Rise and Establishment of Protestantism at Geneva - James Aitken Wylie

imprisonment, or it might be banishment. The
Spiritual Court, looking at the act as an offense
against the ecclesiastical ordinances, had visited it
with an ecclesiastical censure; the Council, looking
at it as a breach of the civil laws, awarded against it
a temporal punishment. We ask why this double
character of the same act? Because in Geneva the
nation was the Church, and the ecclesiastical
ordinances were also the laws of the State. They
had not only been enacted by the Senate, they had
been twice solemnly and unanimously voted by the
people. "The people could not afterwards allege,"
says M. Gaberel, "that they were deceived as to the
bearing of the laws they were sanctioning. For
several weeks they could meditate at leisure on the
articles proposed; they knew the value of their
decision, and when twice -- on the 20th of
November, 1541, and again on the 2nd of January,
1542 -- they came to the Cathedral of St. Peter's,
and, after each article, raised their hands in
acceptance of it, the vote was an affair of
conscience between God and themselves, for no
human power could impose such an engagement.
They were 20,000 citizens, perfectly free, and
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