Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 11

Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 11

'He will come on horseback.' 'No, he won't; he will come by chariot.'

'You lie.' 'No, I do not; _you_ are the liar.' 'Take _that_'--a blow with the fist. 'You take _that_'--a sword-thrust through the body. O Prince, what would you think of such citizens? Christ asked us to put on the white robes of a pure and holy life, but what occupies our thought? We dispute not only of the way to Christ, but of His relation to G.o.d the Father, of the Trinity, of predestination, of free will, of the nature of G.o.d, of angels, of the condition of the soul after death,--of a mult.i.tude of matters that are not essential for salvation, and _matters, in fact, which never can be known until our hearts are pure, for they are things which must be spiritually perceived_."

With a striking boldness, but with beautiful simplicity of spirit, he describes "an honest follower of Christ"--and {95} it is himself whom he is describing--"who believes in G.o.d the Father and in His Son Jesus Christ, and who wants to do His will, but cannot see that will just as others about him see it, in matters of intellectual formulation and in matters of external practice." "I cannot," he adds, "do violence to my conscience for fear of disobeying Christ. I must be saved or lost by my own personal faith, not by that of another. I ask you, whether Christ, who forgave those who went astray, and commanded His followers to forgive until seventy times seven, Christ who is the final Judge of us all, if He were here, would command a person like that to be killed!

. . . O Christ, Creator and King of the world," he cries out, "dost Thou see and approve these things? Hast Thou become a totally different person from what Thou wert? When Thou wert on earth, nothing could be more gentle and kind, more ready to suffer injuries. Thou wert like a sheep dumb before the shearers. Beaten, spit upon, mocked, crowned with thorns, crucified between thieves, Thou didst pray for those who injured Thee. Hast Thou changed to this? Art Thou now so cruel and contrary to Thyself? Dost Thou command that those who do not understand Thy ordinances and commandments as those over us require, should be drowned, or drawn and quartered, and burned at the stake!"

The Christian world holds this view now. It is a part of the necessary air we breathe. But at this crisis in modern history it was unforgivably _new_.[7] One man's soul had the vision, one man's entire moral fibre throbbed with pa.s.sion for it, and his rich intellectual nature pleaded for it as the only course of reason: "To burn a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to _burn a man_!" But it was a voice crying in a wilderness, and from henceforth Castellio was a marked and dangerous man in the eyes of all who were opposed to "Bellianism "--as the principle of toleration was nicknamed in honour of Martinus Bellius--and that included almost all the world. But to the end of his life, and in almost every one of his mult.i.tudinous {96} tracts he continued to announce the principle of religious liberty, and to work for a type of Christianity which depended for its conquering power solely on its inherent truth and on its moral dynamic.

Calvin, who recognized the hand of Castellio in this powerful defence of freedom of thought, called his opponent "a monster full of poison and madness," and proceeded to demolish him in a Reply. In his _Contra libellum Calvini_, which is an answer to this Reply, Castellio declares that Calvin's act in burning Servetus was a b.l.o.o.d.y act, and that now his book is a direct menace to honest, pious people. "I," he adds, "who have a horror of blood, propose to examine the book. I do not defend Servetus. I have never read his books. Calvin burned them together with their author. I do not want to burn Calvin or to burn his book. I am only going to _answer_ it." He notes that Calvin complains of "novelties and innovations," a strange complaint, he thinks, from a man who "has introduced more innovations in ten years than the entire Church had introduced in six centuries!" All the sects, he reminds the great Reformer, claim to be founded on the Word of G.o.d. They all believe that their religion is true. Calvin says that his is _the only true one_. Each of the others says that his is the only true one. Calvin says that they are wrong. He makes himself (by what right I do not know) the judge and sovereign arbiter. He claims that he has on his side the sure evidence of the Word of G.o.d.

Then why does he write so many books to prove what is evident? The truth is surely not evident to those who die denying that it is truth!

Calvin asks how doctrine is to be guarded if heretics are not to be punished. "Doctrine," cries Castellio, "Christ's doctrine means loving one's enemies, returning good for evil, having a pure heart and a hunger and thirst for righteousness. _You_ may return to Moses if you will, but for us others Christ has come."

Love, he constantly insists, is the supreme badge of any true Christianity, and the traits of the beat.i.tudes in a person's life are a surer evidence that he belongs in {97} Christ's family, than is the fact that he holds current opinions on obscure questions of belief.

"Before G.o.d," he writes in his _Defensio_, a work of the year 1562, to those who wish to hunt him off the face of the earth, "and from the bottom of my heart, I call you to the spirit of love." "By the bowels of Christ, I ask and implore you to leave me in peace, to stop persecuting me. Let me have the liberty of my faith as you have of yours. At the heart of religion I am one with you. It is in reality the same religion; only on certain points of interpretation I see differently from you. But however we differ in opinion, why cannot we love one another?"

He was, however, never to have the peace for which he pleaded, and he was never to experience the love and brotherly kindness for which he longed. Whole sheaves of fiery arrows were shot at him, and in tract after tract he had to see himself called "monster," "wretch," "dog,"

"pest," "fog-bank," and finally to see himself proclaimed to the world as a petty thief "who was supporting himself by stealing wood from his neighbours"! With beautiful dignity Castellio tells the story of how he fished for public drift-wood on the sh.o.r.es of the Rhine, and how he kept his family alive by honest toil, when he was living in pitiable poverty, "to which," he says to Calvin, "everybody knows that thy attacks had brought me." "I cannot conceive how thou of all persons, thou who knowest me, can have believed a tale of theft about me, and in any case have told it to others."[9]

Compelled, as he was, to see the Reformation take what seemed to him the false course--the course of defending itself by persecution, of b.u.t.tressing itself on election, of elevating, through a new scholasticism, doctrine above life,--he turned more and more, as time went on, toward interior religion, the cultivation of an inner sanctuary, the deepening of the mystical roots of his life, and the perfection of a religion of inner and spiritual life. "I have never taken holy things lightly," {98} he once wrote, and in the later years of what proved to be his brief as well as stormy life, he drew nearer to Christ as the Life of his life, and laboured with deepening pa.s.sion to practise and present a religion of veracity, of reality and of transforming power. "It is certain," he says in his _Contra libellum Calvini_, "that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of G.o.d, and there is furthermore no doubt about the worth of love--love to G.o.d and love to man. There is no doubt, again, of the worth of forgiveness, of patience, of pity, of kindness, and of obedience to duty. Why leave these sure things and quarrel over inscrutable mysteries?"

This point that the things which are essential to salvation are clear and luminous is a frequently occurring one in his writings.

Impenetrable mysteries do not interest him, and he declares with reiteration that controversies and divisions are occasioned mainly by the proclamation of dogma on these inscrutable things. In a remarkable work, which remains still in ma.n.u.script--his _De arte dubitandi et confidendi, sciendi et ignorandi_,--he pleads for a religion that fits the facts of life and for the use of intelligence even in these lofty matters of spiritual experience where most astonishing miracles occur.

He returns, in this writing, to his old position that the truths which concern salvation are clear and appeal powerfully to human reason.

"There are, I know," he says, "persons who insist that we should believe even against reason. It is, however, the worst of all errors, and it is laid upon me to fight it. I may not be able to exterminate the monster, but I hope to give it such a blow that it will know that it has been hit. Let no one think that he is doing wrong in using his mental faculties. It is our proper way of arriving at the truth."[9]

Without entering in detail into the bottomless controversy of those times, let us endeavour to get an adequate view of Castellio's type of Christianity, and then we shall be able to form an estimate of the man who in the {99} strong power of his faith stood almost alone as the great battle of words raged around him.[10]

Those on the other side of the controversy began always from the opposite end of the spiritual universe to his point of departure.

_They_ were fascinated with the mysteries of the Eternal Will, and used all the keys of their logic to unlock the mysteries of foreknowledge, predestination, and grace which has wrought the miracle of salvation for the elect. Castellio, on the other hand, in true modern fashion, starts always with the concrete, the near and the known, to work upward to the nature of the unknown. We must, he says, try to discover the Divine attributes and the Divine Character by first finding out what our own deepest nature implies. If G.o.d is to speak to us it must be in terms of our nature. Before undertaking to fathom with the plummet of logic the unsoundable mystery of foreknowledge, let us see what we can know through a return to the real nature of man as he is, and especially to the real nature of the new Adam who is Christ, the Son of G.o.d. Man, as both Scripture and his own inner self testify, is made _in the image of G.o.d_, is dowered with freedom to determine his own destiny, may go upward into light, or downward into darkness. Man thus made, when put to trial, _failed_, followed lower instincts instead of higher, and experienced the awful penalty of sin, namely its c.u.mulative power, the tendency of sin to beget sin, and to make higher choices ever more difficult. Christ, however, the new Adam, has _succeeded_.

He has completely revealed the way of obedience, the way in which spirit conquers flesh. He is the new kind of Person who lives from above and who exhibits the c.u.mulative power of goodness. His victory, which was won by His own free choice, inspires all men who see it with faith and hope in man's spiritual possibilities. Castellio declines to discuss Christ's metaphysical nature, except in so far as His life has revealed {100} it to us. He sees in Him the Heart and Character of G.o.d, the certainty of Divine love and forgiveness, and the way of life for all who desire to be spiritually saved, which means, for him, the formation of a new inward self, a purified nature, a morally transformed man, a will which no longer loves or wills sin. "Christ alone," he says, "can heal the malady of the soul, but He can heal it."

"There is," he says again, "no other way of salvation for any man than the way of self-denial. He must put off his old man and put on Christ--however much blood and sweat the struggle may cost." Man, he insists, is always wrong when he represents G.o.d as angry. Christ showed that G.o.d needed no appeasing, but rather that man needed to be brought back to G.o.d by the drawing of Love, and be reconciled to Him.

Faith--which for every prophet of human redemption is the key that unlocks all doors for the soul--is for Castellio the supreme moral force by which man turns G.o.d's revelations of Himself into spiritual victories and into personal conquests of character. It is never something forensic, something magical. It is, as little, mere belief of historical facts and events. It is, on the contrary, a moral power that moves mountains of difficulty, works miracles of transformation, and enables the person who has it to partic.i.p.ate in the life of G.o.d.

It is a pa.s.sionate leap ("elan") of the soul of the creature toward the Creator; it is a way of renewing strength in Him and of becoming a partic.i.p.ator in His divine nature. It is a return of the soul to its source. It is a _persistent will_, which multiplies one's strength a hundredfold, makes Pentecost possible again, and enables us to achieve the goal which the vision of our heart sees. The only obstacle to this all-conquering faith is selfishness, the only mortal enemy is self-will.[11]

There have been, Castellio holds, progressive stages in the Divine education of the race, and in man's apprehension of G.o.d. The mark of advance is always found in the progress from law and letter to spirit, and from {101} outward practices and ceremonies to inward experience.

Divine revelations can always be taken at different levels. They can be seen in a literal, pictorial, temporal way, or they can be read deeper--by those who are purified by faith and love, and made partakers of the self-giving Life of G.o.d--as eternal and spiritual realities.

The written word of G.o.d is the garment of the Divine Thought which is the real Word of G.o.d. It takes more than eyes of flesh to see through the temporal garment to the inner Life and Spirit beneath. Only the person who has in himself the illumination of the same Spirit that gave the original revelation can see through the garment of the letter to the eternal message, the ever-living Word hidden within.[12] In the Christianity of the full-grown spiritual man, sacraments and everything external must be used only as pictorial helps and symbolic suggestions for the furtherance of spiritual life. Within us, as direct offspring of G.o.d, as image of G.o.d, there is a Divine Reason, which existed before books, before rites, before the foundation of the world, and will exist after books and rites have vanished, and the world has gone to wreck.

It can no more be abolished than G.o.d Himself can be. It was by this that Jesus Christ, the Son of G.o.d--called, in fact, Logos of G.o.d--lived and taught us how to live. It was in the Light of this that He transcended books and rites and declared, without quoting text, "G.o.d is Spirit and thou shalt worship G.o.d in spirit and in truth." This Reason is in all ages the right investigator and interpreter of Truth, even though time changes outward things and written texts grow corrupt.[13]

As his life was drawing to a close, he sent forth anonymously another powerful prophet-call for the complete liberation of mind and conscience. Ten years before the awful deeds of St. Bartholomew's Day, he issued his little French book with the t.i.tle _Conseil a la France desolee_--Counsel {102} to France in her Distress. It is a calm and penetrating diagnosis of the evils which are destroying the life of France and working her desolation. It throbs with n.o.ble patriotism and is full of real prophetic insight, though he spoke to deaf ears and wrote for blind eyes. The woes of France--her torn and distracted condition--are mainly due to the blind and foolish method of attempting to force intelligent men to accept a form of religion which in their hearts they do not believe is true. There can be no united people, strong and happy, until the blunder of compelling conscience entirely ceases. He pleads in tenderness and love with both religious parties, Catholics and Evangelicals, to leave the outgrown legalism of Moses and go to the Gospels for a religion which leads into truth and freedom.

"O France, France," he cries--as formerly a greater One had said, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem"--"my counsel is that thou cease to compel men's consciences, that thou cease to kill and to persecute, that thou grant to men who believe in Jesus Christ the privilege of serving G.o.d according to their own innermost faith and not according to some one else's faith. And you, that are private people, do not be so ready to follow those who lead you astray and push you to take up arms and kill your brothers. And Thou, O Lord our Saviour, wilt Thou give to us all grace to awake and come to our senses before it is forever too late.

I, at least, have now done my duty and spoken my word of truth." St.

Bartholomew's Day was the answer to this searching appeal, and the land, deaf to the call of its prophet, was to become more "desolate"

still.

Just as the storm of persecution that had been gathering around him for years was about to burst pitilessly upon him in 1563, he quietly died, worn out in body, and "pa.s.sed to where beyond these voices there is peace." His students in the University of Basle, where, in spite of the opposition from Geneva, he had been Professor of Greek for ten years, bore his coffin in honour on their shoulders to his grave, and his little band of disciples devoted themselves to spreading, in Holland and wherever {103} they could find soil for it, the precious seed of his truth, which had in later years a very wide harvest.[14]

He was not a theologian of the Reformation type. He did not think the thoughts nor speak the dialect of his contemporaries. They need not be blamed for thanking G.o.d at his death nor for seeing in him an arch-enemy of their work. They were honestly working for one goal, and he was as honestly living by the light of a far different ideal. The spiritual discipline of the modern world was to come through their laborious systems, but he, antic.i.p.ating the results of the travail and the slow spiral progress, and seeing in clear vision the triumph of man's liberated spirit, with exuberant optimism believed that the religion of the Spirit could be had for the taking--and he stretched out his hand for it!

"I am," he cried out beneath the bludgeons, "a poor little man, more than simple, humble and peaceable, with no desire for glory, only affirming what in my heart I believe; why cannot I live and say my honest word and have your love?" The time was not ready for him, but he did his day's work with loyalty, sincerity, and bravery, and seen in perspective is worthy to be honoured as a hero and a saint.[15]

[1] F. Buisson, _Sebastien Castellion, sa vie et son oeuvre_ (Paris, 1892), 2 vols.; Charles Jarrin, _Deux Oublies_ (Bourg, 1889); emile Broussoux, Sebastien Castellion, sa vie, ses oeuvres, et sa theologie (Strasbourg, 1867); A. Schweizer, _Die protestantischen Centraldogmen_ (Zurich, 1854), pp. 311-373.

[2] _Dialogi sacri, latino-gallici, ad linguas moresque puerorum formandos_. Liber primus. Geneve, 1543.

[3] There were at least three English translations--1610, 1715, and 1743.

[4] Buisson, _op. cit._ i. p. 205.

[5] His Latin Bible appeared in 1551 and the French Bible in 1555.

During this period he also brought out a new edition of his "Sacred Dialogues," an edition of Xenophon, a translation of the Sibylline Oracles, a Latin poem on Jonah, and a Greek poem on John the Baptist, the Forerunner.

[6] Calvin, in striking contrast, had written to the same boy-king in 1548: "Under the cover of the Gospel, foolish people would throw everything into confusion. Others cling to the superst.i.tions of the Antichrist at Rome. _They all deserve to be repressed by the sword which is committed to you_."

[7] Beza called it "diabolical doctrine."

[8] He selected as the t.i.tle of this book the opprobrious word which Calvin had used in the charge--_Harpago_, _i.e._ "Boat-hook."

[9] This MS. is in the Bibliotheque de l'eglise des Remontrants in Rotterdam. I have used only the extracts given from it in Buisson and Jarrin.

[10] The main lines of Castellio's Christianity can be found in his _Dialogi quatuor_: (i.) De praedestinatione, (ii.) De electione, (iii.) De libero arbitrio, (iv.) De fide (Gouda, 1613) and in his _Scripta selecta_. (1596).

[11] For Faith see _De fide and De arts dub._ ii. 212.

[12] This idea comes out in his Preface to the Bible, in his _Moses latinus_, and in his ma.n.u.script work, _De arte dubitandi_.

[13] _De arte dubitandi_.

[14] Under the nom-de-plume of John Theophilus, Castellio translated the _Theologia Germanica_ into Latin, and published it with an Introduction. His translation carried this "golden book" of mystical religion into very wide circulation, and became a powerful influence, especially in England, as we shall see, in reproducing a similar type of religious thought.

The Quaker William Caton, who spent the latter part of his life in Holland, cites Castellio seven times in his Tract, _The Testimony of a Cloud of Witnesses, who in their Generation have testified against that horrible Evil of Forcing of Conscience and Persecution about Matters of Religion_ (1662), and he seems very familiar with his writings. He also cites Schwenckfeld and Franck on pp. 37 and 17 respectively.

[15] Castellio's plea for toleration, _Traite des Heretiques a savoir, si on les doit persecuter_ (Rouen, 1554), has just been reissued in attractive form in Geneva, edited by Olivet and Choisy.

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CHAPTER VII

COORNHERT AND THE COLLEGIANTS--A MOVEMENT FOR SPIRITUAL RELIGION IN HOLLAND

The struggle for political liberty in the Netherlands forms one of the most dramatic and impressive chapters in modern history, but the story of the long struggle in these same Provinces for the right to believe and to think according to the dictates of conscience is hardly less dramatic and impressive. Everybody knows that during the early years of the seventeenth century Holland was the one country in Europe which furnished cities of refuge for the persecuted and hunted exponents of unpopular faiths, and that the little band of Pilgrims who brought their precious seed to the new world had first preserved and nurtured it in a safe asylum among the Dutch; but the slow spiritual travail that won this soul freedom, and the brave work of spreading, on that soil, a religion of personal insight and individual experience are not so well known.[1] The growth and development of this great movement, with its numerous ramifications and differentiations, obviously cannot be told here, but one or two specimen lines of the movement will be briefly studied for the light they throw upon this general type of religion under consideration, and for their specific influence {105} upon corresponding spiritual movements in England and America.

The silent propagation and germination of religious ideas in lands far away from their original habitat, their sudden appearance in a new spot like an outbreak of contagion, are always mysterious and fascinating subjects of research. Some chance talk with a disciple plants the seed, or some stray book comes to the hand of a baffled seeker at the moment when his soul is in a suggestible state, and lo! a new vision is created and a new apostle of the movement is prepared, often so inwardly and mysteriously that to himself he seems to be "an apostle not of men nor by man." One of the earliest Dutch exponents and interpreters of this type of spiritual religion which we have been studying as a by-product of the Reformation in Germany, and one who became an apostle of it because at a critical period of his life the seeds of it had fallen into his awakened mind, was Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert.[2]