TO A NOBLE CO-LABORER.

51

to condemn what to thy short-sight loomed up, though but a mote in another's eye, blind to the beam in thine own, when thou rejectedst the hand of thy gentle, weeping brother, who came to thee suing for peace as becomes a child of God, the Christian was dead within thee: it was that Evil Spirit of selflove, which thy fancy had so often personified as Demon, that ruled the hour. Heaven help those who, in this, are still following thy erring lead!

This radical error ran through the Great Reformer's life. While one cannot read his "Table Talk," without warming under the blunt geniality of the man, nor without admiring the force of his rough-hewings, yet his unchristian asperity toward his opponents-alas! the spirit of his age among controversialists-is as directly opposed to the gentle teachings of his Master, as if the Wittenberg doctor had never looked into the Testament, or read the Sermon on the Mount.

We might excuse him, perhaps, considering how he was persecuted, for saying: "Seeing the Pope is Antichrist, I believe him to be a devil incarnate; " we may find apology even for this: “He that says the Gospel requires works for salvation, I say, flat and plain, is a liar." But what shall we say of the terms he applies to one of the most distinguished scholars of the age, the intimate of Sir Thomas More, one who revived the * Dr. Martin Luther's Colloquia Mensalia, or his Divine Discourses at his Table: gathered, with the scrupulous punctiliousness of a Boswell, from the mouth of Luther, by two of his most intimate friends and disciples (Lauterbach and Aurifaber), translated by Hazlitt, London, 1848.

Under an edict issued by the Emperor Rudolph II., 80,000 copies of this work (then to be found in almost every parish of the empire) are said to have been burnt.

t "Table Talk," p. 195. One of Luther's works is entitled: Das Papstthum zu Rom vom Teufel gestiftet; that is: The Roman Papacy, an Institution of the Devil. The expression quoted above is but one of a hundred (some much more abusive), which he "thundered," as his admirers were wont to express it, against the Church of Rome, its head and its clergy. The mace of steel was his weapon.

+ Table Talk, p. 137.

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CALVIN'S GRIEVOUS SIN.

study of the Scriptures in the original tongues, publishing, in 1516, the first edition of the Greek Testament from manuscripts -a man who, like himself, had been condemned as a heretic by Roman Catholic authority--what shall we say of his abusɛ of such a man, whose worst faults were timidity and conservative moderation? "Erasmus of Rotterdam," said Luther, "is the vilest miscreant that ever disgraced the earth. Whenever I pray, I pray for a curse upon Erasmus.” *

It is to be admitted, however, that Luther is not the exponent of that phase of early Protestantism which led men the farthest astray from the paths of charity and justice. A man, second only to himself in prominence as a Reformer, with more learning, and, in the sense of the schools, an acuter intellect than Luther-one more polished, too, and far more cold-blooded than the bluff and hearty Wittenberger-this man, John Calvin, sinned far more grievously than the other, not against light and knowledge-for the stern Genevan is not to be taxed with insincerity—but against the Spirit that can alone reform the heart of man-against that holy Spirit, without which the. most eloquent master of all mysteries and all knowledge is but as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.

One of the forty-one heresies charged against Luther in Leo's bull of excommunication was that he (Luther) had declared it to be "against the will of the Holy Ghost to burn heretics." But Calvin was accessory to that very persecution unto death for opinion's sake which the other, at the outset of his career as a Reformer, had thus emphatically condemned.

That I may not be held to have made light assertion here touching an important episode in history which I had not carefully examined, I pray you to bear with me while I briefly recall the chief incidents connected with the burning as a heretic,

* Table Talk, p. 283. The immediate cause of this outburst seems to have been Erasmus' expression of opinion that the Epistle to the Romans, whatever it might have been at a former period, was not applicable to the state of things in the sixteenth century. (Same page.)

by the Protestants of Geneva, of a fellow Christian, in the year 1553. The story has been told by an eminent Protestant divine, with careful impartiality* and an exceeding minuteness of detail: and there are still extant numerous official, or otherwise trustworthy authorities by which to test the historian's accuracy.

§ 6. THE FORTUNES AND THE FATE OF SERVETUS.

Michael Serveto (or, as he is usually called, Servetus) was born in the year 1509, in Villa Nueva, a town in the kingdom of Aragon which had, thirty-five years before, become part of the kingdom of Spain. He was of reputable birth; his parents being Catholic and his father an advocate in good standing and notary of the town. He was probably educated for the Church, in a Spanish Convent; but he emigrated from his native country at the age of nineteen, never to return to it. He was of feeble constitution, afflicted with hernia from his birth, and, ac

* Mosheim's narrative bears, throughout, the impress of truth. Deeply feeling the delicacy of his task, he says, at the outset: "It is easier to pass unhurt between two fires burning close to each other than to relate, in such fashion that no one shall be offended or exasperated, the history of a man who had so many bitter enemies and strong friends. The deep emotions which arise when we look into such a history-emotions of pity, of love, of anger, of hatred-tend to mislead even the man who sets the strictest guard on his conscience. I approach this work with entire calmness and tranquillity of heart (mit einer völligen Gelassenheit und Stille des Herzens) and take with me the earnest resolve at once to put down all sentiment that might disturb that calm. I deprecate but one thing-of all imputations the most shameful--that I shall knowingly pervert or suppress the truth." MOSHEIM: Geschichte des berühmten Spanischen Artztes,

Michaels Serveto; Helmstaedt, 1748, pp. 4, 5.

This history, which I believe has never been translated, extends, with its numerous accompanying documents, to 528 quarto pages, displaying an elaborate and exhaustive research rarely to be found outside of German literature.

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CREED OF SERVETUS.

cording to his own declaration, it was on account of his infirm health that he never married. He seems to have been earnest and studious from his youth up; and it is not improbable that incipient symptoms of heresy may have been the cause why, at so early an age, he left the place of his birth. It is certain that three years after his emigration he had already abandoned the Romish faith, and become imbued with the religious ideas that were to rule his life. These three years were chiefly spent in study at the University of Toulouse.

When but twenty-two years of age, to wit in 1530, he visited, at Basel, a noted Swiss Reformer, Johann Hausschein, better known under the Greek name he assumed, of Ecolampadius; frankly laying before him his creed. It appears to have been substantially as follows:

There is one God almighty, and none other beside him, single not complex, who through his Word and through the Holy Ghost, created all things. There is one only Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten by the eternal Word of the Father and given by God to men as Saviour and Redeemer: He prays to the Father for us; and through his prayers and by the agency of angels, we receive the Holy Ghost.*

Ecolampadius, the chief leader of the new religious movement in Basel and a man highly esteemed all over Switzerland, was by nature of mild and gentle character for that age; yet he was sorely tried by the eagerness, and what he must have

*MOSHEIM: Geschichte des Michael Serveto, p. 16. HoTTINGER: Schweitzer Kirchengeschichte, vol. ii. p. 94. Throughout Servetus' works, when he seeks minutely to define his idea of the nature and divinity of Christ, his expressions are not very intelligible: a common fault among the theologians of that age, to say nothing of our own.

Here is Calvin's definition of the Trinity: "There is in the Father a proper hypostasis, which is conspicuous in the Son; and thence, also, we may easily infer the hypostasis of the Son which distinguishes him from the Father. The same reasoning is applicable to the Holy Spirit. But this is not a distinction of the essence which it is unlawful to represent as any other than simple and undivided."--Inst., Book 1, Chap. 13, § 2.

SERVETUS AND ECOLAMPADIUS.

55

deemed the presumption, of a scarcely-bearded youth, who pressed upon him, a father in Israel, doctrines savoring of Arianism, and held argument with one of more than twice his own age, as man to man, on terms of frank equality. They parted, as honest men often do, mutually incensed; * the Spaniard protesting that he should ever recognize Christ as the Son of God; the Swiss insisting that if his opponent intended to be a Christian, he must acknowledge Christ to be the uncreated and eternal Sɔn of God, of identical substance with the Father. It was the same dispute, unsettled yet, that had convulsed the Council of Nice, twelve hundred years before, between the advocates of the orthodox Homoousian and those of the heterodox Homoiousian doctrine.

A little knowledge of the world would have convinced Servetus that if his doctrines were thus harshly repulsed by a man of Ecolampadius' easy temper, they would be certain to create a storm of indignation among the Reformers generally. But not perceiving this, or, if he perceived it, undeterred by prudence and carried away by the conviction that he had a mission from God, the young Spaniard printed, in Strasburg in 1531, his work on the "Errors of the Trinity.” ↑

* When Servetus, next year, went to Strasburg he complained to Bucer, a noted Reformer residing there, of Ecolampadius' harsh treatment. Bucer probably wrote on the subject to colampadius: at

all events there is a letter extant addressed by the latter to Bucer in which he exculpates himself in these words: "I will be mild in other things, but not when I hear Jesus Christ blasphemed."-RUCHAT : Histoire de la Reformation de Suisse, vol. iii. Book 7.

+ De Trinitatis Erroribus, Libri Septem. As a specimen of the obscurity of definition to which I have referred, take the following from this work: "Christ was preformed in the Divine mind; he was a certain mode of existence which God constituted in himself, that he might make himself visible to us; namely by describing the effigies of Jesus Christ in Himself." (Erat Christus in mente divina præformatus; erat quidem modus se habendi, quem in se ipso Deus disposuit, ut seipsum nobis patefaceret, scilicet Jesu Christi effigiem in se discribendo.") Lib. vii. p. 110.