After leaving Noyon in 1534 Calvin reappears, in legend at all events, at Poitiers, and presently thereafter at Orleans again. A short sojourn at Paris had, we may note, made him and Michael Servetus acquainted. But it was at Basel, to which he betook himself practically as an exile, that he finally elaborated the Institutes. Whether he meant it expressly for that purpose or not, the book was destined to give cohesion to the scattered congregations of the Reformed in France, till that time sporadic and a prey to uncertainty, confusion, and anarchy; they needed a common text-book, ' a form of sound words,' and they found it in the Institutes. Calvin, it is true, assigns in his autobiographical Preface to the Commentary on the Psalms a somewhat different origin to the work. He says it was written to convince the world that the Reformed were no infidels or evil-livers; and to that purpose the famous preface certainly answers. The book itself was in six chapters only-afterwards to be elaborated into four books and eighty chapters; and it contained by implication only the dogmas afterwards identified with Calvinism. It was concerned with faith and conduct, and only in the last chapter did the theocratic theory really appear. Magistrates were ordained of God and ought to be obeyed. So far Holy Scripture; but there comes in the authorized interpreter, the prophet, and explains that away. God is above all and when He speaks He alone is to be listened toCalvino interprete-nor may we seek to please men by offending God. Ergo, if the king command what God has forbidden, we must fear God and disobey the king.

From this small beginning sprang the great doctrinal compendium to which Calvin's fame so greatly attaches; and of the completed work a few words must here be said From the plain man's point of view it is the product of a cold and bloodless logic starting from two false premises. The first of these is that Holy Scripture is encyclopaedic in character; that it affords a basis for rules to govern the whole of the varied activities of mankind, and in especial civil polity. It was this last which brought the Old Testament into such undesirable prominence in Puritan language and belief. Scripture was to take the place of the infallible

judgement of the Papacy. Men must have some ultimate court of appeal when in religious doubt; well, they should have it in the Bible, said Calvin, and he would interpret it for them. Half the troubles of Geneva arose from this blind arrogation of supernatural powers-for they were no less; and similarly a personal claim to superior knowledge underlay the second false premise. God, it was posited, is an absolute monarch: limitation of His monarchy is unthinkable; but the free will of man would limit it; therefore free will is impossible. It will be observed that all idea of the Fatherhood of God and of His Love towards mankind is pushed out of sight, and also that Calvin claims a knowledge of God which only a special revelation could have given him. To quote Guizot' again 'he meditates and imagines, and if I dared I would say that he presents God to us and describes Him as if he knew Him thoroughly and had exclusive possession of Him. He then summons man into the presence of God, and denies or calmly rejects everything in Him which does not accord with or cannot be adjusted to the God whom he has conceived and depicted.' 'He denies the free will of man and affirms his predestination because he imagines that man's free will is opposed to the idea which he has formed of the omnipotence and omniscience of God, and that this predestination is necessary to it.' In short it is Calvin's God as well as Calvin's Bible that must be accepted. For the working out of the system-' the scheme of damnation' as it has been called; for the justification of the punishment of thieves and murderers who sin' with an enslaved will and yet voluntarily '2; for the ascription to God Himself of the legitimate use of their wickedness' 3 for the assertion that conscience accuses them of doing what God has ordained them to do, we must go to the book itself.

But the preface is indeed a masterpiece of eloquence and reasoned remonstrance. It does not implore toleration as a concession, but claims freedom (?) as a right. The king ought to be just; to condemn unheard is unjust . . . and if the king fail to act as a minister of God, he is a robber and

1 Op. cit. [E. T.], p. 196. 2 Instit. II. v. $ 5. • Ibid. I. xvii. § 5.

no king. And then we have a magnificent passage summing up the sufferings of the heretic in language not unlike that of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, but ending with the curious bathos which often betrays Calvin's want of sense of proportion: 'we are treated in most unbecoming ways' ('indignissimis modis tractamur').

Around the story of the Reformer's life from the early part of 1536 till his arrival at Geneva in July of that year the mists of legend have gathered. That he visited the court of Ferrara, where at the time the Duchess Renée of France, daughter of Louis XII. (who, as she said, 'had she but had a beard on her chin' would have been ruler of Catholics and Reformed alike), was sheltering poor French refugees, is certain. With her he established relations which lasted many years and a correspondence in which he shines, as he could shine when his personal dignity was not endangered, as an apostle of toleration. Yet even here his personal dislikes make themselves felt; he will have her2 to dismiss her almoner François Richardot (the name sounds Genevan) for some petty reason; and she will not. As for himself he had to quit Ferrara when Hercules d'Este, the Duke, for political reasons, suddenly turned persecutor; and then romance environs him. A circumstantial account is given by the imaginative Merle d'Aubigné3 of his arrest by the minions of the Inquisition and his rescue from them as they were hurrying him off to Papal territory; while another Protestant romancer, Jules Bonnet, describes in vivid language his visit to the faithful few in the Val d'Aosta, his sojourn outside the city in a farmhouse, the nocturnal visits of his quaking adherents, and finally his flight, pursued by the Marshal of Savoy, the Count of Chalans, ' with a drawn sword, to the very foot of the mountains 'as if the Alps were a kind of practicable side-scene on the stage. To this legend tradition has added stories of hair

1 Cf. A. M. Fairbairn, Cambridge Modern History, ii. 356.

* Bonnet, Lettres Françaises, 2 vols. (Paris, 1854), i. 43-56. The editor assigns the letter to 1541; Walker, with more probability, to 1537 Doumergue, ii. 55-56. Muratori had been led into the same error, • Ibid. ii. 89-94.

breadth escapes among the Alps, supported by place-names such as Calvin's window' and the like. In the story of the Inquisition there appears to be no single word of truth; in that of Aosta merely the probability that Calvin passed through the valley. The mystic inscription' upon the cross in the market-place of the town, ' Hanc Calvini fuga erexit, anno MDXLI: religionis constantia reparavit, anno MDCCXLI,' &c., is but a fustian riddle, and it is even suggested that it refers to the defeat of Calvinism and its extirpation. Certainly 1541 has nothing to do with the Reformer's flight from Ferrara. If we confine ourselves to facts, we find that he now (1536) visited Noyon for the last time, and on trying to get thence to Strassburg found Lorraine so full of Imperial troops that he went round by Geneva, where he found his destiny and his life's work.

It was a strange little town, French in language, Italian in religion, Swiss in politics, and commercially and industrially German; and its constitution was as anomalous as its position. A bishop in the Holy Roman Empire was as a rule sovereign prince in his diocese except in his capital, which was free. But the Bishop of Geneva was master in his own house, checked only by the democratic spirit of the citizens and the ever watchful aggressiveness of the Dukes of Savoy, who maintained within the city a kind of podestà, the Vicedomne,' nominally Lieutenant of the Church but really representative of the Duke and not reckoned as a citizen. The burgesses might be called together in Council General, but were commonly represented by a greater senate of 200, instituted after the alliance of the city with the Swiss cantons and in imitation of these; a lesser council of sixty, of whom we hear little; and an executive body of about twenty-four, of whom four were the annually elected 'syndics' or chief magistrates, and

1 Dr. McCrie junior and F. Bungener (Calvin: his Life, Labours, and Writings [E. T.] Edinburgh 1863, p. 83) both regard the monument as celebrating the triumph of Romanism. The latter gives a very circumstantial version of the legend.

2 The lists given by Roget at the end of each of his volumes vary considerably in number.

four the ex-syndics of the previous year. Though elective this body tended to become oligarchic, and it was this which enabled Calvin and Farel to exercise such power. A pure democracy they would have found less easy to handle; but by a series of ruthless banishments, which remind us of the worst revolutions of ancient Greece, they brought it about that there was no one left to elect save their own partisans.

Down to the beginning of the seventeenth century the domains of the Dukes of Savoy extended as far as Lyons, and their efforts to secure the one little enclave therein formed by Geneva and its dependent villages were untiring. They had their adherents within the town, known as 'Mamelukes' in opposition to the Swiss party, the 'Eyguenots' (a corruption of Eidgenoss ') and during the first two decades of the century the ducal influence gained ground under a Bishop who was himself a bastard of Savoy. But neither he nor his well-meaning successor, Peter de la Baume, could overcome the stubborn Genevan spirit, which was fortified by alliances first with Catholic Fribourg and then with Protestant Berne. Between these two it was presently necessary to choose. Both had rendered help; but Berne was more powerful and more politic, and in the end the Genevans adhered to her, accepting her thinly veiled protectorate, and, one may almost add, her religion. They were rewarded in 1536 by the complete dispersal of the besieging Savoyard army and the questionable advantage of the extension of their allies' territory (by the conquest of Vaud) well nigh to the gates of their city. The Bishop's authority was repudiated, the Church lands seized, and their owners expelled; there was a general breaking of images, and on May 21, 1536, the assembled citizens swore to live according to the precepts of the Gospel. Already in the preceding year under Bernese influence the public celebration of Mass had been forbidden, and what now took place was little more than a public acknowledgment of that influence. Certainly there was very little intention, on the part of such reformers, of reforming their own lives: that was to be done for them forcibly, and John Calvin was to do it.