Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/396

 Hence, we could contribute nothing towards our own salvation; God did it all; we had no merit, and He had all the glory. In a system so conceived there was no room for the priest; his prayers and sacrifices, his masses and absolutions, his shrines and relics and articles of worship, were but the impertinences of ephemeral and feeble man in the face of the Eternal Potency.

Calvin knew well the sublimity of the system which he expounded, but he could have wished it to be more pitiful. He did not love to think of the innumerable millions of the heathen with their infant children ordained to everlasting death; the decree that fixed the number alike of the saved and the lost was to him an awful decree, but he could not look towards the Alps without feeling how closely the sublime and the awful were allied. And if the sublimity of earth was terrible, how much more terrible must be the majesty of God! But if He is so august, must we not labour to attain the dignity of moral manhood, the only dignity which it becomes Him to recognise?

We come then to Calvin's legislative achievements as his main title to name and fame. But two points must here be noted. In the first place, while his theology was less original and effective than his legislation or polity, yet he so construed the former as to make the latter its logical and indeed inevitable outcome. The polity was a deduction from the theology, which may be defined as a science of the Divine will as a moral will, aiming at the complete moralisation of Man, whether as a unit or as a society. The two were thus so organically connected that each lent strength to the other, the system to the Church and the Church to the system, while other and more potently reasonable theologies either died or lived a feeble and struggling life. Secondly, the legislation was made possible and practicable by Geneva, probably the only place in Europe where it could have been enacted and enforced. We have learned enough concerning Genevan history and institutions to understand why this should have been the case. The city was small, free, homogeneous, distinguished by a strong local patriotism, a stalwart communal life. In obedience to these instincts it had just emancipated itself from the ecclesiastical Prince and its ancient religious system; and the change thus accomplished was, though disguised in a religious habit, yet essentially political. For the Council which abolished the Bishop had made itself heir to his faculties and functions; it could only dismiss him as civil lord by dismissing him as the ecclesiastical head of Geneva, and in so doing it assumed the right to succeed as well as to supersede him in both capacities. This, however, involved a notable inversion of old ideas; before the change the ecclesiastical authority had been civil, but because of the change the civil authority became ecclesiastical. If theocracy means the rule of the Church or the sovereignty of the clergy in the State, then the ancient constitution of Geneva was theocratic; if democracy means the sovereignty of the people in Church as well as in