Mgr. Louis de Ségur: Plain Talk about the Protestantism of Today [1868]

[Stone]

PART SECOND.


V. The Reformers their own Judges.

— There are Protestants who still cling to the memory of their great reformers, and are jealous of whatever may concern their name and fame. Like the children of Noah, they throw a mantle over the turpitude of their fathers, and raise a cry of indignation should any one allow himself to think that Luther and Calvin were not patterns of goodness. They continually accuse Catholic writers of lying, and slandering. Luther and Calvin are to them as pure as lambs in spite of the verdict of history.

To give such charges their own weight, and to enable my readers to form a true estimate of these new apostles, I will only copy the opinions rendered by the chiefs of the Reformation on one another. As they knew each other better than any one else, these portraits will be truly after nature.

Let us begin with Luther. All hail to the chief! Hear how he is portrayed by Calvin: "Indeed Luther is very wicked. Would to God, he had taken more pains in controlling his libertinism! Would to God he had better known how to acknowledge his vices!"

"When I read one of Luther's books," says Zwinglius (Oeuvres II. 474), "I think I see a nasty swine grunting around and tearing up the sweet flowers of a fine garden. Luther cannot speak of God and of holy things, but with procacity, great ignorance of theology, and impropriety." Luther returns tit for tat, saying: "Zwinglius dreams to be a sun that illumines the world, but he gives no more light than dung would in a lamp . . . stereus in lucerna."

Nor is Calvin less severely disposed of by his collaborers in the work of Reformation, those who should have felt most interested in palliating his faults. Volmar, his first professor, says: "Calvin is violent and perverse: so much the better, for he is the man we need to further our interests."* Bucer, an apostate monk, and a married priest, adds a touch to the limning: "Calvin in all truth is a mad dog: he is a bad man . . . Be on thy guard, O Christian reader! against Calvin's books."† But hear how Theodore Beza, Calvin's favorite disciple, treats his master: "Calvin could never be trained either to temperance or to honest habits, or to truthfulness: he was always stuck in the mud."

Zwinglius, according to his favorite disciple Bullinger, was expelled from his parish for his immorality. In spite of his being a priest, and a parish priest, he was publicly married, after the fashion of Luther. "If you are told," says he in a letter, "that I have given in to pride, intemperance, and impurities, believe it, for it is true: I am a prey to these vices and many others."* Of him Luther declared that he was satanized, insatanized, over-satanized, and that not the least hope could be entertained of his salvation.

Nor has the great Theodore de Beza, that pious individual of whom we find so many eulogies in Protestant writers, fared any better in the opinion of the most fervent partisans of the Reformation. Heshussius (transl. of Florimond, p. 1048) exclaims: "How can any one wonder at the incredible impudence of this monster, whose lewd and infamous life is so well known over all France, through his epigrams worse than cynic? And still in hearing him you would say that he was a holy man, another Job, or a modern anchorite of the desert, even a greater man than Saint John or Saint Paul, he boasts so much, on every occasion, of his exile, his labors, his purity, and the wonderful sanctity of his life!" — Schlussemberg, another writer of the same sect, remarks: "This obscene man, equal to a devil incarnate, kneaded with cunning and impiety, can do naught but belch forth satirical blasphemies . . ."

Shortly before he was smitten with apoplexy Luther embodied all these testimonies and added with his own hand: "In truth we are only blackguards."

But a truce to this subject. Volumes might be filled with the reproaches and recriminations which the so-called reformers have bandied with one another. On the other hand, the quotations which we have before us are of a character which we should loathe to place before the eyes of decent readers.

Let, then, the children of Luther and of his companions raise no more the cry of calumny when a Catholic voice is raised from time to time to give a judgment of their fathers and to impeach them. Never did the Church, in casting them off, brand them with expressions of such crushing force as those they have employed themselves, a small sample whereof we have just recalled to mind.

It would be more to the liking of Protestants were these revelations, so suggestive and so damning, allowed to lie forgotten or hidden. Of course, their vanity suffers by such exposures; but is it not necessary that light be made and justice rendered in the face of the never-ceasing efforts of Protestant propagandism?