Table Of ContentT AGES D L
HE IGITAL IBRARY
HISTORY
H
ISTORY OF THE
R
EFORMATION IN THE
C
TIME OF ALVIN
V . 7
OL
by J.H. Merle d’Aubigne
B o o k s F o r Th e A g e s
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Version 1.0 © 1998
2
HISTORY
OF THE
REFORMATION IN EUROPE
IN THE TIME OF CALVIN.
BY
J. H. MERLE D’AUBIGNE, D.D.,
AUTHOR OF the ‘HISTORY OF the REFORMATION OF the
SIXTEENTH CENTURY,’ ETC.
Les choses de petite duree ont coutume de devenir fanees, quand
elles ont passe leur temps.
‘Au regne de Christ, il n’y a que le nouvel homme qui soit
florissant, qui ait de la vigueur, et dont il faille faire cas.’
CALVIN.
VOL. 7
GENEVA. DENMARK, SWEDEN, NORWAY. HUNGARY, POLAND,
BOHEMIA. THE NETHERLANDS.
3
EDITOR’S PREFACE.
A WHOLE year has elapsed since the publication of the sixth volume of the
History of the Reformation. But this delay is owing to the fact that the
editor has been unable to devote to this under-taking more than the scanty
leisure hours of an active ministry; and not, as some have supposed, to the
necessity of compiling the History from notes more or less imperfect left
by the author. The following narrative, like that which has preceded it, is
wholly written by M. Merle d’Aubigne himself.
The editor repeats the statement made on the publication of the last
volume—that his task has consisted solely in verifying the numerous
quotations occurring in the text or as foot-notes, and in curtailing, in two
or three places, some general reflections which interfered with the rapid
flow of the narrative, and which the author would certainly have either
suppressed or condensed if it had been permitted him to put the finishing
touches to his work.
We can only express our gratitude to the public for the reception given to
the posthumous volume which we have already presented to them.
Criticism, of course, has everywhere accompanied praise. The estimates
formed by the author of this or that character have not been accepted by
all readers; and the journals have been the organs of the public sentiment.
One important English review f1 has censured the author for placing
himself too much at the evangelical point of view. It is unquestionable that
this is indeed the point of view at which M. Merle d’Aubigne stood. This
was not optional with him; he could not do otherwise. By conviction, by
feeling, by nature, by his whole being, he was evangelical. But was this the
point of view best adapted to afford, him a real comprehension of the
epoch, the history of which he intended to relate? This is the true
question, and the answer seems obvious. If we consider the fact that the
theologians of the revival at Geneva have been especially accused of having
been too much in bondage to the theology of the sixteenth century, we
shall acknowledge that this evangelical point of view was the most
favorable to all accurate understanding of the movement of the
Reformation, and to a just expression of its ideas and tendencies. No one
4
could better render to us the aspect of the sixteenth century than one of
those men who, if we may so speak, have restored it in the nineteenth.
The criticism most commonly applied to M. Merle d’Aubigne is that he
has displayed a bias in favor of the men of the Reformation; and especially
in favor of Calvin. That the author of the History of the Reformation feels
for Calvin a certain tenderness, and that he is inclined to excuse, to a
certain extent, his errors and even his faults, may be admitted. But it is no
less indisputable that this tendency has never led him to palliate or to
conceal those errors or faults. He pronounces a judgment; and this is
sometimes a justification or an excuse. But he has in the first place
narrated; and this narration has been perfectly accurate. The kindly feeling,
or, as some say, the partiality of the writer may have deprived his
estimate of the severity which others would have thought needful; but it
has not falsified his view. His glance has remained keen and clear, and
historical truth comes forth from the author’s narratives with complete
impartiality. These narratives themselves furnish the reader with the
means of arriving at a different conclusion from that which the author has
himself drawn.
May we not add that M. Merle d’Aubigne’s love for his hero, admitting
the indisputable sincerity of the historian, far from being a ground of
suspicion, imparts a special value to his judgments? For nearly sixty years
M. Merle lived in close intimacy with Calvin. He carefully investigated his
least writings, seized upon and assimilated all his thoughts, and entered, as
it were, into personal intercourse with the great reformer. Calvin
committed some faults. Who disputes this? But he did not commit these
faults with deliberate intention. He must have yielded to motives which he
thought good, and, were it only in the blindness of passion, must have
justified his actions to his own conscience. In the main, it is this self-
justification on Calvin’s part which M. Merle d’Aubigne has succeeded
better than anyone else in making known to us. He has depicted for us a
living Calvin; he has revealed to us his inmost thought; and when, in the
work which I am editing, I meet with an approving judgment in which I
cannot join without some reservation, I imagine nevertheless that if Calvin,
rising from the tomb, could himself give me his reasons, he would give me
no others than those which I find set forth in these pages. If this view is
correct, and it seems to me difficult to doubt it, has not the author solved
5
one of the hardest problems of history—to present the true physiognomy
of characters, and to show them as they were; under the outward aspect of
facts to discover and depict the minds of men?
Moreover, the greater number of these general criticisms are matters of
taste, of tendency, of views and of temperament. There are others which
would be important if they were well-founded. Such are those which bear
upon the accuracy of the work, almost upon the veracity of the author.
Fortunately it is easy to overthrow them by a rapid examination.
‘M. Merle,’ it has been said, f2 ‘makes use of his vast knowledge
of the works of the reformers to borrow from them passages which
he arbitrarily introduces out of their place and apart from the
circumstances to which they relate. Thus sentences taken from
works of Calvin written during the last periods of his life are
transformed into sentences pronounced by him twenty or twenty-
five years earlier. That which on one occasion was written with his
pen, is in regard to another occasion, put into his lips. We may,
without pedantry, refuse to consider this process in strict
conformity with that branch of truth which is called accuracy.’
It is true that, in vol. vi., M. Merle d’Aubigne applies to the year 1538
words uttered by Calvin about twenty-five years later, at the time of his
death in 1564:—‘have lived here engaged in strange contests. I have been
saluted in mockery of an evening before my own door with fifty or sixty
shots of arquebuses. You may imagine how that must astound a poor
scholar, timid as I am, and as I confess I always was.’ But these words,
spoken by Calvin many years after the event, referred precisely to that
year, 1538. The historian has quoted them at the very date to which they
belong; nor could he have omitted them without a failure in accuracy.
The following is, however, the only proof given of this alleged want of
accuracy:—
‘At the time when Calvin had just succeeded in establishing in
Geneva what he considered to be the essential conditions of a
Christian church, he had published, in the name of his colleagues,
some statement of the success which they had just achieved, and
had given expression to the sentiments of satisfaction and hope
6
which they felt. Of this statement, to which events almost
immediately gave a cruel contradiction, M. Merle has made use to
depict the personal feelings and disposition of Calvin after the
check which, his work had sustained. The conditions are altogether
changed. Instead of triumphing, the reformer is banished; and,
nevertheless, the language which he used in the days of triumph is
employed to characterize his steadfastness and constancy in the
days of exile.’
The document here spoken of is a preface by Calvin to the Latin edition of
his Catechism. In the original edition it bears date March 1538. It is now
before us; we have read and re-read it, and we cannot imagine by what
strange illusion there could be seen in it a statement of the success which
Calvin and his colleagues had just achieved. It does not contain one
vestige of satisfaction or of hope, not a trace of triumph. It is an
unaccountable mistake to suppose that it was written in days of triumph.
It was written in March 1538, in the very stress of the storm which, a few
days later, April 23, was to result in the banishment of the reformer and
the momentary destruction of his work at Geneva. This storm had begun
to take shape on November 25, 1537, at a general council (assembly of the
people), in which the most violent attacks had been directed against Calvin
and against the government of the republic. From this time, says M.
Merle, ‘the days of the party in power were numbered.’ f3 In fact, the
government favorable to Calvin was overthrown February 3, 1538. On
that day the most implacable enemies of the reformer came into power.
Thus, in March, Calvin, far from thinking of a triumph, was thinking of
defending himself. The preface which stands at the head of his catechism is
not the statement of success already seriously impaired, but an apologia
for his proceedings and his faith, a reply to the ‘calumnies aimed against
his innocence and his integrity,’ f4 to ‘the false accusations of which he is
a victim.’ f5 The following is the analysis of the preface, given by
Professor Reuss, of Strasburg, in the Prolegomena to Vol. 5. of the Opera
Calvini, p. 43:—
‘The occasion for publishing, in Latin, this book was furnished by
Peter Caroli, doctor and prior of the Sorbonne. This doctor, after
having spread abroad iniquitous rumors against Farel, Viret, and
Calvin, broke out passionately in open accusations against these
7
men, his colleagues, who were equally distinguished by their faith
and their moral character, imputing to them the Arian and Sabellian
heresies and other similar corruptions. At this time there existed no
other public monument of the faith of the Genevese church but the
Confession of Farel and the Catechism of Calvin; and these, as they
were written in French, were almost unknown to the rest of the
Swiss churches. For this reason Calvin translated into Latin his
own Catechism and the Confession of Farel, in order to make
known through this version to all his brethren in Switzerland the
doctrine which he had hitherto professed at Geneva, and to show
that the charge of heresy brought against it was without
foundation.’ f6
It must be added that Calvin, in this preface, does not confine himself to
the refutation of the charges of heresy drawn up against him by Caroli; but
he vindicates his own course at Geneva, particularly in that vexatious
affair of the oath which gave rise to the debate of November 25, 1537, the
overthrow of the government on February 3, 1538, and the expulsion of
Calvin and his friends on April 23 following. This document is, with the
letters written by Calvin at this period; the most precious source of
information as to the reformer’s feelings during this cruel struggle; and in
quoting it at this place the author has made a judicious use of it.
Let us quote further some words from an article in the Athenaeum, of
which we have already spoken. In the course of criticisms, sometimes
severe, the writer acknowledges that ‘there are to be found in this volume,
in unimpaired vigor, the qualities we admired in its predecessors. Few
narratives are more moving than the simple tale of the death of Hamilton,
the first of the Scotch martyrs; and the same may be said of the chapter
devoted to Wishart.’ In regard to Calvin the same writer tells us—‘M.
Merle possessed, as we have already remarked, a knowledge truly
marvelous of the writings of Calvin; and there are few books which enable
us to understand so well as M. Merle’s the mind of the reformer—not
perhaps as he was on every occasion, but such as he would have wished to
be.’
Professor F. Godet, of Neuchatel, expresses the same opinions and insists
on them. f7 After having spoken of that stroke of a masterly pencil which
8
was one of the most remarkable gifts of M. Merle d’Aubigne,’ he adds—
‘it is always that simple and dignified style, calm and yet full of
earnestness, majestic as the course of a great river, we might say—like the
whole aspect of the author himself. But what appears to us above all to
distinguish the manner of M. Merle is his tender and reverential love for
his subject. The work which he describes possesses his full sympathy. He
loves it as the work of his Savior and his God. Jesus would no longer be
what he is for the faith of the writer if he had not delivered, aided,
corrected, chastened, governed and conquered as he does in this history.
St. John, in the Apocalypse, shows us the Lamb opening the seals of the
book containing the designs of God with respect to his church. M. Merle,
in writing history, appears to see in the events which he relates so many
seals which are broken under the hand of the King of Kings. In each fact he
discerns one of the steps of his coming as spouse of the church or as judge
of the world. And just as the leaves of the divine roll were written not
only without but within, M. Merle is not satisfied with portraying the
outside of events, but endeavors to penetrate to the divine idea which
constitutes the essence, and to unveil it before the eyes of his reader. Do
not therefore require him to be what’s called an objective historian, and to
hold himself coldly aloof from the facts which he recalls to mind. Is not
this faith of the sixteenth century, of which he traces the awakening, the
struggles, defeats and victories, his own faith and the life of his own soul?
Are not these men whom he describes, Calvin, Farel, Viret, bone of his
bone, flesh of his flesh? Are not these churches, whose birth and first
steps in life he relates, his own spiritual family? The reader himself, to
whom his narrative is addressed, is for him an immortal soul, which he
would fain make captive to the faith of the Reformation. He does not for
an instant lay aside, as narrator, his dignity as a minister of Christ. The
office of historian is in his case a priesthood. Not that he falls into the
error of determining at all cost to glorify his heroes, to palliate their
weaknesses, to excuse their errors, or to present facts in a light different
from that objective truth to which he has been led by the conscientious
study of the documents. The welfare of the church of to-day for which he
desires to labor, may as surely result from the frank avowal and the severe
judgment of faults committed, as from admiration of everything ,which has
been done according to the will of God.’
9
The same judgment was lately pronounced by the author of a great work
on French literature, recently published, f8 Lieutenant-Colonel Staaf. It is
in the following terms that the author introduces M. Merle d’Aubigne to
the French public:—‘M. de Remusat has said of this work—“It may have
had a success among Protestants (un succes de secte), but it deserves a
much wider one, for it is one of the most remarkable books in our
language.” We might add one of the most austere, for it is at once the work
of a historian and of a minister of the gospel. It would be a mistake to
suppose that the author has sacrificed the narrative portion of his history
to the exposition and defense of the doctrines of the Reformation.
Without seeking after effects of coloring, without concerning himself with
form apart from thought, he has succeeded in reproducing the true
physiognomy of the age whose great and fruitful movements he has
narrated. All the Christian communities over which the resistless breath of
the Reformation passed live again in spirit and in act in this grand drama,
the principal episodes of which are furnished by Germany, France,
Switzerland, and England. In order to penetrate so deeply as he has done
into the moral life of the reformers, M. Merle was not satisfied with
merely searching the histories of the sixteenth century; he has drawn from
sources the existence of which was scarcely suspected before they had
been opened to him.’... ‘Now, at whatever point of view we may take our
stand, it is no subject for regret that for writing the story of the conflicts
and too often of the execution of so many men actuated by the most
generous and unalterable convictions, the pen has been held by a believer
rather than by a skeptic. It was only a descendant and a spiritual heir of
the apostles of the Reformation who could catch and communicate the fire
of their pure enthusiasm, in a book in which their passions have left no
echoes. M. Merle d’Aubigne—and this is one of the peculiar
characteristics of his work—has satisfied with an antique simplicity the
requirements of his twofold mission. It is only when the conscience of the
historian has given all the guarantees of fairness and impartiality that one
had a right to expect from it that the pastor has indulged in the
outpourings of his faith.’
We close with the words of Professor F. Bonifas, of Montauban: f9—‘In
this volume are to be found the eminent qualities which have earned for M.
Merle d’Aubigne the first place among the French historians of the
10
Reformation: wealth and authenticity of information, a picturesque
vivacity of narration, breadth and loftiness of view, a judicious estimate of
men and things, and in addition to all these a deeply religious and Christian
inspiration animating every page of the book. The writer’s faculties
remained young in spite of years, and this fruit of his ripe old age recalls
the finest productions of his youth and manhood.’
A last volume will appear (D.V.) before the end of the present year.
Ad. Duchemin.
Lyons, May 1870.
