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

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ft990 In a footnote in ch. LIV. of his work on the Decline and Fall of the R.
E. (Smith’s ed. V. 552). He assigns three reasons for this judgment: (1)
the zeal of Calvin was envenomed by personal malice and perhaps envy
[?]; (2) the deed of cruelty was not varnished by the pretence of danger
to the Church or State; (3) Calvin violated the golden rule of doing as
he would be done by. Gibbon’s prejudice against Calvinism is
expressed in the sentence (p. 551) that “many a sober Christian would
rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious
tyrant.”
ft991 James Martineau states that “in his eighteen years of office, Cardinal
Thomas de Torquemada had burned alive, it is computed, eighty-eight
hundred victims, and punished ninety thousand in various ways, not for
offences against the moral law, or crimes against society, but for
thoughts of their own about religion, which only God, and not the
pope, had allowed; or for being Jews that would not be apostates; or
for refusing on the rack to confess what they had never done.” The
Seat of Authority in Religion, 1890, p. 156; comp. Llorente’s Histoire
Critique de l’Inquisition, IV. 251 sq.
ft992 “Hoc crimen est morte simpliciter dignum, et apud Deum et apud
homines.” In the twenty-seventh letter to Calvin (Christianismi
Restitutio, p. 656). He speaks there of the punishment of Ananias and
Sapphira, who were “incorrigibiles, in malitia obstinati.” Calvin refers
to this admission of Servetus, and charges him with inconsistency.
Opera, VIII. 462.
ft993 This is admitted now by all impartial historians. Michelet (XI. 96) calls
this blot in Calvin’s life “crime du temps plus que de l’homme même.’
ft994 Responsio ad Balduini Convicia, Opera, IX. 575: “Iustas quidem ille
poenas dedit: sed an meo arbitrio? Certe arrogantia non minus quam
impietas perdidit hominem. Sed quodnam meum crimen, si Senatus
noster mea hortatu, ex plurium tamen ecclesiarum sententia,
exsecrabiles blasphemias ultus est? Vituperet me sane hac in parte
Franciscus Balduinus, modo Philippi Melanchthonis iudicio posteritas
mihi gratitudinem debeat, quia tam exitiali monstro ecclesiam
purgaverim. Senatum etiam nostrum, sub cuius ditione aliquando
vixit, perstringat ingratus hospes: modo idem Philippus scripto
publice edito testetur dignum esse exemplum quod imitentur omnes
christiani principes.”