§ 137. CALVIN AND SERVETUS. 689
at Geneva, and into the flames which have iinniortalized his name.i
The judgment of historians on these remarkable men has undergone a great change. Calvin's course in the tragedy of Servetus Avas fully approved by tlie best men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^ It is as fully condemned in the nineteenth century. Bishop Bossuet was able to affirm that all Christians were happily agreed in maintaining the rightfulness of the death penalty for obstinate heretics, as murderers of souls. A hundred years later the great historian Gibbon echoed the opposite public sentiment when he said : " I am more deeply scandalized at the single execution of Servetus than at the hecatombs which have blazed at auto-da-f^s of Spain and Portugal." '^
It would be preposterous to compare Calvin with Torquemada."* But it must be admitted that the burning of Servetus is a typical case of Protestant persecution, and makes Calvin responsible for a principle which may be made to justify an indefinite number of applications. Persecution deserves much severer condemnation in a Protestant than in a Roman
1 "If ever a poor fanatic thrust himself into the tire, it was Michael Servetus." Coleridge, in his Table-Talk.
- See the judgments below in § 139.
3 In a footnote in ch. LIV. of his work on the Decline and Fall of the R. E. (Smith's ed. V. 552). He assigns three reasons for this judgment: (1) the zeal of Calvin was envenomed by personal malice and perhaps envy [1] ; (2) the deed of cruelty was not varnished by the pretence of danger to the Church or State ; (3) Calvin violated the golden rule of doing as he would be done by. Gibbon's prejudice against Calvinism is expressed in the sentence (p. 551) that "many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant."
* James Martineau states that " in his eighteen years of office, Cardinal Thomas de Torquemada had burned alive, it is computed, eighty-eight hundred victims, and punished ninety thousand in various ways, not for offences against the moral law, or crimes against society, but for thoughts of their own about religion, which only God, and not the pope, had allowed ; or for being Jews that would not be apostates ; or for refusing on the rack to confess what thej' had never done." The Seat of Authority in Religion, 1890» p. 156; comp. Florente's Ilistoire Critique de I' Inquisition, IV. 251 sq.
690 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
Catholic, because it is inconsistent. Protestantism must stand or fall witli freedom of conscience and freedom of worship.
From the standpoint of modern Christianity and civilization, the burning of Servetus admits of no justification. Even the most admiring biographers of Calvin lament and disapprove his conduct in this tragedy, which has spotted his fame and given to Servetus the glory of martyrdom.
But if we consider Calvin's course in the light of the sixteenth century, Ave must come to the conclusion that he acted his part from a strict sense of duty and in harmony with the public law and dominant sentiment of his age, which justified the death penalty for heresy and blasphemy, and abhorred toleration as involving indifference to trutli Even Servetus admitted the principle under which he suffered; for he said, that incorrigible obstinacy and malice deserved death before God and men.^
Calvin's prominence for intolerance was his misfortune. It was an error of judgment, but not of the heart, and must be excused, though it cannot be justified, by the spirit of his age.^
Calvin never changed his views or regretted his conduct towards Servetus. Nine years after his execution he justified it in self-defence against the reproaches of Baudouin (1562), saying: "Servetus suffered the penalty due to his heresies, but was it by my will ? Certainly his arrogance destroyed him not less than his impiety. And what crime was it of mine if our Council, at my exhortation, indeed, but in conformity with the opinion of several Churches, took
^ " Hoc crimen est morte simpliciter dignum, et apud Deum et apud homines." In the twenty-seventh letter to Calvin (Christianismi Restitutio, p. 656). He speaks there of the punishment of Ananias and Sapphira, who were " incorrigihiles, in malitia obstinati." Calvin refers to this admission of Servetus, and charges him with inconsistency. Opera, VIII. 462.
2 This is admitted now by all impartial historians. Michelet (XI. 96) calls this blot in Calvin's life "crime du temps plus que de Vhomme meme."