Germany; the precursory culture that is to introduce it, must come from France. Therefore, if it is impossible enthusiastically to admire the French national character, we should at least diligently study it, on account of the multiplied objects of civilization which have been committed by Providence to its free and onward scope.

In describing the character of the French, I have, in a great measure, described the character of Calvin. He had the same tact and talent, without genius; the same unpoetical, unimaginative, unspiritual tastes and adaptations; the same analytical modes of thought; the same quickness of logical perception, and skill and accuracy of logical utterance. But he had not the grace, the amiableness, the cheerfulness of his native land. He was gloomy, cold, morose, unsocial-a pure, brave, conscientious man, yet unloveable and unloved. I know not any picture more painful than that which Calvin's residence at Geneva presents. Placed amid scenes so fair that nature offers few parallels to their beauty, he refused to surrender his heart to their incessant and multiplied attractions; and, surrounded by the glories of a paradise, he mused on the horrors of a hell. The sun, from the depths of its azure path, spoke to him of the love of its Creator; but he listened not. The lake, whose blue ripplings bathed the walls of his adopted city, whispered its testimony to the Divine affection; but its testimony was unheeded. The smiling landscapes, made glad by villages and by vineyards, were bright and musical with their Maker's goodness; to him they were dull and lifeless shapes. The mountains echoed back what the sky, the waters, and the valleys uttered; to him their utterance had no import. He sat lonely, in sacerdotal apathy and sternness, employing his crushing and inexorable logic to add atom after atom to the system which was to tear from his throne the God who had lavished its loveliness on the elysium in which he dwelt. Every formula that he proclaimed, was a blasphemy against Heaven, against humanity, against his own bosom, hardened as that bosom was by polemical strife and theological theorising; but forth remorselessly each formula went, with its complicated apparatus of argument, because he cared more for a formula recognised than for a world redeemed. He

became a mere intellectual machine, working out the problems that relate to human destinies and hopes, but inaccessible to the impulse of ordinary sympathies. He burned Servetus, as much to satisfy his logic, as to glut his personal vengeance; and he would have burned Beza or any other of his most intimate friends, with the same unscrupulousness, had his logic required it. There is no security against any man who has reduced the whole of human principles to a dogmatic form. Robespierre and Calvin are in this respect the types of a class. The one and the other were most cruel and odious, when they were most obedient to the convictions of duty; because duty, with them, did not consist in the knowledge and practice of what was proper and commendable--that knowledge derived from, that practice guided by, experience and reflection: it consisted in an attempt to realise the abstractions of hypotheses that were based on no collision with the actualities of life. And it is this, more or less modified, that constitutes the substance of all fanaticism. The fanatic is not necessarily under the dominion of intense feeling; he may be as cold, pulseless, and passionless as an automaton; but he has reduced the whole of his conceptions and persuasions to dogmas; and he cannot believe that the salvation of the world can be wrought out by any other process than by giving every individual a dogmatic consciousness, and the whole of society a dogmatic mould. The enthusiast, on the contrary, cares little about the dogmatic adoption of his faith, provided it pervades others with the same vitality and animates them with the same fire as himself. He wishes more to see a new order of feelings than a new series of ideas produced. He wishes more to see the heart changed than the mind convinced;-knowing by an instinctive philosophy, that changes in the heart effect more surely and rapidly changes in the mind, than changes in the mind effect changes in the heart. Now, this is the great distinction between Luther and Calvin,-between Luther and all the other leaders of the Reformation. He was an enthusiast; they were fanatics, and Calvin was the most fanatical of all. Luther was roused to his gianttask by an invincible impulse of the soul; they were put in movement by the speculations of a restless under

standing. Insensibly, and in the tranquil transformation of his views into something more definite, did he come into opposition with Catholicism; while they intentionally confounded it with its accidental exhibitions. They attacked it from a sectarian spirit of antipathy; he from the earnestness of his character, and from the force of circumstances which urged him on in a career which he had not chosen. Religion dedicated him to the work of reformation; talent and learning fitted them. He fought for the Kingdom of God; they fought for their notion of that kingdom. They spoke to the educated, who theorised; he spoke to the masses that felt. And though, by means of established churches, of Confessions of Faith, of Creeds and of Catechisms, Calvinism has become a popular faith in different parts of Europe, yet it was not immediately or extensively popular like the teachings of Luther. And it would never have assumed its present celebrity or extension, but for the priestly agencies that have been so skilfully and industriously organised in its favour. For logic is, from its very nature, antisocial; unless it is employed as an inferior aid and developement to the higher principles of our nature. And in no mode could it be more unsocial than that which, in the dogmas of Calvin, it took. Therefore, if those dogmas have become prevalent as national beliefs, it is not from their innate social adaptations, but from the sophistries and the material and conventional machinery which have been brought to their assistance.

Let us admit, however, that if Calvin was scarcely anything more than a logician, he was a logician of singular power. Nothing can be more masterly and successful than his grasp of a subject. No point is omitted that is likely to have effect, and every blow falls with irresistible vigour at its proper time and in its proper place. If we were not so thoroughly disgusted with the hideous ideas that his system embodies, we should be disposed to admire the wonderful ingenuity with which it is compacted. It has the clearness, the continuity, the method of a perfect whole. Perhaps, in this respect, it excels every other statement of theological principles that has ever been given. It resembles a prison of faultless architecture, whose every cell is filled with groaning victims

and sounds of despair, and whose symmetry we cannot help praising while shuddering at the amount of misery that it contains. How often, in reading Calvin, we are filled with regret that such a noble logic was not devoted to a nobler cause!

Let us also, while doing justice to his logical vigour and acumen, not forget his personal virtues. He was a man of irreproachable purity, and of undoubted courage. If he had not the benevolence, he had the spotlessness of the saint; and there can be no doubt that he would have been as willing to die a martyr to a belief in his dogmas, as he was ready to punish others for their rejection. Vain and ambitious, he was not sordid and selfish. If he had

a stern soul, he had a proud and a manly one. He sought power; the whole aim of his existence was power; but he disdained to base his claims on anything but the energy and resources of his character. All the low arts and the wretched trickeries by which power is usually gained, he sincerely despised and perseveringly avoided. And the power that he obtained, was, on the whole, both merited and well used. Calvin came to Geneva, a foreigner, with nothing to recommend him but his rising name as a missionary of the Reformation. In a short time, he acquired an influence which went on increasing to the time of his death. And that influence was honestly and zealously employed for the benefit of the little republic of which he had become a citizen. He certainly, while in the guise of an apostle of freedom, endeavoured to rule like a despot; but his despotism was characterised by exceeding wisdom, promptitude, and diligence; and he realised. effects of the most salutary description. He accomplished a notable improvement in the morals, the manners, and the intelligence of the Genevese; he was the means of reforming their laws, and of causing them to be better administered; of modifying their institutions, and of adapting them to the exigencies of the times; of creating a taste for education, and of providing abundant and efficient instruments for its elementary as well as its more elevated requirements. For all this, they owe him an everlasting debt of gratitude, which they ungrudgingly pay. There is not a single native of Geneva that does not mention with enthusiasm and deep thankfulness the

name of Calvin. All the bad results of his residence and labours in this celebrated city, have long since passed away; the good, in tenfold beauty and fruitfulness, survive. His horrific theological doctrines have ceased to be believed in the very cradle of their birth; but the moral and social emancipation that he brought, remains as a cheering and ever-expanding reality. The best of Calvin's monuments, is not the books he left, or the doctrines that he taught, or the controversies that he directly or indirectly excited, or the churches and religious communities that his teachings founded, but that city by the brink of Leman's lake, whence poverty, crime, and ignorance seem banished, where religious tolerance is universal, where all classes are blended into a brotherly unity, where there is republican freedom without republican turbulence, and whither the heart instinctively turns, as to a home of peace amid the crash and turmoil of the mighty empires of Europe.

Nor to Geneva alone have the benefits of Calvin been confined. There is no doubt that his theological system has produced, and is producing, an immensity of mischief. There is no doubt that it is antagonistic to the true spirit of civilization. But it has not been unattended by occasional blessings. Calvinism, such as its author had conceived it, such as it was adopted by his immediate followers, was a revival, in its primary articles, of the faith of St. Augustine; while its constitution was expressly modelled after the Jewish constitution. It was the combination, by a logical mind, of theocracy and fatalisma theocratical church, compacted and defended by a fatalist philosophy. Now, theocracy implicitly obeyed, and fatalism implicitly believed, are fitted, even when operating apart, to make the obeyers and the believers a caste. Much more must this be the effect when they operate together. Both from its faith and its constitution, therefore, was Calvinism adapted to produce this effect on those who embraced it; and a caste they in all cases accordingly became. Now, castes, ever since their first appearance, have been built up in their exclusiveness, as much by their contempt for what others possessed and cherished, as by their pride in those things for which they sought peculiarly to be distinguished. This contempt,