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

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It is by the combination of a severe creed with severe self-discipline that
Calvin became the father of the heroic races of French Huguenots, Dutch
Burghers, English Puritans, Scotch Covenanters, and New England
Pilgrims, who sacrificed the world for the liberty of conscience. “A little bit
of the worlds history,” says the German historian Häusser, f364 “was enacted
in Geneva, which forms the proudest portion of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. A number of the most distinguished men in France,
the Netherlands, and Great Britain professed her creed; they were sturdy,
gloomy souls, iron characters cast in one mould, in which there was an
interfusion of Romanic, Germanic, mediaeval, and modern elements; and
the national and political consequences of the new faith were carried out by
them with the utmost rigor and consistency.” A distinguished Scotch
divine (Principal Tulloch) echoes this judgment when he says: f365 “It was
the spirit bred by Calvin’s discipline which, spreading into France and
Holland and Scotland, maintained by its single strength the cause of a free
Protestantism in all these lands. It was the same spirit which inspired the
early and lived on in the later Puritans; which animated such men as Milton
and Owen and Baxter; which armed the Parliament of England with
strength against Charles I., and stirred the great soul of Cromwell in its
proudest triumphs; and which, while it thus fed every source of political
liberty in the Old World, burned undimned in the gallant crew of the
‘Mayflower,’ the Pilgrim Fathers,—who first planted the seeds of
civilization in the great continent of the West.” f366
Calvin was intolerant of any dissent, either papal or heretical, and his early
followers in Europe and America abhorred religious toleration (in the sense
of indifference) as a pestiferous error; nevertheless, in their conflict with
reactionary Romanism and political despotism, they became the chief
promoters of civil and religious liberty based upon respect for God’s law
and authority. The solution of the apparent inconsistency lies in the fact
that Calvinists fear God and nothing else. In their eyes, God alone is great,
man is but a shadow. The fear of God makes them fearless of earthly
despots. It humbles man before God, it exalts him before his fellow-men.
The fear of God is the basis of moral self-government, and self-government
is the basis of true freedom. f367
3. Calvin’s influence is not confined to the religious and moral sphere; it
extends to the intellectual and literary development of France. He occupies
a prominent position in the history of the French language, as Luther, to a
still higher degree, figures in the history of the German language. Luther