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

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had become the leader of the Counter-Reformation with its measures of
violence and blood. Such monsters, he says, are the popes. One contradicts
the other, and yet they are all infallible, and demand absolute submission.
Rather die a thousand times than have any communion with popery and fall
away from Christ, the Son of God, who was crucified for us and rose from
the dead. Popery and the gospel are as incompatible as darkness and light,
as Belial and Christ. No compromise is possible between them. Vergerio
was hardly less severe on the cardinals and bishops, although he allowed
some honorable exceptions. He attacked and ridiculed the Council of
Trent, then in session, and tried to show that it was neither general, nor
free, nor Christian. He used the same arguments against it as the Old
Catholics used against the Vatican Council of 1870. He repelled the charge
of heresy and turned it against his former co-religionists. The Protestants
who follow the Word of God are orthodox, the Romanists who follow the
traditions of men are the heretics.
His anti-popery writings were read with great avidity by his
contemporaries, but are now forgotten. Bullinger was unfavorably
impressed, and found in them no solid substance, but only frivolous
mockery and abuse.
As regards the differences among Protestants, Vergerio was inconsistent.
He first held the Calvinistic theory of the Lord’s Supper, and expressed it
in his own Catechism, f243 in a letter to Bullinger of Jan. 16, 1554, and even
later, in June, 1556, at Wittenberg, where he met Melanchthon and Eber.
But in Würtemberg he had to subscribe the Augsburg Confession, and in a
letter to the Duke of Würtemberg, Oct. 23, 1557, he confessed the
ubiquitarian theory of Luther. He also translated the Catechism of Brenz
and the Würtemberg Confession into Italian, and thereby offended the
Swiss Zwinglians, but told them that he was merely the translator. He
never attributed much importance to the difference, and kept aloof from
the eucharistic controversy. f244 He was not a profound theologian, but an
ecclesiastical politician and diplomatist, after as well as before his
conversion.
Vergerio left the Roman Church rather too late, when the Counter-
Reformation had already begun to crush Protestantism in Italy. He was a
man of imposing personality, considerable learning and eloquence, wit and
irony, polemic dexterity, and diplomatic experience, but restless, vain, and
ambitious. He had an extravagant idea of his own importance. He could