but probably very little the principle of them. As Romanist or Protestant, he must have equally led a life of intense devotion and spiritual work. For there were no elements of lawless affection in him, no excesses of youthful passion, and, moreover, no impulses of mere selfish desire that could have ever drawn him aside to the service of the flesh or the world. He was naturally fitted as well as divinely trained for the special work which he had to do. He found his career, or rather it found him, with a singular felicity, amid the exciting strifes into which he was born. Before his arrival in Geneva, he appeared very much the mere scholar and theologian. Intellectual study seemed not unlikely to divert and absorb his energies. But so soon as he settled there, his great practical and administrative qualities were drawn forth, and intellectual interest became henceforth subservient to that which he felt to be his peculiar mission, the reörganization of the divine kingdom in the world, as he saw and believed in it.

Combined with this strict simplicity of aim in Calvin there is a wonderful grandeur of endurance and power. Nowhere lovely, he is everywhere strong. Strength looks upon us with a naked glance from every feature of his life and work. He is stern and arbitrary and cruel, when it suits him, but never weak. He seldom mistakes, and as seldom fails. Confident in his own conclusions, and inflexible in his resolutions, he never goes back upon his practical policy, nor upon his theological views,' for revisal or modification, but always forward in expansive and consistent development. There is no wavering and no scruples in him. In all his pained and worn countenance you can

1 Beza has noticed this, Vita Calv. "In the doctrine which he delivered at the first, he persisted steadily to the last, scarcely making any change."

not trace a quivering of feebleness, scarce a spark of sensitiveness, only the forward and steady gaze of resolved and imperious duty, whatever it might cost him.

As to the more social aspects of his character, it becomes a very difficult task to be at once just and critical. On the one hand, even in the face of his acknowledged harshness in many cases, it is impossible to adopt the representations of some, and regard him as destitute of all warmth of affection. Many of his letters, on the contrary, arẻ marked by an affectionate interest, which, if not very warm or tender, is yet considerate and kindly. Then his relations. with Farel, and Viret, and Bucer, and still more Melancthon, from whom in many points he differed, sufficiently show that there was something in him lovable and capable of love, fitted both to engage sincere and deep regard, and to respond with an affectionate faithfulness to the friendly emotions which he excited. We have seen how his weary spirit clung to that of Melancthon, removed beyond the contentions of theological strife; and there is something peculiarly affecting in his long and sometimes very trying and delicate relations with Farel, consummated by that last kind and tender memorial which he sent him from his death-bed. On the other hand, it appears to us a misinterpretation of character altogether to read these tokens of friendly sympathy as being what have been called “the overflowings of a heart filled with the deepest and most acute sensibility." Overflowing of any kind is exactly what you never find in Calvin, even in his most familiar letters. His strongest expressions of affection are always calm and measured. When he condoles with Viret and Knox, for example, on the death of their wives, there is no

1 Preface to Letters Constable.

1

impulsive trembling or sensitive fulness in his tones, but only a becoming and regulated expression of grief. Then it cannot be forgotten that there are some of his letters full of fierce expressions of hatred and anger, which one can only read now with pity and sorrow.2 Affectionate and even hearty to his friends, let us admit him to have been, and capable of unbending so far as to play with the syndics at the game of the key (whatever that may have been), on a quiet evening; but Calvin was certainly not in the least a man of genial and overflowing sensibility. His temper was repressive and not expansive, concentrated and not sympathetic, and his heart burned more keenly with the fires of polemic indignation, than it ever glowed with the warmth of kindly or tender emotion.

There are nowhere in all his letters any joyous or pathetic exaggerations of sentiment-any of that play of feeling or of language which in Luther's letters make us so love the man. All this he would have thought mere waste of breath mere idleness, for which he had no time. The intensity of his purpose, the solemnity of his work, prevented him from ever looking around or relaxing himself in a free, happy, and outgoing communion with nature or life. Living as he did amid the most divine aspects of nature, you could not tell from his correspondence that they ever touched him that morning with its golden glories, or evening with its softened splendors, as day rose and set amid such transporting scenes, ever inspired him. The murmuring rush of the Rhone, the frown

1 His words to Knox, quoted by M'Crie, are: "Viduitas tua mihi ut debet, tristis et acerba est. Uxorem nactus eras cui non reperiuntur passim similes." His letters to Viret indicate perhaps more warmth of feeling (vol. ii. p. 22-24).

2 See especially a brief letter to Madame de Cany, vol. ii. p. 323.

ing outlines of the Jura, the snowy grandeur of Mont Blanc, might as well not have been, for all that they seemed to have affected him. No vestige of poetical feeling, no touch of descriptive color, ever rewards the patient. reader. All that exquisitely conscious sympathy with nature, and wavering responsiveness to its unuttered lessons, which brighten with an ever-recurring' freshness the long pages of Luther's letters, and which have wrought themselves as a very common-place into modern literature, is unknown, and would have been unintelligible to him. And no less all that fertile interest in life merely for its own sake its own joys and sorrows-brightness and sadness; the mystery, pathos, tenderness, and exuberance of mere human affection, which enrich the character of the great German there is nothing of all this in Calvin; no such yearning or sentimental aspirations ever touched him. Luther, in all things greater as a man, is infinitely greater here. And in truth this element of modern feeling and culture is Teutonic rather than Celtic in its growth. It springs out of the comparatively rich and genial soil of the Saxon mind, — deeper in its sensibilities, and more exuberant in its products.

On the whole, simplicity, grandeur, and consistency of purpose mark out Calvin from his fellows, and constitute the main elements of his greatness and influence. The same kind of consistency which we shall meet with in his system appears in his character a consistency not of manifold adaptation, but of stern comprehension. As the complexities of Christian doctrine in his theology are not merely evolved and laid side by side, but crushed into a unity, so his life is unique and symmetrical at the expense of richness and interest, and a whole and hearty humanity. Both can alone be truly judged in reference to the exigen

cies amidst which they were prepared and the work that they accomplished. Human progress needed both of them assuredly, although it is a melancholy and saddening reflection that it did so. It was a hard and bad world that needed Calvin as a reformer. And when we think of the Institutes in comparison with the Gospels, we cannot help acknowledging how far man was then, alas! is still, below his blessings how infinitely higher is the reach of divine truth than the response of human desire, or any capacity of human understanding.

An impression of majesty, and yet of sadness, must ever linger around the name of Calvin. He was great, and we admire him. The world needed him, and we honor him ; but we cannot love him. He repels our affections while he extorts our admiration; and while we recognize the worth, and the divine necessity, of his life and work, we are thankful to survey them at a distance, and to believe that there are also other modes of divinity governing the world, and advancing the kingdom of righteousness and truth.

According to what we have already said, the great distinction of Calvin, as we see him appearing within the sphere of the Reformation, is that in him the movement found its genius of order. He is from the outset of his career not at all, like Luther, the head of an onward struggle, but the representative of a new organization of the disturbing forces, spiritual and social, that were spreading all around in France and Switzerland. While, therefore, Luther is characteristically the hero, he is characteristically the legislator. He feels that the insurrectionary movement, which has been proceeding vigorously and fiercely for a quarter of a century, needs a guide some one, not