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Updated: June 5, 2025
But the Christian's duty, the Reformer's zeal, the lively apprehension of the perils which were being incurred by the cause of the Reformation, and the nobly ambitious hope of delivering it, these sentiments united prevailed over the first misgivings of that great and mighty soul, and Calvin devoted himself in Geneva to a work which, from 1536 to 1564, in a course of violent struggles and painful vicissitudes, was to absorb and rapidly consume his whole life.
War and Peace, a description of Napoleonic times in Russia, found scant favour with Liberals or Conservatives in the East, but it ranked as a great work of fiction. Anna Karenina gave descriptions of society in town and country that were unequalled even by Turgeniev, the writer whose friendship with Tolstoy was often broken by fierce quarrels. The reformer's nature suffered nothing artificial.
Hardly can such a brilliant statement of the case be found elsewhere in literature. It is not necessary to quote here the reformer's side of the question, for Emerson's whole life was devoted to it. The conservatives' attitude he gives with such accuracy and such justice that the very bankers of State Street seem to be speaking:
In fact, the resolution to grant Zwingli's petition was at last carried. Besides, the Council could justify itself with the Bishop by his own inactivity, by his refusal of the just prayer to institute a synod or convocation of learned men for the examination of the Reformer's doctrine.
Like the good Protestants her Majesty and the Prince were, they went to see the great reformer's room, and looked at the ink-splash on the wall the mark of his conflict with the devil the stove at which he warmed himself, the rude table at which he wrote and ate, and above all, the glorious view over the myriads of tree-tops with which he must have refreshed his steadfast soul.
At the same time, though Elsmere was, in truth, more interested in her friends than in her, he could not possibly be insensible to the consideration shown for him in her drawing-room. Madame de Netteville allowed herself plenty of jests with her intimates as to the young reformer's social simplicity, his dreams, his optimisms.
So Randolph, possibly fresh from the sound of the Reformer's preaching, writes of him to Cecil: "Where your honour exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the voice of one man is able, in an hour, to put more life in us than six hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears." M'Crie's LIFE OF KNOX, ii. 41. Thus was the proclamation made. Nor was it long in wakening all the echoes of Europe.
It is not the incredibleness of a metaphysical belief, but a laxity or cowardice of the practice connected with it, which can point the reformer's gibe and wing his sarcasm. Theodore Parker virtually told the Christian minister that he must reprove profitable and popular sins, or else stand at great disadvantage in the trial between Rationalism and Supernaturalism which is vexing the age.
So Randolph, possibly fresh from the sound of the Reformer's preaching, writes of him to Cecil: "Where your honour exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the voice of one man is able, in an hour, to put more life in us than six hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears." Thus was the proclamation made. Nor was it long in wakening all the echoes of Europe.
He had, of course, not accomplished the whole Augean task of purification. He was a vigorous Huguenot, but no Hercules, and demigods might have shrunk appalled at the filthy mass of corruption which great European kingdoms everywhere presented to the reformer's eye. Compared to the Spanish Government, that of France might almost have been considered virtuous, yet even there everything was venal.
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