e of Christendom was in favour of this; that even such a
man as Melanchthon affirmed the justice of the sentence;[12] that an
eminent English divine of the next age should declare the process
against him "just and honourable,"[13] and that only a few voices here
and there were at the time raised against it, many will be ready to
accept the judgment of Coleridge, that the death of Servetus was not
"Calvin's guilt especially, but the common opprobrium of all European
Christendom."[14]

Calvin was also involved in a protracted and somewhat vexing dispute
with the Lutherans respecting the Lord's Supper, which ended in the
separation of the evangelical party into the two great sections of
Lutherans and Reformed,--the former holding that in the eucharist the
body and blood of Christ are objectively and consubstantially present,
and so are actually partaken of by the communicants, and the latter that
there is only a virtual presence of the body and blood of Christ, and
consequently only a spiritual participation thereof through faith. In
addition to these controversies on points of faith, he was for many
years greatly disquieted, and sometimes even endangered, by the
opposition offered by the libertine party in Geneva to the
ecclesiastical discipline which he had established there. His system of
church polity was essentially theocratic; it assumed that every member
of the state was also under the discipline of the church; and he
asserted that the right of exercising this discipline was vested
exclusively in the consistory or body of preachers and elders. His
attempts to carry out these views brought him into collision both with
the authorities and with the populace,--the latter being not unnaturally
restive under the restraints imposed upon their liberty by the vigorous
system of church discipline, and the former being inclined to retain in
their own hands a portion of that power in things spiritual which Calvin
was bent on placing exclusively in the hands of the church rulers. His
dauntless courage, his perseverance, and his earnestness at length
prevailed, and he had the satisfaction, before he died, of seeing his
favourite system of church polity firmly established, not only at
Geneva, but in other parts of Switzerland, and of knowing that it had
been adopted substantially by the Reformers in France and Scotland. The
men whom he trained at Geneva carried his principles into almost every
country in Europe, and in varying deg