social nor genial; he sought a wife, not so much for communion of feeling as to ease him of his burdens,—­not to share his confidence, but to take care of his house.  Nor was he fond, like Luther, of music and poetry.  He had no taste for the fine arts; he never had a poet or an artist for his friend or companion.  He could not look out of his window without seeing the glaciers of the Alps, but seemed to be unmoved by their unspeakable grandeur; he did not revel in the glories of nature or art, but gave his mind to abstract ideas and stern practical duties.  He was sparing of language, simple, direct, and precise, using neither sarcasm, nor ridicule, nor exaggeration.  He was far from being eloquent according to popular notions of oratory, and despised the jingle of words and phrases and tricks of rhetoric; he appealed to reason rather than the passions, to the conscience rather than the imagination.

Though mild, Calvin was also intolerant.  Castillo, once his friend, assailed his doctrine of Decrees, and was obliged to quit Geneva, and was so persecuted that he died of actual starvation; Perrin, captain-general of the republic, danced at a wedding, and was thrown into prison; Bolsec, an eminent physician, opposed the doctrine of Predestination, and was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment; Gruet spoke lightly of the ordinances of religion, and was beheaded; Servetus was a moral and learned and honest man, but could not escape the flames.  Had he been willing to say, as the flames consumed his body, “Jesus, thou eternal Son of God, have mercy on me!” instead of, “Jesus, thou son of the eternal God!” he might have been spared.  Calvin was as severe on those who refused to accept his logical deductions from acknowledged truths as he was on those who denied the fundamental truths themselves.  But toleration was rare in his age, and he was not beyond it.  He was not even beyond the ideas of the Middle Ages in some important points, such as those which pertained to divine justice,—­the wrath rather than the love of God.  He lived too near the Middle Ages to be emancipated from the ideas which enslaved such a man as Thomas Aquinas.  He had very little patience with frivolous amusements or degrading pursuits.  He attached great dignity to the ministerial office, and set a severe example of decorum and propriety in all his public ministrations.  He was a type of the early evangelical divines, and was the father of the old Puritan strictness and narrowness and fidelity to trusts.  His very faults grew out of virtues pushed to extremes.  In our times such a man would not be selected as a travelling companion, or a man at whose house we would wish to keep the Christmas holidays.  His unattractive austerity perhaps has been made too much of by his enemies, and grew out of his unimpulsive temperament,—­call it cold if we must,—­and also out of his stern theology, which marked the ascetics of the Middle Ages.  Few would now approve of his severity of discipline any more than they would feel inclined to accept some of his theological deductions.