646} Christians should hate the enemies of God as much as did
David, and when Renee of Ferrara suggested that that law might have
been abrogated by the new dispensation, Calvin retorted that any such
gloss on a plain text would overturn the whole Bible. Calvin went
further, and when Castellio argued that heretics should not be punished
with death, Calvin said that those who defended heretics in this manner
were equally culpable and should be equally punished.

Given the premises of the theologians, their arguments were
unanswerable. Of late the opinion has prevailed that his faith cannot
be wrong whose life is in the right. But then it was believed that the
creed was the all-important thing; that God would send to hell those
who entertained wrong notions of his scheme of salvation. "We utterly
abhor," says the Scots' Confession of 1560, "the blasphemy of those
that affirm that men who live according to equity and justice shall be
saved, what religion so ever they have professed."

[Sidenote: Tolerance]

Against this flood of bigotry a few Christians ventured to protest in
the name of their master. In general, the persecuted sects,
Anabaptists and Unitarians, were firmly for tolerance, by which their
own position would have been improved. [Sidenote: Erasmus] Erasmus
was thoroughly tolerant in spirit and, though he never wrote a treatise
specially devoted to the subject, uttered many _obiter dicta_ in favor
of mercy and wrote many letters to the great ones of the earth
interceding for the oppressed. His broad sympathies, his classical
tastes, his horror of the tumult, and his Christ-like spirit, would not
have permitted him to resort to the coarse arms of rack and stake even
against infidels and Turks.

The noblest plea for tolerance from the Christian standpoint was that
written by Sebastian Castellio [Sidenote: Castellio] as a protest
against the execution of Servetus. He {647} collects all the
authorities ancient and modern, the latter including Luther and Erasmus
and even some words, inconsistent with the rest of his life, written by
Calvin himself. "The more one knows of the truth the less one is
inclined to condemnation of others," he wisely observes, and yet,
"there is no sect which does not condemn all others and wish to reign
alone. Thence come banishments, exiles, chains, imprisonments,
burnings, scaffolds and the miserable rage of torture and torment that
is plied every day because of some opinio