Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/404

 Geneva exercised an influence far beyond France. It extended into Holland, which in the strength of the Reformed faith resisted Charles V and his son, achieved independence, and created the freest and best educated State on the continent of Europe. John Knox breathed for awhile the atmosphere of Geneva, was subdued into the likeness of the man who had made it, and when he went home he copied its education and tried to repeat its Reformation. English Reformers, fleeing from martyrdom, found a refuge within its hospitable walls, and, returning to England, attempted to establish the Genevan discipline, and failed, but succeeded in forming the Puritan character. If the author of the Ordonnances Ecclésiastiques accomplished, whether directly or indirectly, so much, we need not hesitate to term him a notable friend to civilisation.

The Consistory may be described as Calvin's method for moralising through the Church the life of man and the State to which he belonged. He may in the manner of the jurist have imagined that regulation by positive law was the most efficient means of governing conduct; but if he legislated as a jurist, he thought and purposed as a Reformer. It is here, where injustice is easiest, that we ought to be most scrupulously just. Calvin was resolved, so far as he had power, to make the Church what it had not been but what it ought to be, an institution organised for the creation of a moral mankind. For this reason he claimed for it the right of excommunication and the power to excommunicate. But as he conceived the matter, the exercise of the power which followed from the possession of the right, while spiritual in essence and in purpose, might yet be civil in certain of its effects. The Consistory was a body appointed to be the guardian of morals, and therefore possessed of the power to excommunicate.

It was composed of six ministers and twelve elders. The elders were to be elected annually, and were to be men of good and honourable conduct, blameless and free from suspicion, animated by the fear of God and endowed with spiritual wisdom. They were to be chosen, two from the Smaller Council, four from the Council of Sixty, and six from the Great Council; they were to be elected at the same time as the magistrates, were to be capable of re-election, and were to take the oath of allegiance to the State and fidelity to the Church. They represented the idea that Geneva was a Church-State; and their duties were to have their eyes upon every man, family, or district, to have their ears open to every complaint, to punish every offence according to a carefully-graduated scale, and to enforce purity everywhere. The Consistory's jurisdiction was not civil, but spiritual; the sword which it wielded was not Caesar's but Christ's, yet it had rights of entry and investigation that were not so much Christ's as Caesar's. It was a judicial body and sat every Thursday to examine charges of misconduct or