ent attendant upon the Reformation had called
forth, and who hung mischievously upon the rear of the reforming body.
To obviate the evils thence resulting, Calvin, in union with Farel, drew
up a condensed statement of Christian doctrine consisting of twenty-one
articles. This the citizens were summoned, in parties of ten each, to
profess and swear to as the confession of their faith--a process which,
though not in accordance with modern notions of the best way of
establishing men in the faith, was gone through, Calvin tells us, "with
much satisfaction." As the people took this oath in the capacity of
_citizens_, we may see here the basis laid for that theocratic system
which subsequently became peculiarly characteristic of the Genevan
polity. Deeply convinced of the importance of education for the young,
Calvin and his coadjutors were solicitous to establish schools
throughout the city, and to enforce on parents the sending of their
children to them; and as he had no faith in education apart from
religious training, he drew up a catechism of Christian doctrine which
the children had to learn whilst they were receiving secular
instruction. Of the troubles which arose from fanatical teachers, the
chief proceeded from the efforts of the Anabaptists; a public
disputation was held on the 16th and 17th of March 1537, and so excited
the populace that the Council of Two Hundred stopped it, declared the
Anabaptists vanquished and drove them from the city. About the same time
also, the peace of Calvin and his friends was much disturbed and their
work interrupted by Pierre Caroli, another native of northern France,
who, though a man of loose principle and belief, had been appointed
chief pastor at Lausanne and was discrediting the good work done by
Pierre Viret in that city. Calvin went to Viret's aid and brought Caroli
before the commissioners of Bern on a charge of advocating prayers for
the dead as a means of their earlier resurrection. Caroli brought a
counter-charge against the Geneva divines of Sabellianism and Arianism,
because they would not enforce the Athanasian creed, and had not used
the words "Trinity" and "Person" in the confession they had drawn up. It
was a struggle between the thoroughgoing humanistic reformer who drew
his creed solely from the "word of God" and the merely semi-Protestant
reformer who looked on the old creed as a priceless heritage. In a synod
held at Bern the matter was fully discussed, when a verd