Well might Calvin be weary of controversy! And yet we have still to notice the two most memorable struggles in which he was engaged, viz., his final contest with the Libertines, with Amy Perrin at their head, and the sad affair of Servetus.

The renewed contest with the Libertines was protracted during a long period, and was beyond doubt the central contest of Calvin's existence-waged hand to hand, and for life or death, through many strange turns and changes. It did not terminate till about two years after the death of Servetus, and this latter event is in some degree mixed up with it; but it will be more convenient to complete our view of it, before passing to consider the circumstances connected with the trial and execution of Servetus. It is only its most general outline that we can trace; and indeed, amid the confusion in which, to some extent, the subject has been left by all the historians of Geneva, as well as the biographers of Calvin, it is not easy to describe the various influences under which it was so long prolonged, now in Calvin's favour, and now in favour of his opponents, while yet terminating in what appears a contemptible emeute, leaving Calvin victor of the field.

Amy Perrin had at first been a friend of Calvinone of those who solicited his return, and to whom, in conjunction with the reformer, had been committed the preparation of the ecclesiastical ordinances. Ambitious himself, however, and united to a family both the male and female members of which seem to have cherished a natural dislike to the reformer, he soon began to chafe under the pride and rigour of the Cal

vinistic rule, and gradually attached himself to the mixed liberal party, whose principle of fusion was mainly hostility to Calvin. Personal causes served to embitter the animosity-scandals too dark and wretched for us to rake from their forgotten hidingplaces. The picture which the reformer has drawn of the whole Favre family in his letters is coloured with a grim harshness, and vivid with touches of the most biting sarcasm. The intensity of his tempersparing no folly, and exposing with a kind of zest all the details of their disgrace,-comes out strongly. He fixes their several features by some ludicrous or opprobrious epithet, concentrating at once his scorn and their absurdity or baseness. Speaking, for example, of a marriage in the family, which had been conducted, in his view, with a flagrant mockery of religion, and the consequences of which were deservedly humiliating, he writes to Viret: "Proserpine (supposed to be wife of Francis Favre, the head of the family), the day before they received the spouse with such honours, beat the mother-in-law in such a manner that she bled profusely; her whole countenance was disfigured with wounds, and her head covered with dirt. You know the old woman's temper; she was heard through the whole street calling on God and man to assist her. We cited her before the consistory, but she escaped to her sisters. Penthesilea (Perrin's wife) will certainly have to be reprimanded stoutly; she patronises the worst causes and defends herself furiously-in short, her every word and deed betray her utter want of modesty." Another marriage at the * Ep. Beza, Ep. 69.

house of a widow was celebrated with dancing, at which the same Penthesilea had distinguished herself, and the opportunity of reprimanding her could not be passed over. She seems, however, to have been almost a match for Calvin, for, according to his own confession, she "abused him roundly," while he answered her as she deserved. "I inquired," he continues, "whether their house was inviolably sacred-whether it owed no subjection to the laws? We already detained her father in prison, being convicted of one act of adultery; the proof of a second was close at hand; there was a strong report of a third; her brother had openly contemned and derided the Senate and us. Finally, I added, that if they were not content to submit to us here under the yoke of Christ, they must build another city for themselves, for that so long as they remained at Geneva, they would strive in vain to elude the laws, and that if each person's head in the house of Favre wore a diadem, it should not prevent the Lord from being superior."*

All this occurred at an early period of the struggle in 1546. The execution, in the year following, of Gruet, a leader among the spiritual Libertines, whose opinions are represented as of an impious and flagrant character, increased the bitterness of the factions. Calvin stretched his power to the utmost. Slashed breeches, in which the young Libertines had delighted as a symbol of their party, were prohibited, "not that we cared about the thing itself," he says, "but because we saw that, through the chinks of those breeches, a door would be opened to all sorts of profusion and

luxury." The Libertines in their turn carried their license to the extent of publicly insulting Calvin, and threatening to cast him into the Rhone. He professed to laugh at their threats as only "the froth of the pride of Moab, whose ferocity must at length fall with a crash." Things continued in this state through various alternations, Perrin being now imprisoned, with his wife and father-in-law, and now again, through a change of fortune, not only elevated to the magistracy, but made chief syndic. This took place in 1549, and Calvin ridicules unsparingly his attempts at statesmanship, calling him now the "Comic Cæsar," and now the "Tragic Cæsar."

The execution of Servetus in 1553 gradually drew the contest on to a denouement. The deep feeling which in various quarters was excited by this event, and the vehemence with which it was directed against Calvin, seemed to encourage the Libertine party to action. One Berthelier tried to wrest from the consistory its right of excommunication, and to force admission to the Lord's Supper, from which he had been excluded. But Calvin's firmness baffled him, and even awed Perrin. In the beginning of 1554 there was a sudden truce, and things assumed a quieter look. But there was no sincerity of reconciliation on either side, and the contention soon broke out more fiercely than Calvin's power seemed to totter in his hands.

ever.

He wrote to an

"If you knew

old friend, whose name is not given, but a tenth part of the abuse with which I am wounded, feelings of humanity would make you groan at sufferings to which I am myself grown callous.

Dogs bark at me on all sides." At length, in 1555, the crisis came-a confused and disorderly affair, the account of which reads more like a street riot than anything else. Perrin, with his fellow-leaders Berthelier and Peter Vandel, had probably planned a regular rising of the populace, which was to be directed against the French in the city, for the cries heard in the tumult took something of this shape. Their own confusion, however, or the apathy of the citizens, converted it into a ridiculous failure. They then tried to make light of the affair; but the Council of Two Hundred assembled and took a very different view of it; and, apprehensive for their safety, the agitators fled from the city. Sentence was pronounced against them in absence. They were condemned to lose their heads and be quartered, and special tortures were to be inflicted on Perrin. The sentence was executed in effigy ; and the city permanently delivered from commotion.

Thus terminated the long struggle with the Libertines, in which, whatever be our judgment of particular points of Calvin's conduct, we must admire his heroism, and moreover rejoice in his triumph. For it was undoubtedly the triumph of moral order against a liberalism which, resting on no basis of principle, and conserved by no bonds of moral feeling, must have speedily dissolved in its own success, and left Geneva a sure prey to internal factions and weakness. As it was, Geneva became, strange as it may seem, the stern cradle of liberty, an asylum of Protestant independence against the gathering storms of despotism on all sides. Freedom of thought and action were crushed for the time under an iron sway, but in behalf

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