LETTERS
OF
JOHN CALVIN

COMPILED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS AND
EDITED WITH HISTORICAL NOTES

BY

DR. JULES BONNET.

VOL. I.

TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL LATIN AND FRENCH.

——————

PHILADELPHIA:
P R E S B Y T E R I A N   B O A R D   O F   P U B L I C A T I O N,
NO. 821 CHESTNUT STREET.

Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by
JAMES DUNLAP, Treas.,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

ADVERTISEMENT.

John Calvin, the profound scholar, the exact theologian, the enlightened statesman, and the eminent Reformer, exerted an influence on the age in which he lived, which, instead of being diminished by the lapse of three centuries, must continue and increase while the great truths, involving the present and future interests of mankind, which he so lucidly and energetically enforced, shall be incorporated with human enlightenment and progress. The results of his indefatigable labours, as published to the world in his Institutes, Commentaries, and Sermons, are familiar to the students of theology; but his correspondence, so illustrative of his personal character, and the history of the times in which he lived, has never, until now, been collected and made accessible to the public. The Rev. Dr. Jules Bonnet, with the approbation of the French government, has with untiring and enthusiastic ardour, explored the hidden archives, and with such gratifying success, that four volumes of Calvin's Letters are now ready for the press.

As these Letters were written in Latin and French, it was at once seen to be important that English and American readers, who most thoroughly appreciate the character of this distinguished man, should have easy access to them in their own vernacular. They have accordingly been rendered into English under the immediate inspection of Mr. Bonnet. The first two volumes were published in Edinburgh, when circumstances, unnecessary to detail, arrested the further prosecution of the work.

A benevolent gentleman in New York proposed to purchase the copy-right of the Letters and transfer it to the Presbyterian Board of Publication. The arrangement has been completed, and to that Board, if we should not say to this country, is to be due the credit of first ushering to the world the rich and varied correspondence of one of the greatest and best men of the old world. The enterprise will be an expensive one, and it will require a liberal patronage. To the students of ecclesiastical history, the work will, in a certain sense, be indispensable; but every Presbyterian, who can command the means, should lend his aid to give success to the noble project. It should be mentioned, in this connection, that the truly estimable collector of the Letters, although he can never hope for any adequate pecuniary remuneration for his great labour, is exceedingly anxious that an edition of the Letters in their original form should be published in Europe, and the gratification of this hope will very much depend on the successful sale of these volumes in this country. The Presbyterian Board of Publication have been solely actuated by public considerations in their participation in the publication, and it will afford them much pleasure, if it can possibly be done, to aid Mr. Bonnet in executing his original intention.

Editor of the Board.

PREFACE.

It was but a few days before his death, and in the course of one of the latest conversations handed down to us by Theodore Beza, that Calvin, pointing with failing hand to his most precious furniture, his manuscripts, and the archives of the correspondence that, during a quarter of a century, he had kept up with the most illustrious personages of Europe, requested that these memorials might be carefully preserved, and that a selection from his letters, made by some of his friends, should be presented to the Reformed Churches, in token of the interest and affection of their founder.[1]

This request of the dying Reformer, although treasured in the heart and memory of him who had succeeded to his plans and carried on his work, received but an imperfect fulfilment in the sixteenth century. The times were adverse, and the accomplishment of the duty was difficult. The plague, which had broken out for the third time at Geneva, and carried off thousands of victims; the great disasters, public and private; the shock of the painful events that had been occurring in France from the breaking out of the Civil War to the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; even the scruples of friendship, heightened by the perils that threatened the city of the Reformation itself, all seemed to conspire against the execution of Calvin's wish. "Without speaking," says Beza, "of the assistance that was indispensable for the examination of so extensive a correspondence, or of the time required for so laborious an undertaking, the calamities that befell our city, the plague that raged for many years, the convulsions of a neighbouring country, have more than once interrupted the progress of the work. The selection of the letters also involved great difficulties, at a time when men were predisposed to judge harshly and unfairly. There are many things that may be said or written in the familiar intercourse of sincere and ingenuous friendship, such as Calvin's, which can hardly be given to the public without inconvenience. We were obliged in our work to have respect to persons, times, and places."[2] These scruples of an earnest and respectful disciple, anxious to avoid all collision with his contemporaries and at the same time to render justice to a great name, would be out of place now; but they were legitimate in an age of revolutions, when words were swords, and when the war of opinion, often sanguinary, outlasting its originators, was perpetuated in their writings.

Still it must be owned, that notwithstanding all these difficulties, the friends of Calvin did not shrink from the performance of their duty. Deeply impressed with the importance of the mission intrusted to them, they applied themselves to their task with religious fidelity. By their care, the originals or the copies of a vast number of letters addressed to France, England, Germany, and Switzerland, were collected at Geneva, and added to the precious deposit already confided to them. The archives of the city of Calvin received this treasure and preserved it faithfully through the storm that fell upon the churches of France, destroying or dispersing in foreign lands so many pages of their annals. By a remarkable dispensation, Geneva, the holy city of French Protestantism, the seminary of her ministers, of her doctors, and of her martyrs, after having conferred upon her, by the hand of Calvin, her creed and her form of worship, was also to preserve for her the titles of her origin and of her history. These titles are gloriously inscribed in the noble collection of autograph letters of the Reformer, for which we are indebted to the pious care of some refugees of the sixteenth century, whose names are almost lost in the lustre of those of Calvin and Beza, but whose services cannot be forgotten without ingratitude. Let us at least recall with a fitting tribute of grateful respect, the names of Jean de Budé, Laurent de Normandie, and especially of Charles de Jonvillers.

It is to the latter mainly that we must ascribe the honour of the formation of the magnificent epistolary collection that now adorns the Library of Geneva. Born of a noble family in the neighbourhood of Chartres, and carried across the Alps by the irresistible necessity of confessing the faith which he had embraced with all the ardour of youth, Charles de Jonvillers found in the affection of Calvin, a compensation for the voluntary sacrifice of fortune and country. Admitted, with his young patrician countrymen—the élite of the Reformed party—to the intimacy of the Reformer, he devoted himself with filial reverence and unbounded attachment to the great man whose faith and energy, moulding a rebellious people, had transformed an obscure Alpine city into a metropolis of the human mind. He became his secretary, after the celebrated lawyer, François Baudouin, and the minister Nicholas des Gallars, and henceforward assisted him in his laborious correspondence, followed him to the Auditoire and the Academy, and took down during Calvin's Lectures those luminous Commentaries, which were afterwards dedicated to the most illustrious personages of the age, and which modern theology has never surpassed.

Such was the man to whom the friendship of Calvin and the confidence of Beza assigned the great and laborious task of preparing for publication the Letters of the Reformer. He brought to it the zeal of a disciple and the filial reverence of a son who forgets himself in the execution of a sacred will; undertaking distant journeys to ensure its fulfilment, seeking everywhere for those precious documents in which were preserved the thoughts of the venerated master he had lost; and transcribing a vast number of letters with his own hand; supported in these costly and difficult researches by the consciousness of a duty accepted in humility and performed with faithfulness.[3] This labour, early commenced and pursued for twenty years under the vigilant superintendence of Beza, was the origin of the collection of Calvin's Latin Correspondence published in 1575; a faithful but incomplete tribute to the memory of the Reformer by his disciples—an unfinished monument, which might indeed suffice the generation that was contemporary with the Reformation, but which is insufficient to satisfy the curiosity of our own.[4]

Nearly three centuries had passed away without adding anything to the work of Charles de Jonvillers and Beza. The Letters published by their care have been the common source from which the apologists and the adversaries of the Reformation have alike drawn; while the numerous unpublished documents preserved in the Library of Geneva, or collected in the Libraries of Zurich, Gotha, and Paris, have been forgotten. It was reserved for the present age to rescue these from unmerited oblivion, and thus to open up for history a mine of information hitherto unexplored.

And here justice compels us to acknowledge, with gratitude, the obligations of this unpublished correspondence to the recent labours and investigations of several distinguished Protestant authors. We refer especially to the "Life of Calvin," by Dr. Paul Henry of Berlin,—a pious monument raised in honour of the Reformer by a descendant of the refugees, and enriched with a number of Letters from the libraries of France and Switzerland;[5] to the learned researches of Professor Bretschneider, the editor of the Gotha Letters;[6] the important work of Ruchat,[7] re-edited by the talented continuator of the great historian Jean de Müller, Professor Vulliemin of Lausanne, with an extensive Appendix, containing precious fragments of Calvin's French Correspondence, reproduced in the "Chronicle" of M. Crottet.[8] And now, having made these acknowledgments, we may legitimately claim for ourselves the privilege of offering to the public, for the first time, a general and authentic collection of Calvin's Correspondence, the greater part of which has, up to the present time, been buried in the dust of libraries, and altogether unpublished.

This collection is the result of five years of study and research among the archives of Switzerland, France, Germany, and England. Charged by the French Government, at the suggestion of M. Mignet, under the liberal administration of two eminent ministers, MM. de Salvandy and de Falloux, with a scientific mission that enabled us to gather the first materials of a correspondence, the richest depositories of which were in foreign countries, and sustained in our labours by the cordial sympathy of those most distinguished in the world of science and literature, we have spared nothing that might ensure the completeness of a collection which throws so much light on the history of the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century.

The correspondence of Calvin begins in his youth and is only closed on his deathbed, (May 1528 to May 1564.) It thus embraces, with few intervals, all the phases of his life; from the obscure scholar of Bourges and Paris escaping from the stake by flying into exile, to the triumphant Reformer, who was able in dying, to contemplate his work as accomplished. Nothing can exceed the interest of this correspondence, in which an epoch and a life of the most absorbing interest are reflected in a series of documents equally varied and genuine; and in which the familiar effusions of friendship are mingled with the more serious questions of theology, and with the heroic breathings of faith. From his bed of suffering and of continued labours, Calvin followed with an observant eye the great drama of the Reformation, marking its triumphs and its reverses in every State of Europe. Invested, in virtue of his surpassing genius, with an almost universal apostolate, he wielded an influence as varied and as plastic as his activity. He exhorts with the same authority the humble ministers of the Gospel and the powerful monarchs of England, Sweden, and Poland. He holds communion with Luther and Melanchthon, animates Knox, encourages Coligny, Condé, Jeanne d' Albret, and the Duchess of Ferrara; while in his familiar letters to Farel, Viret, and Theodore Beza, he pours out the overflowings of a heart filled with the deepest and most acute sensibility. The same man, worn by watchings and sickness, but rising by the energy of the soul above the weakness of the body, overturns the party of the Libertines, lays the foundations of the greatness of Geneva, establishes foreign churches, strengthens the