FRENCH PROTESTANTISM.
In France the Reformation seemed to be better prepared than even in Germany, if we look only at the surface of the situation. The French Church had always maintained a certain independence of Rome, under the name of Gallican rights or liberties. Paris was, it is true, the chief seat of orthodox scholasticism, and the Sorbonne took an early opportunity to condemn Luther and his writings (1521); but it nursed also the spirit of mysticism and disciplinary reform, which led to the Councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basle. In the South a remnant, of the Waldenses had survived the bloody persecutions. The humanistic studies flourished greatly at Paris, Orleans, Bourges, and found favor at the court of Francis I. (1494-1547), who invited classical scholars from Italy, thought of calling Erasmus and even Melanchthon to his capital, and aided, for political, reasons, the Protestants in Germany, while yet he inflicted imprisonment and death upon them in France.
For half a century, and amid bloody civil wars, three conflicting tendencies, represented by Calvin, Rabelais, and Loyola--who happened to be in Paris at about the same period--struggled for the mastery: Calvinism, with its high intelligence and uncompromising virtue; the Renaissance, with its elegant culture and frivolous skepticism; and Jesuitism, with its reactionary and unscrupulous fanaticism. Francis I. wavered between the Renaissance, which suited his natural taste, and Romanism, which was the religion of the masses of Frenchmen; his gifted sister, Queen Margaret, of Navarre (grandmother of Henry IV.), protected the Reformation and the Renaissance, and harbored at one time Calvin, and at another the Libertines. Romanism triumphed first over Protestantism, and afterwards over semi-evangelical Jansenism, and France reaped infidelity and the Revolution.
Calvinism, always in the minority, and too stern and exacting for the national character, after a period of heroic martyrdom, gained for a time a limited legal existence under Henry IV. in the Edict of Nantes (1598), but was expelled under Louis XIV. to fertilize other countries, and reduced to a proscribed sect of the desert at home, where nevertheless, like the burning bush, it could not be consumed, and was providentially preserved for better days. [939]
The father of French Protestantism in its unorganized form is Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples (Faber Stapulensis, 1455-1537), Professor of the Sorbonne and tutor of the royal princes. He translated the Bible from the Vulgate (completed 1530); he taught, even before Luther and Zwingli, [940] the doctrine of justification by faith without human works or merit, and the supremacy of the Bible as a rule of faith, and predicted a reformation, saying to his pupil, Farel, 'God will renovate the world, and you will be a witness of it;' but he had to flee to Strasburg, and afterwards to the court of Queen Margaret.
In the same spirit labored his friends and pupils--Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, who fostered evangelical doctrines and practices in his diocese, but afterwards timidly joined in the condemnation of Luther; Melchior Wolmar, a native of Germany, Professor of Greek in Bourges and teacher of Calvin; Louis de Berquin (1489-1599), a royal counselor, who was burned at the stake; Clement Marot (1495-1544), the favorite poet of his age and translator of the Psalms in verse; Peter Robert Olivetan (d. 1538), a relative of Calvin and translator of the Bible into French (printed at Neuchatel, 1535); William Farel (1489-1565), Peter Viret, Anton Froment, Calvin, and Beza--who were driven to French Switzerland. The radical extravagances of Anabaptists and anti-Trinitarians also spread in France, and were confounded by the government with the sound evangelical doctrines, and made a pretext for persecution.
But it was only after Calvin, himself the greatest Protestant of France, had taken up his permanent abode in Geneva, that the Reformation movement was organized into a separate Church, and acquired a national importance. He therefore, and his friend and successor Beza, may be regarded as the fathers of the Reformed Church of France. Geneva became an asylum for their persecuted countrymen, and the nursery of evangelists. Henceforward French Protestantism assumed a Calvinistic type in doctrine and discipline, but, owing to the hostile attitude of the government, it was kept separate and distinct from the state. Although cruelly persecuted, and numbering its martyrs by thousands, it spread rapidly among the middle and higher classes, and in 1558 it embraced four hundred thousand followers.
The first national Synod was held in Paris, May 25-28, 1559, under the moderatorship of François de Morel, then pastor of Paris, a friend and pupil of Calvin. [941] It gave the Reformed Church a compact organization by the adoption of the Gallican Confession of Faith, in connection with a Presbyterian form of government and discipline, which remained the firm basis of the Church as long as she was allowed to exist and to hold national Synods, twenty-nine in all, the last being that at Loudun, 1659.