Reply of John Calvin to the Calumniator's Preface

CALUMNIATOR'S PREFACE.

THAT there are many adversaries to my doctrine I know full well and wonder not. For it is no new thing that brawlers on every side should open their mouths against Christ, under whose banner I fight. My only grief in the sacred matter is, that through my feeble side the solemn and eternal truth of God is stabbed, which ought to be looked upon with reference and adoration by the whole world. But since I see that this same truth of God has ever, from the beginning, been exposed to the calumnies of the wicked, and that Christ Himself, by the decree of His heavenly Father, must ever be a "rock of offence" and of contradiction (Rom. ix. 33; Isa viii. 14, 15), I consider that the defenders of the truth must bear this offence with all patience. No fierce bites of the wicked, however, will at any time cause me to repent of the doctrine which I have taught, because I feel fully assured that God is its origin and author. Nor have I profited so little by those numerous conflicts in which God Himself has caused me to be engaged, as now to be alarmed by your empty and futile noises.

Nay, as far as you yourself are concerned, poor masked monitor, I derive some consolation from the thought that you cannot be ungrateful towards the man who has treated you with much greater kindness than you deserved at his hands, without betraying at the same time your foul wickedness against God. I know quite well that there is no sport more grateful to you Academics than the rooting out of all faith from the hearts of the godly by casting a shade of doubt over all that they hold dear. And how sweet you feel in yourself all those revilings to be which you direct against the "Secret Providence of God," is apparent from the very point of your pen, how much soever you strive to hide your base gratification. But I cite you and all your fellows before that tribunal on which the Judge of heaven sits, from whose mouth the blast and the bolt shall one day fall upon you all, and lay you prostrate. I trust, however, that I myself, before I have done, shall make your insolent speaking against God to be as loathsome to the feelings of all good and godly men, as they are inwardly gratifying to your own heart.

You demand of me a refutation of that vain scribble of yours, which you sent secretly to Paris from a town in Switzerland, that poison might be poured upon my name far and wide without my knowing it, and without the possibility of the application of a remedy. You feign, nevertheless, the desire of learning the truth, and yet you concealed your name; for what end I know not, unless it be that you well knew that I had it in my power at once to destroy any credit that men might be disposed to give either to yourself or to your fellows. I could conjecture, or rather determine, in a moment who you were, from many evidences furnished by your book. But whether you wrote it with your own hand, or dictated it to Scotus, the trumpeter employed by your band of madmen, that he might carry to Paris things that you dared not utter here, is a matter of utter unconcern to me. I would, indeed, that some other were the author of the book, or that you yourself were another man from what you are. But that will never be until you shall have once tasted what true virtue and honesty are. For although you have ever spoken respectfully to me, yet, how great your natural propensity to cavilling is I have never any difficulty in discovering and being fully assured. This evil inclination which you have indulged in so many puerile and futile exhibitions of it I have endeavoured to correct, but in vain; because, to that natural propensity, there was always appended a depraved affectation, which led you to hunt after the praise for learning and wit, even by the most frigid and more than insipid attempts at jesting on Divine subjects. Nor can you by any means cover these your vain attempts under the shadow of the authority of Socrates, who (you say) was accustomed to attack many things that were said against his doctrine with sharp sarcasm in return. That excellent man was one endowed with many and eminent virtues, of all which, however, he marred the brightness by this one frailty and defect, which you thus, with as much failure as anxiety, attempt to imitate.

You, moreover, ask me to send you "such a refutation of your vain script as shall be understood by the people." I have never done otherwise than study to accommodate myself to the capacity of the most humble and unlettered reader, by adopting the purest and simplest language of instruction. But if you will acknowledge none other mode of reasoning than that which the natural mind of an earthly mortal can receive, you at once shut up against yourself, by pride and disdain, the only way of approach to the comprehension of that doctrine, to the knowledge of which the first step is reverence. I am by no means ignorant of the sarcastic sneers of yourself and of all like you, who treat the deep mysteries of God with a contempt, which indicates that, in your estimation, everything loses its grace and its authority which does not at once meet your opinion and approbation. For what, pray, is the meaning of all this, that the moment anyone chooses to open his mouth against me, I must be called upon to furnish a refutation of his slanders? Now Socrates, whose name you thus brandish before you, would not have suffered himself to be put in such a position. He would not have yielded to the dictation of such a law to him. Not that I would follow any man in everything. But if anyone, not only in this, but in any other age, was ever permitted constantly to set himself, with indignation, against the wicked, and to refute their calumnies against him as Socrates did, surely even the most malevolent and iniquitous will grant me also a fair opportunity of exercising the same kind of diligence in my defence. Your barking, therefore, is the more intolerable. For you trample with blind ignorance on my numerous books of self-defence and of reply to my adversaries, and call upon me to do the same work of refutation twice or thrice over.

You affirm; however, that there is one question in particular on which the arguments of my enemies against me are too powerful to be refuted by the contents of any of my books which I have as yet written upon the subject. That question, you say, is the great subject of predestination, or fate. I would that you could resolve either to inquire into that subject modestly, or to argue upon it honestly, rather than thus to cast off all shame and to confound in one things the most diverse from each other, in order to prevent all true light from falling upon them. Fate is a term given by the Stoics to their doctrine of necessity, which they had formed out of a multiplex labyrinth of contradictory reasonings; a doctrine calculated to call God Himself to order, and to set Him laws whereby to work. But Predestination I define to be, according to the Holy Scriptures, that free and unfettered counsel of God by which He rules all mankind, and all men and things, and also all parts and particles of the world by His infinite wisdom and incomprehensible justice. Now if the depravity of mind and the lust of cavilling and diabolical pride have so blinded you, that you can see nothing in the mid-day light; yet to readers who really have eyes which can see, the distinction I have laid down shows, in a moment, the great justice and equity (!) of your quarrelling with God in the profound matter of His "Secret Providence."

Add to this, had you but been willing to look into my books, you would have been convinced at once how offensive to me is the profane term fate; nay, you would have learned in reading my writings that this same abhorrent term was cast in the teeth of Augustine by the malignity and hatred of the wicked and the worthless of his day; and you would also have discovered in my testimony that these objections were replied to by that holy father and godly teacher in a manner which would fully answer every purpose of my own cause and defence upon the present occasion.

In the Articles also (purporting to be extracts from my books), which you say you will give the public in your proposed order, you will find that my manner and substance of argument are precisely the same with those of that holy father of happy memory. Malevolent ones, however, knowing that this doctrine was not well known, nor generally received, have boastingly published abroad these Articles (which are partly false and partly mutilated), that the ignorant and inexperienced might be fired with hatred of their contents, and might not be able to form any but the most unfavourable judgment concerning them. And though many persons thought, at the first sight of them, that the articles put forth in Augustine's day were really extracts from his writings; yet, the holy father bitterly complains that they were imputed to him falsely. For the compilers of them had either put together short portions of sentences, with evil industry, or else had, with wicked art, corrupted sentences which were whole and true and godly by the crafty introduction of a few words, thus wholly altering the original, that they might hereby create offence in the minds of the simple. And all honest and sincere readers (many of whom will gladly take the pains to compare my doctrine with thy base calumnies) will discover that the articles which you now boast you will put forth as extracted from my writings, are of precisely the same description as those which were published abroad in Augustine's day, purporting to be true extracts from his books.

And first of all I take this stand against you, that you act neither kindly nor honestly in not affixing any marks of designation or reference to the passages purporting to be extracts from my books, so that readers might refer to the originals and assure themselves that I really had written as the extracts represent. And what can be more iniquitous than confusedly to state, that in the course of fifty or more volumes written by me, some fourteen articles were found of such and such a description? Now had you possessed one drop of common honesty, you would have cited, as a matter of course, my sentences verbatim; or, if you had met with any doubt or danger in so doing, from want of the realities and originals, you would have warned your readers against the doubtfulness of the text in such cases; whereas now you cast a shade of doubt over all my writings together, hoping thereby to destroy all good memory of them from the earth. And thus, that in my books, which might have been read without any offence at all, you have, for your own convenience, malignantly corrupted and exposed to hatred and contempt. And though I do not altogether condemn Augustine for his prudence, where, wishing to meet the craft and iniquity of his enemies, he tempers his modes of reply to them so as to escape odium; yet, according to my views, my reply to you will be more generally useful if I refute in this great cause your revilings freely, openly and unreservedly, than if I so write as to convey the least idea whatever of retreat or tergiversation.