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.

Such real Protestant feeling as existed was due to the teaching of the 'chétif malheureux prédicant nommé Guillaume' as that piquante writer, Sister Jeanne de Jussie, of the exiled sisterhood of St. Clara, describes him- William Farel, one of the firebrands of the Reformation, who having quarrelled with Erasmus and disgusted Oecolampadius had come all uninvited to Geneva in 1532, together with Saunier, afterwards Calvin's right hand in the matter of education. For four years, with intervals of exile, Farel and his friends, Froment and Viret, had waged war against the Romish harlot,' in the midst of threats, tumults, and even murders, culminating in an attempt, real or fictitious, to poison them all three. The facts are disputed: the woman accused was a Protestant, and the priest whom she accused of suborning her was certainly innocent; nor does her own execution prove anything in such times; in fact, that Viret was taken ill after dinner is the one statement which can be really substantiated.' But the affair gave a final blow to the tottering Romanist influence in the city, and Farel was able to take a leading part in the iconoclasm of 1535 and the public declaration of May 21, 1536. But there his successes ended. His savage intolerance was not backed by the necessary moral vigour; and he knew it. It was small wonder that he regarded the chance arrival of Calvin as a blessing sent direct from heaven.

2

With regard to the moral condition of Geneva, the idea has prevailed that Calvin found the town a sink of voluntary iniquity and left it a garden of compulsory virtues. This is partly true and partly false. Both Romanist and Protestant writers have found their account in blackening the

'Kampschulte, Johann Calvin, i. 159, seems far more impartial than his critic Doumergue (ii. 131).

* Cf. Dyer, pp. 59, 60, and the disgraceful story of his proceedings at Neuchâtel, given in full by Doumergue, ii. App. iv. There was something in Farel's character peculiarly antipathetic to women, possibly connected with the foul nickname given him by Erasmus (Dyer, p. 46). On his missionary expedition to Metz in 1542 (Dyer, p. 165) it was women who attacked and nearly killed him. Viret, on the other hand, was beloved by all, and poor ill-regulated Froment gained his first successes among the children.

picture the former to shew the bad results of rebellion against episcopal rule; the latter to enhance the value of Calvin's influence. But undoubtedly the state of public morals had been deplorable. The canons were open patrons of houses of ill-fame, were even said to own them; that they acted as laymen, and dissolute laymen too, we are assured; and that they could use their swords with dexterity we see from the history of the Farel riots. So far from the Church sanctifying the world, the world had very effectually secularized the Church; and apart from this, the morality of the townsfolk was, as is proved from the public records, singularly bad. Gambling, drunkenness, adultery, and blasphemy were rife, and a 'Reine du Bordel' had been regularly appointed by the magistrates for more than a century. But it is not true that Calvin was the first to attempt to deal with this state of things. Attendance at public worship had long been enforced. A compulsory service at four o'clock in the morning-for servants, poor creatures!-had been established, and proclamations issued against fornication and blasphemy. Innkeepers had been forbidden to allow profane swearing, playing at cards or dice, or the serving of liquor to any person after nine at night. The lieutenant of the city, Curtet, was imprisoned and deposed for keeping a mistress, and Jean Balard, a former syndic, was prosecuted for non-attendance at sermon and for refusing to say that the Mass was bad.

This latter was, indeed, a crucial case. It exemplifies the ugly state of things for which the ugly name of 'caesaropapism' has been coined. Kampschulte well describes Balard's position, an honoured and sane magistrate and no fanatic, nobly pleading for broad tolerance and freedom of conscience, but compelled to submit his religious convictions to the apparent political necessities of the day.' In fact the clerical authority, its lawful representatives banished, was

1 Translated by H. D. Foster in his admirable paper on 'Geneva before Calvin.' (American Historical Review, Jan. 1903). His conclusion is that Calvin did not make Geneva intolerant. Indeed, Geneva had gone further than Berne in the suppression of the holy days; and Berne disapproved.

promptly usurped by the magistrate, whose intention it was to imitate the Protestant Swiss cantons in making the Church entirely subservient to the State and assuming episcopal power even to the extent of imposing and removing the penalty of excommunication. In this even fiery Reformers like Zwingli had acquiesced. Geneva was to find in Calvin a man of different mould.

The citizens had sworn to live in the holy evangelical law and Word of God.' But who was to enforce the 'holy evangelical law'? At first it seemed as if the civil authorities would be able to do so. They had already in June 1535 organized a more or less farcical disputation between the two religions, in which, for want of a better, an unsavoury professional renegade named Caroli, afterwards to prove a thorn in Calvin's side, appeared as defender of Holy Church. The decision, a foregone one, was pronounced by the magistrates, who also took upon them to prohibit the Mass, to distribute the property of the Church, and to suppress all holy days except Sundays. The enforcement of attendance at school was also attempted.

This was by no means a theocracy or rather a clerocracy of the kind desired by Farel and his friends; but, active enough in destruction, they were conscious of weakness in constructive power, and of the want of the dignity necessary to enable them to fight syndics and councils. Hence when it was told him by du Tillet, then a Protestant, that Calvin, already recognized among the Reformers as a man of commanding genius, was passing through Geneva, Farel adopted such means to keep him there as seem to us outrageous. 'God,' he said, assuming that knowledge of the counsels of the Almighty which was the badge of the School,' will curse your studies if you do not stay." Of Calvin's reluctance to enter on the arena which was to be the scene of his future autocracy we need not doubt, but we need not attribute it to excessive humility. Geneva was not likely to prove a bed of roses, nor was the little town of some 13,000

1 Calvin, Praef. ad Psalmos: usque ad execrationem descendit, ut Deus otio meo malediceret.' 'Otium' is not an easy word to translate here.