Schaff - History of the Christian Church Vol. 8 - Media Sabda Org

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occasion with a copy of the Augsburg Confession and the Apology. f234 At
that time he was, according to his confession, still as blind and impious as
Saul. In the address De Unitate et Pace Ecclesicae, which he delivered at
Worms, Jan. 1, 1541, and which is diplomatic rather than theological, f235
he urged a General Council as a means to restore the unity and peace of
the Church on the traditional basis.
His conversion was gradually brought about by a combination of several
causes,—the reading of Protestant books which he undertook with the
purpose to refute them, his personal intercourse with Lutheran divines and
princes in Germany, the intolerance of his Roman opponents, and the
fearful death of Spiera. He acquired an experimental knowledge of the
evangelical doctrine of justification by faith, which at that time commended
itself even to some Roman divines of high standing, as Cardinal Contarini
and Reginald Pole, and which was advocated by Paleario of Siena, and by a
pupil of Valdés in an anonymous Italian tract on “The Benefit of Christ’s
Death.” f236 He began to preach evangelical doctrines and to reform abuses.
His brother, bishop of Pola, fully sympathized with him. He roused the
suspicion of the Curia and the Inquisition. He went to Trent in February,
1546, to justify himself before the Council, but was refused admittance,
and forbidden to return to his diocese. He retired to Riva on the Lago di
Garda, not far from Trent.
In 1548 he paid a visit to Padua to take some of his nephews to college. He
found the city excited by the fearful tragedy of Francesco Spiera, a lawyer
and convert from Romanism, who had abjured the evangelical faith from
fear of the Inquisition, and fell into a hell of tortures of conscience under
the conviction that he had committed the unpardonable sin by rejecting the
truth. He was for several weeks a daily witness, with many others, of the
agonies of this most unfortunate of apostates, and tried in vain to comfort
him. He thought that we must not despair of any sinner, though he had
committed the crimes of Cain and Judas. He prepared himself for his visits
by prayer and the study of the comforting promises of the Scriptures. But
Spiera had lost all faith, all hope, all comfort; he insisted that he had
committed the sin against the Holy Spirit which cannot be forgiven in this
world nor in the world to come; he was tormented by the remembrance of
the sins of his youth, the guilt of apostasy, the prospect of eternal
punishment which he felt already, and died in utter despair with a heart full
of hatred and blasphemy. His death was regarded as a signal judgment of