HENRY NETTLESHIP, M. A. CORPUS PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD VOL. II Oxford AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1889 [All rights reserved] XII. CALVIN AT GENEVA. [Westminster Review, 1858.] WHEN Casaubon, on his first visit to Paris, was WH shown over the great hall of the Sorbonne, he was told by his guide-'This is where the theologians have disputed for five hundred years.' 'Indeed!' was the reply; and pray what have they settled?' Something like this is the feeling of every reflective mind on a review of the last three centuries of the history of Europe. We see the most civilized part of mankind, the nations of the West, 'the root and crown of things,' devoting their best energies, and lavishing all their resources, mental and material, upon a doctrinal quarrel. Nor at the end of a three hundred years' experience are we at all wiser. Among our educated classes, at least, far the larger number still think that there exist no questions of more momentous interest for themselves and the world at large than those tenets by which the Protestant Churches are separated from the Church of Rome. No philosophic mind at this day sympathizes with the scoffers of the last century, or with the 'profane of every age, who have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousians and the Homoiousians 2. The buffoon wit 11. CALVIN (JEAN), Lettres recueillies pour la première fois et publiées d'après les Manuscrits originaux. Par JULES BONNET, Vols. I and II. Lettres Françoises. 8vo. Paris, 1854. 2. GABEREL (J.), Histoire de l'Église de Genève depuis le commencement de la Réformation jusqu'en 1815. Vols. I and II. 8vo. Genève, 1855 |