The career of Robespierre can alone picture to the minds of the present day that of Calvin, who, founding his power on the same bases, was as despotic and as cruel as the lawyer of Arras.  It is a noticeable fact that Picardy (Arras and Noyon) furnished both these instruments of reformation!  Persons who wish to study the motives of the executions ordered by Calvin will find, all relations considered, another 1793 in Geneva.  Calvin cut off the head of Jacques Gruet “for having written impious letters, libertine verses, and for working to overthrow ecclesiastical ordinances.”  Reflect upon that sentence, and ask yourselves if the worst tyrants in their saturnalias ever gave more horribly burlesque reasons for their cruelties.  Valentin Gentilis, condemned to death for “involuntary heresy,” escaped execution only by making a submission far more ignominious than was ever imposed by the Catholic Church.  Seven years before the conference which was now to take place in Calvin’s house on the proposals of the queen-mother, Michel Servet, a Frenchman, travelling through Switzerland, was arrested at Geneva, tried, condemned, and burned alive, on Calvin’s accusation, for having “attacked the mystery of the Trinity,” in a book which was neither written nor published in Geneva.  Remember the eloquent remonstrance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose book, overthrowing the Catholic religion, written in France and published in Holland, was burned by the hangman, while the author, a foreigner, was merely banished from the kingdom where he had endeavored to destroy the fundamental proofs of religion and of authority.  Compare the conduct of our Parliament with that of the Genevese tyrant.  Again:  Bolsee was brought to trial for “having other ideas than those of Calvin on predestination.”  Consider these things, and ask yourselves if Fourquier-Tinville did worse.  The savage religious intolerance of Calvin was, morally speaking, more implacable than the savage political intolerance of Robespierre.  On a larger stage than that of Geneva, Calvin would have shed more blood than did the terrible apostle of political equality as opposed to Catholic equality.  Three centuries earlier a monk of Picardy drove the whole West upon the East.  Peter the Hermit, Calvin, and Robespierre, each at an interval of three hundred years and all three from the same region, were, politically speaking, the Archimedean screws of their age,—­at each epoch a Thought which found its fulcrum in the self-interest of mankind.

Calvin was undoubtedly the maker of that melancholy town called Geneva, where, only ten years ago, a man said, pointing to a porte-cochere in the upper town, the first ever built there:  “By that door luxury has invaded Geneva.”  Calvin gave birth, by the sternness of his doctrines and his executions, to that form of hypocritical sentiment called “cant."[*] According to those who practice it, good morals consist in renouncing the arts and the charms of life, in