from whence, however, he escapes, with the connivance of the jailer, and, as it is thought, of the archbishop also. He intended to have fled to Naples, and resumed his professional practice there as a physician; but losing his way, he finds himself on the 15th of July, 1553, in Geneva. He is preparing for his departure, when Calvin causes him to be arrested. He is accused of having, "in a printed book, defamed, in the person of M. Calvin, minister of God in the Church of Geneva, the doctrine which is preached; pronouncing all the insults and blasphemies which it is possible to invent." Day after day his examination proceeds, Calvin and the other ministers being present at the request of the judges; and day after day Calvin mounts the pulpit of the church publicly to insult and denounce his enemy before all the people; probably with a view to preparing them for the punishment which was to follow, and which Calvin had already determined upon. No one is allowed to visit him in prison; his petition that an advocate may be assigned to conduct his defence, especially in consideration of his being a stranger and ignorant of the laws of the country, is refused; so also is his petition for a shirt and some clean linen, being, as he said, devoured alive in his prison by vermin. To his plea that he had committed no offence on the Swiss territory, that he was no disturber of the peace or seditious person, but only had written a book treating on difficult questions and addressed to learned men, Calvin answered that "a heretic is not like a mere disturber of the peace; for that his crime troubles society, which has the right to punish him, wherever he may be found; and that a heretic is outside the pale of the common law." When he quotes the language which Calvin himself had formerly held, about the duty of using tears and entreaties, but never violence, for the conversion of heretics, he receives no answer. At length sentence is pronounced; and on the 27th of October, 1553, he is burnt alive at the stake, Calvin himself looking on and assisting at the last agonies of his enemy. The Churches of Zurich, Basle, Berne, and some other places, wrote to applaud the deed; so also did Bucer, Melancthon, and other Reformers: and a few months later, Calvin himself

published a book professing to be "a faithful exposition of the errors of Michael Servetus, and a brief refutation of the same; wherein is taught that heretics are to be coerced by the right of the sword.”

Such is the history of the execution of Michael Servetus, concerning which some Protestants think it enough to say, that "it only shows that he had imbibed a portion of the persecuting spirit of that Church which he had forsaken;" meaning, of course, the Catholic Church. But the truth is, as the facts in the preceding pages fully show, this act was nothing at all extraordinary in the life of Calvin ; it was not at all inconsistent with his general character and principles; on the contrary, it was in most strict harmony with his whole temper of mind and all the actions of his life and as to its being " : a remnant of Popery," from which he had not yet succeeded in thoroughly emancipating himself, history has not recorded a single act of any Catholic ecclesiastical authority with which this can with any justice be compared. The letter is still extant in which Calvin wrote to his friend Farel, seven years before Servetus came to Geneva, that if ever he did come there, and his authority were of any avail in the matter, he would not suffer him to escape alive. It was, therefore, no sudden frenzy of passion which produced this result; it had been maturely considered and deliberately determined upon for years. That other letter also is still extant, in which Servetus, shut up in the prison of Geneva, lying upon straw and devoured by vermin, reminded his persecutor of the principles which he himself had laid down, in his work on the Christian Institutes, as to the proper mode of dealing with heretics. He cannot, therefore, avail himself of the plea of ignorance; the more humane course was set before him, and he knowingly rejected it. Lastly, it should be borne in mind, not only that Calvin, by setting aside the authoritative teaching of the Church, and referring each man to his Bible and to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, had rendered it praetically impossible for any one to know with certainty what he ought to believe, but also that on this very subject of the Holy Trinity, he had himself been accused of Arianism by some of his brother Re

formers; and though he had denied the charge, yet he confessed that he did not hold the same faith as was defined in the Athanasian creed; "which creed," he falsely said, "the Church of God had never received." Both Calvin and Servetus, therefore, departed from the true faith on this subject; but because Servetus adopted a different heresy from his own, Calvin did not hesitate to put him to death.

As my object in these pages is not to give you a complete account of the life of Calvin, but only as much as is necessary for you to form a correct idea of his moral and religious character as a Christian and a Reformer, I shall pass over his treatment of some other persons, which, if not so fatal in its consequences, was certainly not less cruel in its principle than that which has been already described; neither shall I enter on an account of all the political troubles by which Geneva still continued to be disturbed, but in which the party of which Calvin was the representative ultimately prevailed. It is enough that you should know that the same unchristian severity marked his whole career to the end. Just as he caused a poor woman to be banished, because she had been heard to express an opinion that the execution of Servetus was unjust, so, when he had succeeded in securing the exile of his political antagonists, as well as of their wives and families, and the confiscation of all their property, he next obtained a decree from the council, ordaining the punishment of death against every citizen who should even speak of recalling the exiles. And so he continued, manifesting the same hard, intolerant, unmerciful spirit up to the very moment of his death, which happened on the 27th of May, 1564.

"On that day," says Beza, "the sun went down, and the greatest luminary that ever came into the world for the direction of the Church of God was withdrawn to heaven!" Beza and Farel were the only two who remained on friendly terms with him to the end of his life; and even this was owing, in great measure, to their natural timidity and skill in dissimulation. None of the other Reformers could tolerate his pride, his love of power, and his intense selfishness. Melancthon reproached him with "a moroseness which nothing could bend." Bucer exclaimed, "Thou lovest and

thou hatest with no other motive than that insupportable self-love which is such a nuisance to all that are acquainted with thee." Another of his Protestant contemporaries says of him, that he was "revengeful, and thirsted after blood; and that beneath a calm and modest exterior he concealed pride and selfishness." A fourth writes, "All thy colleagues complain of thy intolerable arrogance." A fifth says that "he is infected with the disease of evil-speaking, as with the poison of a mad dog." Lastly, we are told that he was so hated in Geneva, that it was a common saying among the people, "Better to be in hell with Beza, than in heaven with Calvin."

Such was the general estimate formed of this " "great light of the Protestant Reformation" by those who had the opportunity of knowing him best; and his own estimate of his fellow-Reformers was not much higher perhaps. There is scarcely one of them, from Luther downwards, whom he has not somewhere abused and vilified. Melancthon was, according to him, a weathercock and a coward; Osiander was an enchanter, a seducer, and a wild beast; another is elegantly denounced as a filthy babbler; another is a jackdaw and a screech-owl; a fifth is a proud and wrathful stirrer-up of strife. To a sixth he addresses a letter, couched in the following chaste and charitable language: "Your school is a stinking pig-sty; do you hear me, you dog, you madman, you beast?"

But enough of this. Let us drop the scene on this hideous picture, of men setting themselves up as special examples of the Christian life in the midst of a perverse generation, yet exhibiting in their conduct all those vices which are most opposite to the Christian character; of men professing to have a mission from God to proclaim the truth after it had been lost sight of for hundreds of years, yet denouncing one another and one another's doctrines with just the same violence as they denounced "the Papists and Popery." Let us bear in mind those words of St. James (iii. 16), "Where envying and contention is, there is inconstancy and every evil work;" and we shall never need any other token whereby to form a true judgment of the Reformation and the Reformers.