hands.  The supreme legislation was in the council of Two Hundred; which was much influenced by ecclesiastics, or the consistory.  If a man not forbidden to take the Sacrament neglected to receive it, he was condemned to banishment for a year.  One was condemned to do public penance if he omitted a Sunday service.  The military garrison was summoned to prayers twice a day.  The judges punished severely all profanity, as blasphemy.  A mason was put in prison three days for simply saying, when falling from a building, that it must be the work of the Devil.  A young girl who insulted her mother was publicly punished and kept on bread-and-water; and a peasant-boy who called his mother a devil was publicly whipped.  A child who struck his mother was beheaded; adultery was punished with death; a woman was publicly scourged because she sang common songs to a psalm-tune; and another because she dressed herself, in a frolic, in man’s attire.  Brides were not allowed to wear wreaths in their bonnets; gamblers were set in the pillory, and card-playing and nine-pins were denounced as gambling.  Heresy was punished with death; and in sixty years one hundred and fifty people were burned to death, in Geneva, for witchcraft.  Legislation extended to dress and private habits; many innocent amusements were altogether suppressed; also holidays and theatrical exhibitions.  Excommunication was as much dreaded as in the Mediaeval church.

In regard to the worship of God, Calvin was opposed to splendid churches, and to all ritualism.  He retained psalm-singing, but abolished the organ; he removed the altar, the crucifix, and muniments from the churches, and closed them during the week-days, unless the minister was present.  He despised what we call art, especially artistic music; nor did he have much respect for artificial sermons, or the art of speaking.  He himself preached ex tempore, nor is there evidence that he ever wrote a sermon.

Respecting the Eucharist, Calvin took a middle course between Luther and Zwingli,—­believing neither in the actual presence of Christ in the consecrated bread, nor regarding it as a mere symbol, but a means by which divine grace is imparted; a mirror in which we may contemplate Christ.  Baptism he considered only as an indication of divine grace, and not essential to salvation; thereby differing from Luther and the Catholic church.  Yet he was as strenuous in maintaining these sacraments as a Catholic priest, and made excommunication as fearful a weapon as it was in the Middle Ages.  For admission to the Lord’s Supper, and thus to the membership of the visible Church, it would seem that his requirements were not rigid, but rather very simple, like those of the primitive Christians,—­namely, faith in God and faith in Christ, without any subtile and metaphysical creeds, such as one might expect from his inexorable theological deductions.  But he would resort to excommunication as a discipline, as the only weapon which the Church could use to bind