THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
often experienced an opposition so extreme that he threatened to resign. Although he was inclined to take the part of the magistrates, he knew how to defend the rights and independence of the spiritual power when occasion arose, without, however, conceding to it such a preponderating influence as did Calvin. His activity was great. He mediated between the com- •pagnie and the magistracy; the latter continually asked his advice even in political questions. He corresponded with all the leaders of the Reformed party in Europe. After the massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572), he used his influence to give to the refugees a hospitable reception at Geneva. About this time he wrote his De jure magistratuum, in which he emphatically protested against tyranny in religious matters, and affirmed that it is legitimate for a people to oppose an unworthy magistracy in a practical manner and if necessary to use weapons and depose them. To sum up: Without being a great dogmatician like his master, nor a creative genius in the ecclesiastical realm, Beza had qualities which made him famous as humanist, exegete, orator, and leader in religious and political affairs, and qualified him to be the guide of the Calvinists in all Europe. In the various controversies into which he was drawn, Beza often showed an excess of irritation and intolerance, from which Bernardino Ochino, pastor of the Italian congregation at Zurich (on account of a treatise which contained some objectionable points on polygamy), and Sebastian Castellio at Basel (on account of his Latin and French translations of the Bible) had especially to suffer. With Reformed France Beza continued to maintain the closest relations. He was the moderator of the general synod which met in April, 1571, at La Rochelle and decided not to abolish church discipline or to acknowledge the civil government as head of the Church, as the Paris minister Jean Morel and the philosopher Pierre Ramus demanded; it also decided to confirm anew the Calvinistic doctrine of the Lord's Supper (by the expression: " substance of the body of Christ ") against Zwinglianism, which caused a very unpleasant discussion between Beza and Ramus and Bullinger. In the following year (May, 1572) he took an important part in the national synod at Nimes. He was also interested in the controversies which concerned the Augsburg Confession in Germany, especially after 1564, on the doctrine of the person of Christ and the sacrament, and published several works against Westphal, Hesshusen, Selnecker, Johann Brenz, and Jakob Andrea. This made him, especially after 1571, hated by all those who adhered to Lutheranism in opposition to Melanchthon.
The last polemical conflict of importance Beza encountered from the exclusive Lutherans was at the Colloquy of Mumpelgart (q.v.), Mar. 14-27, 1 580, to which he had been invited by the Lutheran Count Frederick of Wurttemberg at the wish of the French noblemen who had fled to Mumpelgart. As a matter of course the intended union which was the purpose of the colloquy was not brought about; nevertheless it called forth serious developments within the Reformed Church. When the
edition of the acts of the colloquy, as prepared by J. Andrea, was published, Samuel Huber, of
Burg near Bern, who belonged to the
8. The Col- Lutheranizing faction of the Swiss
loquy of clergy, took so great offense at the
Miimpel- supralapsarian doctrine of predesti-
gart. nation propounded at Mumpelgart
by Beza and Musculus that he felt it to be his duty to denounce Musculus to the magistrates of Bern as an innovator in doctrine. To adjust the matter, the magistrates arranged a colloquy between Huber and Musculus (Sept. 2, 1587), in which the former represented the universalism, the latter the particularism, of grace. As the colloquy was resultless, a debate was arranged at Bern, Apr. 15-18, 1588, at which the defense of the accepted system of doctrine was at the start put into Beza's hands. The three delegates of the Helvetic cantons who presided at the debate declared in the end that Beza had substantiated the teaching propounded at Mumpelgart as the orthodox one, and Huber was dismissed from his office.
After that time Beza's activity was confined more and more to the affairs of his home. His faithful wife Claudine had died childless in 1588, a few days before he went to the Bern Disputation.
Forty years they had lived happily 9. Last together. He contracted, on the ad- Days, vice of his friends, a second marriage
with Catharina del Piano, a Genoese widow, in order to have a helpmate in his declining years. Up to his sixty-fifth year he enjoyed excellent health, but after that a gradual sinking of his vitality became perceptible. He was active in teaching till Jan., 1597. The saddest experience in his old days was the conversion of King Henry IV to Roman Catholicism, in spite of his most earnest exhortations (1593). Strange to say, in 1596 the report was spread by the Jesuits in Germany, France, England, and Italy that Beza and the Church of Geneva had returned into the bosom of Rome, and Beza replied in a satire that revealed the possession still of his old fire of thought and vigor of expression. He was not buried, like Calvin, in the general cemetery, Plain-Palais (for the Savoyards had threatened to abduct his body to Rome), but at the direction of the magistrates, in the monastery of St. Pierre.
In Beza's literary activity as well as in his life, distinction must be made between the period of the humanist (which ended with the publication of his Juvenilia) and that of the ecclesiastic. But later
productions like the humanistic, biting, 10. Human- satirical Passavantius and his Comistic and plainte de Messire Pierre Lizet Historical prove that in later years he occasion- Writings, ally went back to his first love. In
his old age he published his Cato censorius (1591), and revised his Poemata, from which he purged juvenile eccentricities. Of his historiographical works, aside from his Icones (15S0), which have only an iconographical value, mention may be made of the famous Histoire ecctisiastique des figlises riformees au Royaume de France (1580), and his biography of Calvin, with which must be