erations; for in the same year in which Gentile perished, most of the Swiss Protestant churches adopted the Helvetic Confession which ere long was also adopted by the Reformed Churches of France, Hungary, and Poland; and thus these churches were henceforth committed to a strict and unchanging form of religious thought much as the early Christian Church had been at Constantinople in 381.1 There had been, however, during this same period, a milder struggle for freedom of belief going on in other Swiss cities than Geneva and Bern, and we must therefore next follow the story of that at Zürich and at Basel.

1 See page 24.

CHAPTER XIV

ANTITRINITARIAN TENDENCIES AT ZÜRICH AND AT BASEL, 1553-1572

Geneva was not the only Swiss city where there were Italian refugees, or where there were seeds of heresy trying to sprout. Zürich, the home of Zwingli, who had founded the Reformation in Switzerland, had long been a favorite refuge for Italian Protestants, when in 1555 their number was suddenly increased by a whole congregation at once. There had been a flourishing young Protestant church at Locarno in Italian Switzerland; and when the Catholic government there at length required them either to give up their faith or to leave the city, they unhesitatingly decided to do the latter. A few of them stopped in the Grisons, where they were made welcome; but the most of them, some six or eight score, went at once to Zürich, where they were hospitably received, were granted a church of their own for Italian worship, and were aided from public funds. Now it happened that just as they were looking for a minister Ochino was near by at Basel, and the Locarno church thought themselves most happy when he accepted their unanimous call.

Since

We last took leave of Ochino at Geneva in 1545. then he had had a varied and interesting life. From Geneva he had gone to Augsburg where for two years he preached to an Italian congregation. When it became unsafe under a Catholic government for him longer to stay

there, he went to England, at the urgent invitation of Archbishop Cranmer, and for nearly six years preached to an Italian congregation in London. All this time he was on the one hand publishing volumes of sermons to be circulated in his dear Italy, where he might no longer preach in person, and was on the other hand becoming acquainted with distinguished Protestants, among them Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth, to whom he dedicated one of his books. But the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary made it necessary for him to leave England, and he returned to Switzerland, arriving at Geneva, so the tradition runs, on the very day after the execution of Servetus. After a brief visit to Chiavenna, and about a year's residence at Basel, he was called to Zürich, as said above.

Ochino was now sixty-eight years old, and deserved a life of quiet retirement; but he accepted his call to new labors without hesitation. For eight years he discharged his office faithfully and with energy, and was held in universal esteem. Although it is possible to imagine in some of his writings before now a faint tinge of heresy, his orthodoxy had never been called in question by Protestants. But in 1563 he published two volumes of Dialogues, which soon brought him into trouble, for one of them was interpreted as arguing in favor of polygamy. This was then a tender subject in the Protestant world, for one of the Protestant princes, Philip of Hesse, had some years previously contracted a polygamous marriage, and had been defended by Luther for it; whereupon Catholics had taken advantage of the situation by calling attention to the demoralizing effects of the Protestant religion.

The Protestant government of Zürich did not propose to bear the weight of another such scandal. Without having granted him even a trial, the magistrates condemned Ochino

to banishment within three weeks. At the edge of winter, and at the age of seventy-six, with his four motherless children, he was obliged to set forth. Refused residence at Basel and also at Mühlhausen, he was permitted to stay the winter out at Nuremberg, though forbidden to remain there longer. In May he arrived in Poland, where he already had numerous friends and correspondents. Here at least he had hoped to be unmolested, and he commenced preaching to an Italian congregation in the capital, at Krakow. But the Catholics had never forgiven their most distinguished preacher for leaving the Church. Within three months they secured from a compliant government a decree that all foreign preachers who were spreading the Protestant religion should leave the country. The decree was aimed especially at Ochino-in fact, he is said to have been the only one to whom it was applied at the time. Nobles interceded for him in vain. Before he could leave he was stricken

down with the plague. Three of his four children died of it. With his one remaining daughter he was finally able late in the year to travel. One refuge still remained when all others had failed. It was among the Anabaptists of Moravia. Thither he turned his faltering steps, and having reached them he died within three weeks at Slavkov (Austerlitz), in his seventy-eighth year.

In the winter after he was driven from Zürich, Ochino prepared an apology to the ministers of that city, in which he defended himself and attacked them. They replied with A Sponge to Wipe out the Aspersions Cast by Ochino, in which they ransacked his writings for materials to justify their treatment of him; and it was not until now that it occurred to them to charge him with unsoundness as to the Trinity. Two of his Dialogues had been on that subject; and in those, although he appeared to be defending the doc

trine, the arguments which he put into the mouth of the attack were so much stronger than those that he put into the mouth of the defense, that there certainly was some color in the charge that he really meant by this means to undermine a doctrine in which he no longer much believed. He was unsound also on the doctrine of the atonement. At all events, he had expressed strong disapproval of the execution of Servetus; at Zürich he had been intimate with Lælius Socinus, whose part in the movement we have next to notice; and we find him in Poland associating with the party which was rapidly developing antitrinitarian views there, and taking part in one of their synods; while it was with the antitrinitarian Paruta1 that he found his last refuge in Moravia. For these reasons his name seems to belong in the history of this movement, in which his writings had important influence.

Lælius Socinus (Lelio Sozini) is one whose name has shone by reflected light from his far more famous nephew Faustus, of whom we shall hear much in connection with the Unitarian movement in Poland. He was born at Siena in 1525, of a family of very distinguished jurists, and connected by family ties with one of the Popes. He was educated in law at Padua and Bologna, and early went over to the Reformation. He was for a time at Venice, though no good evidence is extant that, as is sometimes alleged, he belonged to the antitrinitarian movement there. In 1547 he came to Chiavenna and met Renato, who apparently had a profound influence on the development of the young man's thought. He next spent some time in travel in the Protestant lands of northern Europe-Switzerland, France, England, Holland,

1 Nicola Paruta was a nobleman of Lucca, and one of the Anabaptists in the Venetian territory. He came from Venice to Geneva in 1560, and later was in Poland and Moravia, and in Transylvania, where a catechism which he prepared was used by the Unitarians.