brought up. It was formerly thought that Calvin published this work with a view to influence the king to put a stop to the attacks on the Protestants, but there is nothing in the treatise itself or in the commentary to favour this opinion.
Soon after the publication of his first book Calvin returned to Orleans, where he stayed for a year, perhaps again reading law, and still undecided as to his life’s work. He visited Noyon in August 1533, and by October of the same year was settled again in Paris. Here and now his destiny became certain. The conservative theology was becoming discredited, and humanists like Jacques Lefèvre of Étaples (Faber Stapulensis) and Gérard Roussel were favoured by the court under the influence of Margaret of Angoulême, queen of Navarre and sister of Francis I. Calvin’s old friend, Nicolas Cop, had just been elected rector of the university and had to deliver an oration according to custom in the church of the Mathurins, on the feast of All Saints. The oration (certainly influenced but hardly composed by Calvin) was in effect a defence of the reformed opinions, especially of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. It is to the period between April 1532 and November 1533, and in particular to the time of his second sojourn at Orleans, that we may most fittingly assign the great change in Calvin which he describes (Praef. ad Psalmos; opera xxxi. 21-24) as his “sudden conversion” and attributes to direct divine agency. It must have been at least after his Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia that his heart was “so subdued and reduced to docility that in comparison with his zeal for true piety he regarded all other studies with indifference, though not entirely forsaking them. Though himself a beginner, many flocked to him to learn the pure doctrine, and he began to seek some hiding-place and means of withdrawal from people.” This indeed was forced upon him, for Cop’s address was more than the conservative party could bear, and Cop, being summoned to appear before the parlement of Paris, found it necessary, as he failed to secure the support either of the king, or of the university, to make his escape to Basel. An attempt was at the same time made to seize Calvin, but, being forewarned of the design by his friends, he also made his escape. His room in the Collège Fortet, however, was searched, and his books and papers seized, to the imminent peril of some of his friends, whose letters were found in his repositories. He went to Noyon, but, proceedings against him being dropped, soon returned to Paris. But desiring both security and solitude for study he left the city again about New Year of 1534 and became the guest of Louis du Tillet, a canon of the cathedral, at Angoulême, where at the request of his host he prepared some short discourses, which were circulated in the surrounding parishes, and read in public to the people. Here, too in du Tillet’s splendid library, he began the studies which resulted in his great work, the Institutes, and paid a visit to Nérac, where the venerable Lefèvre, whose revised translation of the Bible into French was published about this time, was spending his last years under the kindly care of Margaret of Navarre.
Calvin was now nearly twenty-five years of age, and in the ordinary way would have been ordained to the priesthood. Up till this time his work for the evangelical cause was not so much that of the public preacher or reformer as that of the retiring but influential scholar and adviser. Now, however, he had to decide whether, like Roussel and other of his friends, he should strive to combine the new doctrines with a position in the old church, or whether he should definitely break away from Rome. His mind was made up, and on the 4th of May he resigned his chaplaincy at Noyon and his rectorship at Pont l’Évêque. Towards the end of the same month he was arrested and suffered two short terms of imprisonment, the charges against him being not strong enough to be pressed. He seems to have gone next to Paris, staying perhaps with Étienne de la Forge, a Protestant merchant who suffered for his faith in February 1535. To this time belongs the story of the proposed meeting between Calvin and the Spanish reformer Servetus. Calvin’s movements at this time are difficult to trace, but he visited both Orleans and Poitiers, and each visit marked a stage in his development.
The Anabaptists of Germany had spread into France, and were disseminating many wild and fanatical opinions among those who had seceded from the Church of Rome. Among other notions which they had imbibed was that of a sleep of the soul after death. To Calvin this notion appeared so pernicious that he composed a treatise in refutation of it, under the title of Psychopannychia. The preface to this treatise is dated Orleans 1534, but it was not printed till 1542. In it he chiefly dwells upon the evidence from Scripture in favour of the belief that the soul retains its intelligent consciousness after its separation from the body—passing by questions of philosophical speculation, as tending on such a subject only to minister to an idle curiosity. At Poitiers Calvin gathered round him a company of cultured and gentle men whom in private intercourse he influenced considerably. Here too in a grotto near the town he for the first time celebrated the communion in the Evangelical Church of France, using a piece of the rock as a table.
The year 1534 was thus decisive for Calvin. From this time forward his influence became supreme, and all who had accepted the reformed doctrines in France turned to him for counsel and instruction, attracted not only by his power as a teacher, but still more, perhaps because they saw in him so full a development of the Christian life according to the evangelical model. Renan, no prejudiced judge, pronounces him “the most Christian man of his time,” and attributes to this his success as a reformer. Certain it is that already he had become conspicuous as a prophet of the new religion; his life was in danger, and he was obliged to seek safety in flight. In company with his friend Louis du Tillet, whom he had again gone to Angoulême to visit, he set out for Basel. On their way they were robbed by one of their servants, and it was only by borrowing ten crowns from their other servant that they were enabled to get to Strassburg, and thence to Basel. Here Calvin was welcomed by the band of scholars and theologians who had conspired to make that city the Athens of Switzerland, and especially by Oswald Myconius, the chief pastor, Pierre Viret and Heinrich Bullinger. Under the auspices and guidance of Sebastian Münster, Calvin now gave himself to the study of Hebrew.
Francis I., desirous to continue the suppression of the Protestants but anxious, because of his strife with Charles V., not to break with the Protestant princes of Germany, instructed his ambassador to assure these princes that it was only against Anabaptists, and other parties who called in question all civil magistracy, that his severities were exercised. Calvin, indignant at the calumny which was thus cast upon the reformed party in France, hastily prepared for the press his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which he published “first that I might vindicate from unjust affront my brethren whose death was precious in the sight of the Lord, and, next, that some sorrow and anxiety should move foreign peoples, since the same sufferings threatened many.” The work was dedicated to the king, and Calvin says he wrote it in Latin that it might find access to the learned in all lands.[1] Soon after it appeared he set about translating it into French, as he himself attests in a letter dated October 1536. This sets at rest a question, at one time much agitated, whether the book appeared first in French or in Latin. The earliest French edition known is that of 1540, and this was after the work had been much enlarged, and several Latin editions had appeared. In its first form the work consisted of only six chapters, and was intended merely as a brief manual of Christian doctrine. The chapters follow a traditional scheme of religious teaching: (1) The Law, (as in the Ten Words), (2) Faith (as in the Apostles’ Creed) (3) Prayer, (4) the Sacraments; to these were added (5) False Sacraments, (6) Christian liberty, ecclesiastical power and civil administration. The closing chapters of the work are more polemical than the earlier ones. His indebtedness to Luther is of course great, but his spiritual kinship with Martin Bucer of
- ↑ This edition forms a small 8vo of 514 pages, and 6 pages of index. It appeared at Basel from the press of Thomas Platter and Balthasar Lasius in March 1536, and was published by Johann Oporin. The dedicatory preface is dated 23rd August 1535. It is a masterpiece of apologetic literature. See W. Walker, John Calvin, 132 f., and for an outline of the contents of the treatise, ib. 137-149.
