826 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
memory the " Salle de la Reformation," a noble building, founded on the principles of the Evangelical Alliance, and dedicated to the preaching of the pure gospel and the advocacy of every good cause.
The Reformed Churches of both hemispheres are the monument of Calvin, more enduring than marble.
Zwingli, of all the Reformers, died first (1531), in the prime of life, on the battlefield, with the words trembling on his lips : " They can destroy the bod}^ but not the soul." The star of the Swiss Reformation went down with him, but only to rise again.
Next followed Luther (1546). He, too, died away from home, at Eisleben, his birthplace, disgusted with the disorders of the times, weary of the world and of life, but holding fast to the faith of the gospel, repeating the precious words : " God so loved the world as to give His onl}^ begotten Son," and, in the language of the 31st Psalm, committing his spirit into the hands of his faithful God, who had redeemed him.
Melanchthon left this world at his own home (1560), like Calvin ; his last and greatest sorrow was the dissensions in the Church for which he could shed tears as copious as the waters of the Elbe. He desired to die that he might be delivered first of all from sin, and also from " the fury of theologians." He found great comfort in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, and the first, and seventeenth chapters of John ; and when asked by his son-in-law (Peucer), whether he desired anything, he replied: "Nothing but heaven."
John Knox, the Calvin of Scotland, " who never feared the face of man," survived his friend eight years (till 1572), and found his last comfort likewise in the Psalms, the fiftythird chapter of Isaiah, and the sacerdotal prayer of our Saviour.
The providence of God, which rules and overrules the movements of history, raised up worth}'- successors for the Reformers, who faithfully preserved and carried forward
§ 164. CALVIN'S LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 827
their work: Bullinger for Zvviugli, Melanchtlion for Luther, Beza for Calvin, Melville for Knox.
The extraordinary episcopal power which Calvin, owing to his extraordinary talents and commanding character, had exercised without interruption, ceased with his death. Beza was elected his successor on the 29th of May, 1564, as " moderateur" of the ecclesiastical affairs of (leneva, only for one year.i But he Avas annually re-elected till 1580, when he felt unequal to carrying any longer the heavy burden of duty. He was willing, however, to continue the correspondence with foreign Churches. He divided his untirinsr activity between Switzerland and France, and exercised a controlling influence on the progress of the Reformation in those two countries. He saw a Huguenot prince, Henry IV., ascend the throne of France ; he lamented his abjuration of the evangelical faith, but rejoiced over the Edict of Nantes which gave legal existence to Protestantism ; and he carried, as the last survivor of the noble race of the Reformers, the ideas of the Reformation to the beginning of the seventeenth century. His theology marks the transition from the broad Calvinism of Calvin to the narrow, scholastic, and supralapsarian Calvinism of the next generation, which produced the reaction of Arminianism not only in Holland and England, but also in France and Geneva.
NOTE. A CALUMNY.
It is painful to notice that sectarian hatred and malice followed the Reformers to their death-beds. Fanatical Romanists represented Zwingli's heroic death as a judgment of God, and invented the myths that CEcolampadius committed suicide and was carried off by the devil ; that Luther hung himself by his handkerchief on the bed-post and emitted a horrible stench ; and that Calvin died in despair.
The myth of Luther's suicide was soberly and malignantly repeated by an ultramontane priest (Majunke, editor of the "Germania" in Berlin), and gave
1 He himself suggested a similar change in an address before the Venerable Company of Pastors and Professors, June 2, 1564. Annales, in Opera, XXI. 816.