Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/394

 turned into substitutes for Deity-induced him to judge the system that claimed to be the sole interpreter and representative of Christ as a crafty compound of falsehood and truth.

His knowledge that the system had profited by men like Erasmus, whose wit made havoc of clerical sins and monkish superstition and Romish errors, and who yet conformed, or men like Gérard Roussel, who preached what he himself and they thought the Gospel, and who yet consented to hold office in the Catholic Church,—begat in him the belief that only by separation and negation could Reformation be accomplished. His friendship with the good and simple, those who had tried to realise the religion of Jesus, and his knowledge of the tyrannies, the miseries, and the martyrdoms which they had in consequence endured, persuaded him that his duty as an honest man was to side with the oppressed whom he admired against the oppressors whose ways and policy he detested. His experiences as a teacher and preacher of the new faith, especially at Geneva, where he tells us he found at his first coming preachings and tumults, breaking and burning of images, but no Reformation, showed him that individual men and even a whole society might profess the Reformed faith without being reformed in character. Out of these experiences came his master problem, namely, by what means could we best secure the expression of a changed faith in a changed life? Or, in other words, how could the Church be made not simply an institution for the worship of God, but an agency for the making of men fit to worship Him?

His attempt to solve this problem constitutes his chief title to a place in the history of religion and civilisation. It means that Calvin was greater as a legislator than as a theologian, that we have less cause to be grateful to him for the system called Calvinism than for the Church that he organised. In other words, his polity is a more perfect expression of the man than his theology, though his theology was the point where he was most vulnerable, and where therefore he was most fiercely, not to say ferociously, attacked. The foes born in his own household, men like Castellio or Bolsec, took the Divine decrees as the spot where they could strike most fatally at him and his preeminence. The Jesuits developed their doctrine in explicit antithesis to his; and the Lutherans, when they wished to discredit his views on the Lord's Supper, thought they could do it most effectually by criticising the absolute Predestination. The sects that rose within the Reformed Church, such as the Socinian and the Remonstrant, justified their schism as a protest against views which they described as equally dishonouring to God and belittling to man. But though Calvin's theology occasioned the hottest and bitterest controversies known to Christian history, yet it is here that his mind is least original and his ideas are most clearly derivative. Without Augustine we should never have had Calvinism, which is but the principles of the anti-Pelagian treatises developed, systematised, and applied.