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

380
special points, in the Transactions of the Munich Academy. See p. 230.
MERLE D’AUBIGNÉ, bk. XI. chs. XXII.–XXIV. (vol. VII. 73 sqq.).
These are his last chapters on Calvin, coming down to February, 1542;
the continuation was prevented by his death in 1872.
§ 99. CALVIN’S IDEA OF THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH.
During his sojourn at Strassburg, Calvin matured his views on the Church
and the Sacraments, and embodied them in the fourth book of the second
edition of his Institutes, which appeared in the same year as his
Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1539). His ideal was high and
comprehensive, far beyond what he was able to realize in the little district
of Geneva. “In no respect, perhaps,” says a distinguished Scotch
Presbyterian scholar, f648 “are the Institutes more remarkable than in a
certain comprehensiveness and catholicity of tone, which to many will
appear strangely associated with his name. But Calvin was far too
enlightened not to recognize the grandeur of the Catholic idea which had
descended through so many ages; this idea had, in truth, for such a mind as
his, special attractions, and his own system mainly sought to give to the
same idea a new and higher form. The narrowness and intolerance of his
ecclesiastical rule did not so much spring out of the general principles laid
down in the Institutes, as from his special interpretation and application of
these principles.”
When Paul was a prisoner in Rome, chained to a heathen soldier, and when
Christianity was confined to a small band of humble believers scattered
through a hostile world, he described to the Ephesians his sublime
conception of the Church as the mystical “body of Christ, the fulness of
Him who filleth all in all.” Yet in the same and other epistles he finds it
necessary to warn the members of this holy brotherhood even against such
vulgar vices as theft, intemperance, and fornication. The contradiction is
only apparent, and disappears in the distinction between the ideal and the
real, the essential and the phenomenal, the Church as it is in the mind of
Christ and the Church as it is in the masses of nominal Christians.
The same apparent contradiction we find in Calvin, in Luther, and other
Reformers. They cherished the deepest respect for the holy Catholic
Church of Christ, and yet felt it their duty to protest with all their might
against the abuses and corruptions of the actual Church of their age, and
especially against the papal hierarchy which ruled it with despotic power.