rist asked us to put
on the white robes of a pure and holy life, but what occupies our
thought? We dispute not only of the way to Christ, but of His relation
to God the Father, of the Trinity, of predestination, of free will, of
the nature of God, of angels, of the condition of the soul after
death,--of a multitude of matters that are not essential for salvation,
and _matters, in fact, which never can be known until our hearts are
pure, for they are things which must be spiritually perceived_."

With a striking boldness, but with beautiful simplicity of spirit, he
describes "an honest follower of Christ"--and {95} it is himself whom
he is describing--"who believes in God the Father and in His Son Jesus
Christ, and who wants to do His will, but cannot see that will just as
others about him see it, in matters of intellectual formulation and in
matters of external practice." "I cannot," he adds, "do violence to my
conscience for fear of disobeying Christ. I must be saved or lost by
my own personal faith, not by that of another. I ask you, whether
Christ, who forgave those who went astray, and commanded His followers
to forgive until seventy times seven, Christ who is the final Judge of
us all, if He were here, would command a person like that to be killed!
. . . O Christ, Creator and King of the world," he cries out, "dost
Thou see and approve these things? Hast Thou become a totally
different person from what Thou wert? When Thou wert on earth, nothing
could be more gentle and kind, more ready to suffer injuries. Thou
wert like a sheep dumb before the shearers. Beaten, spit upon, mocked,
crowned with thorns, crucified between thieves, Thou didst pray for
those who injured Thee. Hast Thou changed to this? Art Thou now so
cruel and contrary to Thyself? Dost Thou command that those who do not
understand Thy ordinances and commandments as those over us require,
should be drowned, or drawn and quartered, and burned at the stake!"

The Christian world holds this view now. It is a part of the necessary
air we breathe. But at this crisis in modern history it was
unforgivably _new_.[7] One man's soul had the vision, one man's entire
moral fibre throbbed with passion for it, and his rich intellectual
nature pleaded for it as the only course of reason: "To burn a man is
not to defend a doctrine, it is to _burn a man_!" But it was a voice
crying in a wilderness, and from henceforth Castellio was a marked and
dangerou