enchman_, travelling through Switzerland, was arrested at
Geneva, tried, condemned, and burned alive, on Calvin's accusation,
for having "attacked the mystery of the Trinity," in a book which
was neither written nor published in Geneva. Remember the eloquent
remonstrance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose book, overthrowing the
Catholic religion, written in France and published in Holland, was
burned by the hangman, while the author, a foreigner, was merely
banished from the kingdom where he had endeavored to destroy the
fundamental proofs of religion and of authority. Compare the conduct
of our Parliament with that of the Genevese tyrant. Again: Bolsee
was brought to trial for "having other ideas than those of Calvin
on predestination." Consider these things, and ask yourselves if
Fourquier-Tinville did worse. The savage religious intolerance of
Calvin was, morally speaking, more implacable than the savage political
intolerance of Robespierre. On a larger stage than that of Geneva,
Calvin would have shed more blood than did the terrible apostle of
political equality as opposed to Catholic equality. Three centuries
earlier a monk of Picardy drove the whole West upon the East. Peter the
Hermit, Calvin, and Robespierre, each at an interval of three hundred
years and all three from the same region, were, politically speaking,
the Archimedean screws of their age,--at each epoch a Thought which
found its fulcrum in the self-interest of mankind.

Calvin was undoubtedly the maker of that melancholy town called Geneva,
where, only ten years ago, a man said, pointing to a porte-cochere in
the upper town, the first ever built there: "By that door luxury has
invaded Geneva." Calvin gave birth, by the sternness of his doctrines
and his executions, to that form of hypocritical sentiment called
"cant."[*] According to those who practice it, good morals consist in
renouncing the arts and the charms of life, in eating richly but without
luxury, in silently amassing money without enjoying it otherwise than as
Calvin enjoyed power--by thought. Calvin imposed on all the citizens of
his adopted town the same gloomy pall which he spread over his own
life. He created in the Consistory a Calvinistic inquisition, absolutely
similar to the revolutionary tribunal of Robespierre. The Consistory
denounced the persons to be condemned to the Council, and Calvin ruled
the Council through the Consistory, just as Robespierre ruled the
Convention through t