and two months afterwards he presented a detailed plan, in which he recommended to lend to the Syndic, Jean Ami Curtet, a sufficient sum from the public treasury for starting the enterprise. The factories were forthwith established and soon reached the highest degree of prosperity. The cloth and silk of Geneva were highly prized in Switzerland and France, and laid the foundation for the temporal wealth of the city. When Lyons, by the patronage of the French crown, surpassed the little Republic in the manufacture of silk, Geneva had already begun to make up for the loss by the manufacture of watches, and retained the mastery in this useful industry until 1885, when American machinery produced a successful rivalry.^
Altogether, Geneva owes her moral and temporal prosperity, her intellectual and literary activity, her social refinement, and her world-wide fame very largely to the reformation and discipline of Calvin. He set a high and noble example of a model community. It is impossible, indeed, to realize his church ideal in a large country, even with all the help of the civil government. The Puritans attempted it in England and in New England, but succeeded only in part, and only for a short period. But nothing should prevent a pastor from making an effort in his own congregation on the voluntary principle. Occasional!}^ we find parallel cases in small communities under the guidance of pastors of exceptional
1 Gaberel, I. 524; Stiihelin, I. 372. Even now the Swiss watches (of Geneva and Neuchatel) are considered the best of those made wholly or mainly bv liand labor.
518 THE KEFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
genius and consecration, such as Oberlin in the Steinthal, Harms in Hermannsburg, and Lohe in Neudettelsau, wha exerted an inspiring influence far beyond their fields of labor.
Let us listen to some testimonies of visitors who saw with their own eyes the changes wrought in Geneva through Calvin's influence.
William Farel, who knew better than any other man the state of Geneva under Roman Catholic rule, and during the early stages of reform before the arrival of Calvin, visited the city again in 1557, and wrote to Ambrosius Blaurer that he would gladly listen and learn there with the humblest of the people, and that "he would rather be the last in Geneva than the first anywhere else." ^
John Knox, the Reformer of Scotland, who studied several years in Geneva as a pupil of Calvin (though five years his senior), and as pastor of the English congregation, wrote to his friend Locke, in 1556 : " In my heart I could have wished, yea, I cannot cease to wish, that it might please God to guide and conduct yourself to this place where, I neither fear nor am ashamed to say, is the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles. Li other places I confess Christ to be truly preached; but manners and religion to be so seriously reformed, I have not yet seen in any other place besides." ^
Dr. Valentine Andrese (1586-1654), a bright and shining light of the Lutheran Church of Wiirtemberg (a grandson of Jacob Andrese, the chief author of the Lutheran Formula of Concord')^ a man full of glowing love to Christ, visited Geneva in 1610, nearly fifty years after Calvin's death, with the prejudices of an orthodox Lutheran against Calvinism, and was astonished to find in that city a state of religion
1 Kirchhofer, Farel' s Leben, II. 125.
2 Thomas M'Crie, Life of John Knox, p. 129 (Philadelphia ed. 1845). I quoted a sentence from this letter by anticipation on p. 2G3, but cannot omit it at tliis place.