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

653
The providence of God, which rules and overrules the movements of
history, raised up worthy successors for the Reformers, who faithfully
preserved and carried forward their work: Bullinger for Zwingli,
Melanchthon for Luther, Beza for Calvin, Melville for Knox.
The extraordinary episcopal power which Calvin, owing to his
extraordinary talents and commanding character, had exercised without
interruption, ceased with his death. Beza was elected his successor on the
29th of May, 1564, as “modérateur” of the ecclesiastical affairs of Geneva,
only for one year. f1263 But he was annually re-elected till 1580, when he
felt unequal to carrying any longer the heavy burden of duty. He was
willing, however, to continue the correspondence with foreign Churches.
He divided his untiring activity between Switzerland and France, and
exercised a controlling influence on the progress of the Reformation in
those two countries. He saw a Huguenot prince, Henry IV., ascend the
throne of France; he lamented his abjuration of the evangelical faith, but
rejoiced over the Edict of Nantes which gave legal existence to
Protestantism; and he carried, as the last survivor of the noble race of the
Reformers, the ideas of the Reformation to the beginning of the
seventeenth century. His theology marks the transition from the broad
Calvinism of Calvin to the narrow, scholastic, and supralapsarian Calvinism
of the next generation, which produced the reaction of Arminianism not
only in Holland and England, but also in France and Geneva.
NOTE. A CALUMNY.
It is painful to notice that sectarian hatred and malice followed the
Reformers to their death-beds. Fanatical Romanists represented Zwingli’s
heroic death as a judgment of God, and invented the myths that
Oecolampadius committed suicide and was carried off by the devil; that
Luther hung himself by his handkerchief on the bed-post and emitted a
horrible stench; and that Calvin died in despair.
The myth of Luther’s suicide was soberly and malignantly repeated by an
ultramontane priest (Majunke, editor of the “Germania” in Berlin), and
gave rise to a lively controversy in 1890. It must be added, however, that
learned and honest Catholics indignantly protested against the calumny.
(Cf. my article, Did Luther commit Suicide? in “Magazine of Christian
Literature,” New York, for December, 1890.)