for saying
that she wanted to be a Catholic. Calvin identified his own wishes and
dignity with the commands and honor of God. One day he forbade a
citizen, Philibert Berthelier, to come to the Lord's table. Berthelier
protested and was supported by the council. "If God lets Satan crush
my ministry under such tyranny," shrieked Calvin, "it is all over with
me." The slightest assertion of liberty on the part of another was
stamped out as a crime. Sebastian Castellio, a sincere Christian and
Protestant, but more liberal than Calvin, fell under suspicion because
he called the Song of Songs obscene, and because he made a new French
version of the Bible to replace the one of Olivetan officially
approved. He was banished in 1544. Two years later Peter Ameaux made
some very trifling personal remarks about Calvin, for which he was
forced to fall on his knees in public and ask pardon.

But opposition only increased. The party opposing Calvin he called the
Libertines--a word then meaning something like "free-thinker" and
gradually getting {176} the bad moral connotation it has now, just as
the word "miscreant" had formerly done. [Sidenote: January, 1547] One
of these men, James Cruet, posted on the pulpit of St. Peter's church
at Geneva a warning to Calvin, in no very civil terms, to leave the
city. He was at once arrested and a house to house search made for his
accomplices. This method failing to reveal anything except that Gruet
had written on one of Calvin's tracts the words "all rubbish," his
judges put him to the rack twice a day, morning and evening, for a
whole month. The frightful torture failed to make Gruet incriminate
anyone else, and he was accordingly tried for heresy. He was charged
with "disparaging authors like Moses, who by the Spirit of God wrote
the divine law, saying that Moses had no more power than any other
man. . . . He also said that all laws, human and divine, were made at
the pleasure of man." He was therefore sentenced to death for
blasphemy and beheaded on July 26, 1547, "calling on God as his Lord."
After his death one of his books was found and condemned. To justify
this course Calvin alleged that Gruet said that Jesus Christ was a
good-for-nothing, a liar, and a false seducer, and that he (Gruet)
denied the existence of God and immortality. Evangelical freedom had
now arrived at the point whore its champions first took a man's life
and then his character, merely for writing a la