Two or three days later, on November 1, 1533, came the famous rectorial
address which Calvin wrote, and Cop revised and delivered, and which
shows how far the humanist had travelled since April 4, 1532, the date
of the _de Clementia_. He is now alive to the religious question, though
he has not carried it to its logical and practical conclusion. Two fresh
influences have evidently come into his life, the New Testament of
Erasmus and certain sermons by Luther. The exordium of the address
reproduces, almost literally, some sentences from Erasmus' _Paraclesis_,
including those which unfold his idea of the _philosophia Christiana_;
while the body of it repeats Luther's exposition of the beatitudes and
his distinction between law and gospel, with the involved doctrines of
grace and faith. Yet "_Ave gratia plena_" is retained in the exordium;
and at the end the peace-makers are praised, who follow the example of
Christ and contend not with the sword, but with the word of truth.
This address enables us to seize Calvin in the very act and article of
change; he has come under a double influence. Erasmus has compelled him
to compare the ideal of Christ with the church of his own day; and
Luther has given him a notion of grace which has convinced his reason
and taken possession of his imagination. He has thus ceased to be a
humanist and a papist, but has not yet become a reformer. And a reformer
was precisely what his conscience, his country, and his reason compelled
him to become. Francis was flagrantly immoral, but a fanatic in
religion; and mercy was not a virtue congenial to either church or
state. Calvin had seen the Protestants from within; he knew their
honesty, their honor, the purity of their motives, and the integrity of
their lives; and he judged, as a jurist would, that a man who had all
the virtues of citizenship ought not to be oppressed and treated as
unfit for civil office or even as a criminal by the state. This is no
conjecture, for it is confirmed by the testimony he bears to the
influence exercised over him by the martyred Etienne de la Forge. He
thus saw that a changed mind meant a changed religion, and a changed
religion a change of abode. Cop had to flee from Paris, and so had
Calvin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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