scar. For
those who consistently admired persecution, it left the estimate of
Calvin unchanged. Not so with others, when they learnt how Calvin had
denounced Servetus long before to the Catholic Inquisitors in France;
how he had done so under the disguise of an intermediary, in a
prolonged correspondence; how he had then denied the fact, and had
done a man to death who was guilty of no wrong to Geneva, and over
whom he had no jurisdiction. It weakened the right of Protestants to
complain when they were in the hands of the executioner, and it
deprived the terrors of the Inquisition of their validity as an
argument in the controversy with Rome. Therefore, with the posting of
the Thesis at Wittenberg; with Worms, and Augsburg, and Ratisbon; with
the flight of Charles V before Maurice, and with the Peace of
Religion, it marks one of the great days in the Church history of the
century. But it obtained still greater significance in the times that
were to come. On the whole, though not without exceptions, the
patriarchs approved. Their conclusions were challenged by younger and
obscurer men, and a controversy began which has not ceased to cause
the widest diversion among men.

The party of Liberty--Castellio, Socinus, Coornhert in the sixteenth
century, like Williams and Penn, Locke and Bayle in the
seventeenth--were not Protestants on the original foundation. They
were Sectaries; and the charge of human freedom was transferred from
the churches to the sects, from the men in authority to the men in
opposition, to Socinians and Arminians and Independents, and the
Society of Friends. By the thoroughness and definiteness of system,
and its practical adaptability, Calvinism was the form in which
Protestant religion could be best transplanted; and it struck root and
flourished in awkward places where Lutheranism could obtain no
foothold, in the absence of a sufficient prop. Calvanism spread not
only abroad but at home, and robbed Luther of part of Germany, of the
Palatinate, of Anhalt, of the House of Brandenburg, and in great part
of Hungary. This internal division was a fact of importance later on.
It assisted the work of the Counter-Reformation, and became the key to
the Thirty Years' War. The same thing that strengthened the
Protestant cause abroad weakened it on its own soil. Apart, then,
from points of doctrine, the distinctive marks of Calvin's influence
are that it promoted expansion, and that it checked the