§7 Introduction (part 6 of 7)

I am not speaking theoretically when I speak of applause from the left and the right. In Switzerland at least it has been our experience that Ragaz and Wernle?42 thought they could appeal with equal enthusiasm to Calvin, the one for revolution, the other for reaction. The last word of the Institutes is neither the one nor the other but Christ, Christian liberty, and the celestial country, in the light of which training

— serious, relevant, zealous training, yet no more — is the proper term for what we ourselves ought to be doing.

After this great digression, which was forced upon us by the completion and publication of the first Institutes in 1536, we take up again the thread of our historical account. It was once thought that there was a French

ZANT OS 1) 2798; BEST 242. Cf. M. Mattmiiller, Leonhard Ragaz und der religiose Sozialismus: Eine Biographie, vol. Il (Zurich, 1968), 80, 430f., 452f. Barth clearly has Wernle, Calvin, 158f., in mind. edition of the Institutes before the Latin, but this has been shown to be a misunderstanding.! At any rate, Calvin finished the Latin, which he had perhaps brought with him in part in manuscript from France, when he was in Basel in 1535, and it was printed and published by Thomas Platter of Basel early in 1536. At the same period Calvin wrote a second preface to his Psychopannychia* and perhaps completed a revision of the work, though this was not published. We recall the letter from W. Capito that warned him not to publish it and to clothe his zeal in a more plausible line of argument, an admonition that in every way rested on ignorance of the situation, for even Capito could not deny that the Instruction in the Christian Religion constituted the more plausible line of argument he requested.3 But Calvin’s simultaneous work on that earlier publication shows that in his view the step from the Psychopannychia to the Institutes was not a step from nonessentials to essentials, that he saw a link between the former thesis and the thrust of this main work, and that he thought he had to keep up this link even if, following the advice of friends and for other reasons, he at first refrained from publishing the revision. I would ask you, now that we have gained some acquaintance with the Institutes, that you look again at what was said about the Psychopannychia, and that you realize that we do not have there a mere chance throw but the key to the way Christianity is presented in the /Institutes. It would be a rewarding and important task to work out and to set forth in detail the inner unity of the two works.

At a stroke with the /Institutes Calvin achieved renown not only in France, where he was known already, but throughout the Protestant and anti-Protestant world. The impression he made on contemporaries was not that of someone who was here repeating what they might just as well read in Luther, Bucer, or Zwingli, but of a new and independent fighter who had now entered the field, and in all whose Protestant views they could rejoice without identifying him with anyone else. He left the impression of the welcome intervention of a fresh and untapped force and gift in a situation that was becoming more and more complicated for the

1. Cf. E. Doumergue, Jean Calvin, vol. I (Lausanne, 1899), 589, 592. Doumergue concludes (192) that materially and morally it is impossible that the 1536 Latin edition of the Institutes should not have been the first. So, too, E. Stahelin, “Calvin,” RE, II (1st ed.), 658.

2. CO 5, 173ff.; cf. above, 148ff.

3. CO 10/II, 45£; cf. above, 153f.

ay

Early Years, 1509-1 536

Protestant cause at the time. This impression has to be for us a confirmation that we do well, when explaining Calvin, not to give prominence to the question of his dependence on predecessors but to seek signs of uniqueness at every point, as we have tried to do. This course commends itself even and precisely when we say, as we certainly can, that Calvin's Institutes met what had become a general need in the third decade of the Reformation: the need for a work that with vigor and openness, but without surrendering anything, would deal with the relation of the Humanist question of time to the Lutheran question of eternity; the need for a comprehensive compendium that, without shrinking from the final implications, would sum up the Reformation paradoxes and at the same time make clear that these are paradoxes of real life; the need for a treatment of the antithesis between the Reformation and the Middle Ages that would be more sharply and ruthlessly defined than Melanchthon’s Loci or the Augsburg Confession, but less personally and contingently than Zwingli’s first great systematic effort along these lines, his Commentary on True and False Religion; the need for a deep and serious presentation that would satisfy all kinds of strangers in theology to whom Luther’s Catechisms might seem to be too childish or too deeply German or too edifying to accept.

To meet this need, to be able to speak strongly and with full eternal certainty of the glory of God, and yet at the same time, and for this very reason, to be eminently practical and contemporary, a special gift was required that neither Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, nor Bucer had, and that gift was Calvin’s. How far it was seen to be unique at the time is another matter. The entrance of a uniqueness that is new and strong is almost always fe/t first and only then understood. Yet Calvin’s uniqueness was understood as it became clearer what he was and what he wanted. This is proved by the fact that the first impression that his Institutes was important became an abiding and growing impact that as it were stamped the face of the Reformation in this second period more strongly than did the influence of the older Luther.

The people of Basel were unaware of the important event that took place in the St. Alban suburb in 1535-36. It was not their fault. Always, even to the days of Friedrich Nietzsche, Basel has made too much rather than too little of celebrated strangers. The fault lay with Calvin himself, who lived there under the name of Martianus Lucianus, so that when the Institutes came out under his real name, at first no one knew that it was he who had written the “catechism of a certain Frenchman to the king of France” (Wernle, Calvin und Basel, 6),4 his associates at the time being only very few, and most of them aliens. Calvin seems to have done biblical study or had conversations with the rector Simon Grynaeus.> We see this from the dedication of his commentary on Romans, which he wrote and published in Strassburg in 15397 and which carries a reference to this period.° Probably even before the Institutes was published, and certainly before it became known and famous, Calvin had left Basel. As he noted in his commentary on the Psalms (31, 23/24), his aim was not to put himself forward or acquire renown, and he quickly left,” almost like a fugitive abandoning his place of work once the work was done.

In March 1536, using the name Charles d’Espeville and accompanied by his friend Louis du Tillet,8 he went by some unknown route to Italy. According to Beza (21, 125) he went there because of a great desire to see Italy, and if that is correct he was one of many famous northerners gripped with an almost incomprehensible homesickness for the south. There is a 1535 picture of Calvin painted by Leonhard Limousin?

— whether it really depicts him is open to question — in which he appears as a young and distinguished man, pale, of eager glance, with full beard, and in a scholar’s robe. The expression conveys seriousness but also give signs of fatigue and overwork, of a certain shyness and reserve, and yet also of something childlike and thoughtful, with a suggestion that impulses of a romantic nature might not have been absent at this period.

The practical aim of the journey was a visit to, and perhaps a longer stay at, one of the secret half-Humanist and half-reforming centers of the movement of the time, the court of the duchess Renata of Ferrara,!9 daughter of Louis XII of France, the predecessor of Francis I. The Ferrara

4. RP Wernle, Calvin und Basel... (Tiibingen, 1909).

5. Simon Grynaeus (1493-1541) was professor of Greek language and NT in Basel, 1529-1534.

6. For the dedication, dated 10.18.1539, cf. CO 10/II, 402ff (no. 191). In the margin Barth noted that he did have the preface to Olivetan’s translation of the Bible of 1535 (9, 791f£), which he must have been told might shed further light on this period in Calvin's life. Calvin’s two prefaces show him at work on the problems of interpreting scripture prior to the publication of the Institutes in 1536.

7. CO 31, 23. In the French (24/26): “de me monstrer et acquerir bruit.”

8. Louis du Tillet later went back to Roman Catholicism and doubted Calvin's vocation. Cf. A. Ganoczy, Le jeune Calvin... (Wiesbaden, 1966), 335ff.: “Le probleme de la vocation.”

9. Cf. Doumergue, I, 13ff; and Bossert, 54.

10. Renata of Ferrara (1510-1575), wife of Duke Ercole II of Este. court, in the Lower Po Valley, is the scene of Goethe’s Zasso. You will perhaps recall the inspired words of Leonore San Vitale describing it (I, 1).!1 Goethe’s Leonore was Renata’s daughter. But in Renata’s day everything was not so happy and harmonious as there depicted. A tragedy lay between mother and daughter, described by the latter in Goethe's play in III, 2.12 Renata had great knowledge and cleverness but these did not protect her from what was called “foreign error.” The tragedy was closely linked to Calvin, for the foreign error that threatened and finally split apart the princely family was none other than Calvinism. If, as in Goethe’s Tasso, classical princely hospitality was extended to poets like Ariosto and later Tasso, it could be dangerous to entertain foreigners of Calvin's stamp as Renata did.!3 This Renata was like her friend Margaret of Angouléme, one of those tragic women whose gifts and position as such enable them instinctively to sense what is authentic and right with a perception that!4 we seek in vain in their more or less clever husbands and brothers, but unable or too little able to follow up on what they know with the energy and consistency that the men usually show when they reach the same stage. Renata was not beautiful but she was intellectual, had studied Greek, Latin, mathematics, and astronomy from her youth, and although regarding herself as a good Catholic, had a basic dislike for the papacy, so that, continuing the honorable tradition of Ferrara in offering hospitality, her court became a center for all the enlightened, all those who had been driven into opposition, all malcontents, all Protestants after the manner of Stapulensis, especially those of French origin. Her husband, Ercole II of Este, a son of the infamous Lucrezia Borgia, was a well-educated but dissolute Renaissance ruler — he even seems to have written some fairly good Latin verse (Bossert, 56) — but for political reasons, as an ally of Charles V, he did not trust what his wife was doing, and the situation seems to have become especially critical that spring.

I have gone into all this in some detail because the situation was a typical one for the younger Calvin: a mixture of the Renaissance, a high aristocracy that would ultimately act for political reasons, and Protestant sentiments. Into this, under an assumed name of course, and invited

11. Lines 70ff.

12. Lines 1792ff.

13. For the reference to Tasso, III, 2, cf. T. Schneider, Calvin und wir (Wiesbaden, 1909), 6f.

14. The MS had ei, altered by the editor to nach. because he was French, came the brilliant scholar and the malcontent, not as an agitator but as one who scattered the seed in judicious conversations with the duchess, so that he did not bring peace but a sword [cf. Matt. 10:34]. A Humanist physician from Germany, named Sinapius,!5 was also in Ferrara at the same time. He was friend of Bucer and Grynaeus. But Calvin did not take him into his confidence, just as he had not told the people of Basel who he really was. We are not entirely clear why the author of the Institutes engaged in this concealment, which was much in vogue in that day, but we should take note of it if we are to understand what it meant when we see the same man very publicly at the helm a few years later.

One thing is clear: his own inclination and constraint were not to occupy the position of a reformer. He wanted to be a Christian scholar working through his books and through private conversations with people like Renata of Este who, he believed, might come to think as he did. There is something academic, almost esoteric, about what he did for the Protestant cause from the Cop address [to the 1536 Institutes]. Even if, as we saw, with some final reservations, he did proclaim the need for active participation in church and state, saying what ministers of the Word, rulers, and citizens should do, for his own part he kept such participation to a minimum, feeling little compulsion to act, practicing his understanding of life in time as a pilgrimage!® literally and directly by wandering from place to place as an anonymous pilgrim scholar with no abiding city [cf. Heb. 13:14], whispering rather than blowing trumpets, desiring nothing less than achieving prominence or renown.!7 What he was able to do, he did provisionally by writing his book and the epistle to the French king. He obviously had no further plan in view and therefore no reason to expose himself unnecessarily to danger.

During the weeks Calvin was in Ferrara the latent crisis between the Estes flared up. In March 1536 inquiry came from Rome whether there were Lutherans in Ferrara. This was a provocative question. On April 14, Good Friday, one of the Frenchmen present in the church refused to offer adoration to the cross. The duke had him arrested and tortured, and like-minded friends of the duchess scattered. Calvin must have been one of those who fled Ferrara at the end of April. His stay, then, can have been

15. Johann Sinapius (d. 1561); cf. Bossert, 159; and Doumergue, II, 63f.

16. See above, 208f. and 216f. n. 208.

17. See above, 229 n. 7.

Early Years, 1 POP 1936

only for a few weeks.!8 Beza tells us that Calvin said he had arrived in Italy only to leave it again (21, 125). For the duchess this was the time of the beginning of the tragedy sketched by Goethe. Rich in all kinds of episodes, it came to a head in 1554, when her children were taken from her and she herself was condemned to imprisonment for life. Two weeks later, however, she declared herself ready to go to mass again. She was restored to her princely dignities, but on her husband’s deathbed had to swear to have no more dealing with heretics. She had been in correspondence with Calvin all this time, and he pronounced the oath to have been forced upon her and therefore invalid.

She left Ferrara in 1560, since her son (Goethe’s Alfonso) was just as much in the hands of the Counter-Reformation as his father. Confessing herself a Protestant, she went to France, where her castle Montargis became a place of refuge for the persecuted during the Huguenot wars. She evenly bravely withstood a siege there. She outlived Calvin, who counseled her until his death. She died unbowed in 1575, three years after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and as Goethe’s Leonore put it, she did not give her children the final consolation of “dying reconciled to God.” Her life, her whole physiognomy, is a remarkably characteristic reflection of the life work of her mentor, both in its greatness and in its questionability.!9 This was what might happen when people became Calvinists in the 16th century. They might well be secular to start with, then show human vacillation as they went on, and finally be heroic after the manner of antiquity. The mother deserved poetic depiction no less than the daughter. But Goethe had his reasons for seeing his own problem in Tasso and not in Calvin. That ‘is how it will always be when artists come face-to-face with this distinctive story. The drama of Renata will no doubt remain unwritten, and surely it is better so.

From there? at the end of April Calvin directed his steps to France, where persecution of Protestants had to some extent eased (Edict of Concy, 1535). The story that he fell into the hands of the Inquisition but fortunately escaped rests on a late fiction, as does the report that his journey through Piedmont was a kind of evangelistic tour. It is hard to decide, too, whether he left there by means of the 2786-m. Col de Fenétre to reach the Rhone Valley. In Aosta there is today a cross with an inscription

18. Cf. Doumergue, II, 52.

19. Doumergue calls Calvin Renata’s “directeur de conscience”; cf. II, 67ff.

20. Doumergue, II, 85ff.

(1541) to record his flight, obviously a monument to the victory of the Counter-Reformation, and there is a tradition that links the cross to the repulse of a Protestant minority in which Calvin played an active part on his return journey by way of Aosta, and with whom, when the Romanist party triumphed, he took flight t6 the Rhone Valley and from there to France, using the difficult detour of the Col de Fenétre because the Great St. Bernard was blocked. The truth behind this tradition is that Protestantism advanced into the Aosta Valley in 1535/36, not without some support from Bern, which was then entering into the period of its entanglement with Savoy, and that the estates of the province passed a resolution to live and die in the Catholic faith and in loyalty to the ruling house.?!

It is more than doubtful, however, whether Calvin had anything to do with all this, for the estates met on February 25, 1536, when Calvin had hardly left Basel. And what about the date 1541 on the cross? Calvin's whole attitude in these years up to his arrival in Geneva makes it most unlikely that he should have been an agitator for the Protestant cause in this corner of Upper Italy. Furthermore, the goal of his journey was not west Switzerland but Basel, so that from there he might move on to France. This being so, going by way of Aosta would have been a strange detour. Finally, a Swiss theologian, E. Bahler,2* regards the whole story as most improbable from an Alpinist standpoint, for the Col de Fenétre would still be impassable in May. In my view this whole Aosta episode belongs to the sphere of legend, though we may regret the fact that it robs the life of Calvin of a dramatic feature. In those years Italian fugitives were by no means rare in those valleys, and recollection of the events of spring of 1536 might well have come to be linked later with the name of the most famous and the most hated of the fugitives. It is at least historical that in Italy, and in Savoy in particular, people later made the sign of the cross when the Genevan reformer was in view.

We thus find Calvin in Basel, and then at the beginning of June in Paris to settle his parents’ affairs. He then wanted to go to Strassburg, but a German-French war blocked the direct path through Alsace-Lorraine, so that he had to go further south, and at the end of July or the beginning of August he reached Geneva. His plan was simply to spend a night there,

21. Ibid., 86.

22. E. Bahler, “J. Calvin in Aosta und sein Alpeniibergang,” Jahrbuch des Schweizer Alpenclub 39 (1903/4), 189ff. but it would become his permanent residence. The most decisive hour of his life had come, the moment we might well call a sudden conversion in the usual sense as distinct from all earlier moments of decision. It is certainly odd that that great but long forgotten war should have had a part in it. That Calvin had to make the detour became its decisive contribution to world history.

Writings: De fugiendis impiorum illicitis sacris and De sacerdotio papali abiiciendo

Before we turn to the next stage in Calvin's life, his first stay in Geneva, we must look at two little works that came from his pen at this critical time, written during the Italian journey according to Beza. The two pamphlets were both printed and published together in Basel in 1537.73 They seem to me to be important for an understanding of what went before and what came after. Our general impression of the Calvin of the first period is that of a theoretically perspicacious person but one who was definitely more inclined by nature to contemplation. What has been recounted of his varied reforming activity in France and Italy seems to rest more on an understandable projection back of the later Calvin to the earlier period. There is nowhere any solid evidence for it. Suddenly, after 1536, we find Calvin, having discovered fields of action, at work as an agitator and fighter. When he himself tells us that this was not what he wanted,*4 we must surely believe him. It is also in keeping with the external image that he had fashioned up to that time. Nevertheless, the change naturally did not take place unprepared. We have already seen something of the agitator and fighter in the Institutes, though within the whole theological system and in the material context it is less prominent there. We have also seen earlier in discussing the Cop address and Psychopannychia that at root Calvin did not want to do the work of a mere scholar but to speak to his contemporaries. If we had more of his earlier letters, we would surely know more of the urge to act, to go to work, that was already awake in him even if it was still severely restrained.

Why was it restrained? Why the incognito in Basel and Ferrara that

23. For the full titles cf. OS I, 287ff. For the short titles used by Barth cf. CO 5, 2308 52 / Oi

24. Cf. below, 243ff. raised a question for us yesterday? Why was it, as we shall hear next time, that Farel had to take extreme measures to break through the restraint? Should we try to explain the matter psychologically as an inferiority complex that secretly dogged this strong man, perhaps attributable to his strict father, and that remained with him until Farel in that famous scene counteracted it and roused him to an awareness of his own powers? Or is it that until he came to Geneva he did not find the object of action that was needed to provide adequate opposition? His relation to this city was remarkable. It was so different from him and for that very reason suited him so well. In 1538 he left it with a feeling of deliverance but in 1541 he would return to it for good, drawn by invisible cords. Or are we to say it was simply the cause, God’s cause, to which he had devoted himself, that proved to be the motor but was also the great rock in his path?

In discussing the Jnstitutes we have seen how he himself constantly checked and thwarted himself and his inclinations even as he developed them. Especially worth pondering in this regard is that he did not entitle his sixth chapter “De civitate Dei,” but contrary to all we might have expected “De libertate christiana.” We must also add that even afterward Calvin was never unfaithful to the restraint. If his synthesis was tilted overmuch to one side in the first /nstitutes, he would also allow for a powerful tilt on the other side. Especially in his personal life, to his honor, he took the step from waiting to action most impressively, making clear that the Christian’s pilgrimage does not find fulfillment in the contemplation of the sage but in the practice of an active life. Nevertheless, the uplifted finger that he obviously saw raised against himself in Basel and Ferrara almost prevented him from ever becoming Calvin, and it would be raised over him throughout his life — the doctrine of predestination that so firmly reminds us of what we cannot do is the most powerful sign of this but not the only one — and without this restriction again Calvin would not have been Calvin. One thing, however is certain. Even before 1536 that other element, the urge to act, the urge to play a part, was burning in him, and it was surely a more burning and consuming urge just because of the even stronger restraint. We might perhaps compare it to a river flowing underground. Farel’s adjuration might well have awakened something of this sort but could hardly have created it.

In this respect the two works written just before the accidental arrival in Geneva are an important signpost. We might perhaps say that if the Cop address shows how the new knowledge of God that Luther and Erasmus mediated had broken tumultuously on the young Humanist, if the Psychopannychia shows how Calvin then began to think out Reformation ideas for himself, and if the Institutes shows him provisionally relating these insights at each point to issues of the day, these two products of the Italian journey indicate the place where Calvin, personally obeying his own genius and the demand of the hour, thought of bringing his powers to bear, thus initiating the process that would have his most striking successes and impact as a result.

But what will he actually do when he takes the ae We can almost see what he will do in advance as we read these works. He will give Protestantism a keener edge by making it clear to Protestants that in venturing with God they have ventured on something dangerous that makes a claim and demands consistency and decision; that the new knowledge must show and confirm itself in significant actions, actions that issue a loud no on the one side and a loud yes on the other. Calvin will strip away from Protestants the illusion that the forgivenss of sins and Christian freedom are soft pillows on which they can rest and thus comfortably forget the great medieval unrest, achieving in this way a medieval rest instead of unrest as Catholics who no longer believe in their Catholicism but with their better knowledge have the consolation of a good conscience. No, he will shake them and tell them that the new unrest is greater than the old, and that come what may, there can be no peace with medieval Catholicism. Calvin will become the father of a militant Protestantism that will again produce heroes and martyrs as Christendom had not done for some time. By making Protestants aware that they are in a conflict, of course, he will also make the rift in the church incurable and irreconcilable. Again, as we have said, he will bring the Reformation finally into history as a force alongside other forces, as a For and Against with specific contours even by human standards. He will thus summon into life something great, something very great, but in the process also destroy for good many flowery dreams that might have been dreamed with a good conscience fifteen years earlier, and either way he will meet the demand of the hour.

The two 1536 pamphlets have the same motto, 1 Kings 18:21: “How long will you halt between two opinions? If the Lord be God, then follow him; if Baal, then follow him.”25 The first work also has 1 Pet. 2:9 as a motto: “But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a peculiar people, that you should show forth the praises of him who has called you

IS, (ONS Ih, AST out of darkness into his marvelous light.”26 And the second work also has the text Rev. 3:2, 15f: “I know your works, for you have a name that you live, and are dead. Be watchful, and strengthen the things that remain, that are eee to die, for | have not found your works perfect before God...

. I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot; I would that you were cold or hot. So then because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.”27 One might say that the whole of Calvin’s program is present in these three quotations from the Bible. The two works have the form of open letters, and although no recipients are mentioned they were addressed to two definite French contemporaries whose names were quickly guessed by the public.

The first work (5, 239ff.)28 on shunning ungodly rites was for Calvin's Paris friend Nicolas Duchemin.?? The question is whether Protestant Christians as a minority among Roman Catholics should conceal their convictions by cultic participation. Many at the time had subtle arguments in favor of this course, and not all were cowards who did it. Calvin would often have to take up his pen later to oppose these so-called Nicodemuses. In 1545 they were still asking Melanchthon, Bucer, and Peter Martyr as well as Calvin for theological opinions on the matter, and that of Melanchthon was not wholly unfavorable to them.3° Their justification was as follows. We can take part externally in the practices of those who believe differently with full inner freedom and clarity. The mass is simply the Lord’s Supper.3! We must do what the times demand. Is now the time to worry about such trifles? Is it not more important to educate people first in true piety, love, kindness, and patience, and only when the time is ripe to undertake external change?3* How can we educate them if we separate ourselves externally from them?9 Is it not perverse to deny the Christianity of one who goes to mass when one who does not do so perhaps shows much less of the Christian life?54 Is it a good thing to give incurable offense to many earnest and devout people, who are not so far

26. Ibid., 328.
27. Ibid., 362.
28. Ibid., 287ff.
29. A layman, a former Paris school friend.

30. For the responses, also from the Zurich pastors, cf. CO 6, 621ff.

31. OS I, 310.

32. Ibid., 316f.
33. Ibid., 290.
Be Moral, Bhil7/.

Jay

off, by ostentatiously not taking part in the cultus, when we might avoid giving offense by Christian moderation?3> Do we not by such nonparticipation incur the charge of atheism?° Is not the intransigent attitude of Calvin and the like a bitter and morose one?37 Is it not all too easy for those who stand outside to philosophize quietly in the shade about the conflict and to condemn those who have a much harder time than they?38 This side could even produce their own good proofs from scripture, for example, the permission that Elisha gave to Naaman to worship with his king in the house of Rimmon in 2 Kings 5:18, or the striking account of Paul bringing an offering for purification in Jerusalem in Acts 21:26.59 Calvin's reply has the effect of a torrent. He must have been invited formally to answer along the lines he did, but it needed only the slight opening of the sluices and he burst out. He had the advantage that those who deal in basics always have over opportunists, even pious opportunists. But he also had the disadvantage that always arises in meeting a specific challenge. His opponents at least seemed to have the NT on their side, Calvin only the OT, apart from Naaman, in whose case, as in Paul’s, he could hardly find an adequate answer. In both these cases the other side was exegetically right. In general, however, Calvin had incomparably the stronger position, as we see at once. What does he really have to reply to? His position is strongest when he simply appeals directly to God. Those who are ready to be trained by God, and who learn to check their own desires, cannot even raise such a question, he says at the outset.4 All attempts to suit both others and God rest on such desires, which those who are serious with God will suppress and forget. If we deviate a nail’s breadth from obedience to God, even if only, as in such considerations, by making distinctions between outward and inward obedience, between important and nonimportant commands, then we are in the typical human situation, and the last state is worse than the first. Christian freedom cannot consist of such deviation from God. It is a weakness, too, to abandon the post at which God has set us. True piety involves true confession.4! For those who truly love God, can there be any other law

35. Ibid., 324.
36. Ibid., 325.
37. Ibid., 304, 316.
38. Ibid., 328.
39 Ibid... 321, 323;
40. Ibid., 290.
41. Ibid., 294.

than that of manifesting his sacred majesty in every possible way? Our only goal must be to let this majesty be seen on every possible occasion, and in an unbroken sequence of moments genuinely to do in this regard what we have ventured to do.*? It is not for us to share the honor we owe to God between him and idols.43 °