658 THE REFORMATION IX FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
rians, he returned to Switzerland, was apprehended by the authorities of Bern, convicted of heresies, deceits, and evasions, and beheaded on the tenth of September, 1566. On the way to the place of execution, he declared that he died a martyr for the honor of the supreme God, and charged the ministers Avho accompanied him with Sabellianism. He received the death-stroke with firmness, amid the exhortations of the clergy and the prayers of the multitude for God's mercy. Benedict Aretius, a theologian of Bern, published in the following year the acts of the process with a refutation of Gentile's objections to the orthodox doctrine.
The fate of Gentile was generally approved. No voice of complaint or protest was heard, except a feeble one from Basel. Calvin had died more than two years before, and now the city of Bern, which had opposed his doctrinal and disciplinary rigor, condemned to death a heretic less gifted and dangerous than Servetus. Gentile himself indirectly admitted that a teacher of false religion was deserving of death, but he considered his own views as true and scriptural.^
The death of Gentile ends the history of Antitrinitarianism in Switzerland. In the same year the strictly orthodox Second Helvetic Confession of Bullinger was published and adopted in the Reformed Cantons.
§ 132. The Eucharistic Controversies. Calvin and Westphal.
I. The Sources are given in § 117. See especially Calvin's Opera, vol. IX.
1-252, and the Prolegomena, pp. i-xxiv. The correspondence between Bullinger, a Lasco, Farel, Viret, and Calvin, on the controversy, in his Opera, vols. XV. and XV'I. The letters of Melanchtlion from this period in the Corpus Reform, vols. VII.-IX. The works of Westphal are quoted below.
II. Planck (neutral) : Geschichte des Protest. Lehrbegriff's (Leipzig, 1799), vol. V. Part II. 1-137. — Ebrard (Reformed): Das Dogma vom heil. Abendmahl, II. 525-744. — Nevin (Reformed), in the " Mercersburg Review" for 1850, pp. 486-510. — Monckeberg (Lutheran): Joachim Westphal und Joh. Calvin, 1865. — Wagenmann in Herzog^, XVII. 1-6.
1 See on this last chapter in the history of Gentile, Trechsel, II. 355-380.
§ 132. THE EUCHAEISTIC CONTKOVERSIES. 659
Henry, III. 298-357. — Dyer, 401-412. — Stahelix, II. 112 sq(i., 189 sqq. — GiESELER, III. Part II. 280 sqq. — Dorner: Geschichte der protest. TheoL, 400 sqq. — Sciiaff, Creeds, I. 279 sqq.
The sacramental controversy between Luther and ZwingU was apparently solved by the middle theory of Calvin, BuUinger, and Melanchthon, and liad found a symbolical expression in the Ziirich Consensus of 1549, for Switzerland, and even before that, in the Wittenberg Concordia of 1536 and in Melanchthon's irenical restatement of the 10th article of the Altered Augsburg Confession of 1540, for Germany. Luther's renewed attack upon the Swiss in 1544 was isolated, and not supported by any of his followers ; while Calvin, from respect for Luther, kept silent.
But in 1552 a second sacramental war was opened by Westphal in the interest of the high Lutheran theory, and gradually spread over all Germany and Switzerland.
We may well "lament," with Calvin in his letter to Schalling (March, 1557), that those who professed the same gospel of Christ were distracted on the subject of his Last Supper, which should have been the chief bond of union among them.^
The Westphal-Calvin controversy did not concern the fact of the real presence, which was conceded by Calvin in all his previous writings on the subject, but the subordinate questions of the mode of the presence, of the ubiquity of Christ's body, and the effect of the sacrament on unworthy communicants, whether they received the veiy body and blood of Christ, or only bread and wine, to their condemnation. Calvin clearly states the points of difference in the preface to his " Second Defence " : —
1 " Dolendum est quum nos pauci numero idem prqfiteamur evangeHum, sacrcB ctetKE occasione, quam prcecipuum inter nos unitatis vinculum esse decehat, in varias sententias distrahi. Sed hoc longe atrocius, non minus hostiliter conjligere quam si nihil esset nobis cum Christo commune." Opera, XVI. 429. Planck, the impartial Lutheran historian, calls the sacramental controversy "die argerlichste uUer Streitigkeiten" (I.e., V. I. p. 1).