Bern, when the Swiss succeeded in conquering the whole of the country of Vaud, and thus relieved Geneva of all immediate danger from the Duke. | Calvin at Geneva, 1536-1538, 1541-1564. Calvin, induced to stay in Geneva at this moment, commenced forthwith to found a Christian church after the model of the _Institutes_; but the severity of his system led to a reaction, and caused his exile, and that of Farel, in 1538. Three years afterwards (September 1541), the city, torn by internal discord, and afraid of being conquered either by the Duke, who was supported by the Catholics within the walls, or by Bern, which courted the Protestants, recalled the Reformer, and accepted his system of church-government. Leaving the municipal government of the city intact, he set up by its side an ecclesiastical consistory, consisting of the pastors, and twelve elders elected from the two councils of the town on the nomination of the clergy. The jurisdiction of this consistory was nominally confined to morals, and the regulation of Church matters. It could only punish by penance, and by exclusion from the Sacrament, but as it was the duty of the secular authority to enforce its decisions, every sin became a crime, punished with the utmost severity. All were forced by law to attend public worship, and partake of the Lord’s Supper. To wear clothes of a forbidden stuff, to dance at a wedding, to laugh at Calvin’s sermons, became an offence punishable at law. Banishment, imprisonment, sometimes death, were the penalties inflicted on unchastity, and a child was beheaded for having struck his parents. When offences such as these were so severely visited, we cannot wonder that heresy did not escape. In 1547, Gruet was executed, and in 1553, Servetus was burnt. This remorseless tyranny, which reminds one forcibly of the rule of Savonarola, was not established without opposition. A party termed the Libertines was formed, who endeavoured to relax the severity of the discipline, and to vindicate the independence of the secular authority. Nevertheless Calvin, aided by the French exiles who crowded into Geneva and obtained the freedom of the city and a share in the government, successfully maintained his supremacy until his death in 1564, when he was succeeded by his pupil, Théodore Beza. Geneva had been relieved from fear of attack from the Duke of Savoy by the French conquest of his country in 1543, and although, in the October of the year in which Calvin died, the Duke obtained from Bern a restoration of all the country south of the Lake of Geneva which it had seized in 1536, he did not make any attempt on the city itself. Geneva continued to be an independent republic, forming from time to time alliances with some of the Swiss cantons, till 1815, when she finally became a member of the Swiss Confederation. | Characteristics of Calvinism.