This Sketch May, Perhaps, Give You Some Faint Idea Of
How Such An Outline Might Be Formed In One's Imagination.
[Illustration: _of Mont Blanc in the distance._]
We walked out the other evening, with M. Fazy, to a beautiful place,
where Servetus was burned. Soft, new-mown meadow grass carpets it, and
a solemn amphitheatre of mountains, glowing in the evening sky, looked
down - Mont Blanc, the blue-black Mole, the Saleve! Never was deed done
in a more august presence chamber! Ere this these two may have
conferred together of the tragedy, with far other thoughts than then.
The world is always unjust to its progressive men. If one fragment of
past absurdity cleaves to them, they celebrate the absurdity as a
personal peculiarity. Hence we hear so much of Luther's controversial
harshness, of Calvin's burning Servetus, and of the witch persecutions
of New England.
Luther was the poet of the reformation, and Calvin its philosopher.
Luther fused the mass, Calvin crystallized. He who fuses makes the
most sensation in his day; he who crystallizes has a longer and wider
power. Calvinism, in its essential features, never will cease from the
earth, because the great fundamental facts of nature are Calvinistic,
and men with strong minds and wills always discover it. The
predestination of a sovereign will is written over all things. The old
Greek tragedians read it, and expressed it. So did Mahomet, Napoleon,
Cromwell. Why? They found it so by their own experience; they tried
the forces of nature enough to find their strength.
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