Note 43 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

Luther, though he would probably have been ready enough to punish Copernicus as a heretic, was saved the evil chance which befel Calvin of being put in a place of authority where he could in God’s name commit judicial murder. It is by acts so describable that the name of Calvin is most directly connected with the history of freethought. In nowise entitled to rank with its furtherers, he is to be enrolled in the evil catalogue of its persecutors. In the case of Jacques Gruet on a mixture of political and religious charges, in that of Michael Servetus on grounds of dogma pure and simple, he cast upon the record of Genevan Protestantism and upon his own memory an ineffaceable stain of blood. Gruet, an adherent of the Perrinist faction of Geneva, a party opposed to Calvin, on being arrested for issuing a placard against the clerical junto in power, was found, by the accounts of the Calvinist historians, to have among his papers some revealing his disbelief in the Christian religion.43 This, however, proves to be a partisan account of the matter, and is hardly even in intention truthful. In the first place, it was admitted by Calvin that the placard, affixed by night to the chair of St. Peter in Geneva, was not in Gruet’s handwriting; yet he was arrested, imprisoned, and put to the torture with the avowed object of making him confess “that he had acted at the instigation of François Favre, of the wife of Perrin, and of other accomplices of the same party whom he must have had.” Perrin was the former Captain-General of Geneva, a popular personage, opposed to Calvin and detested by him. No match for the vigilant Reformer, Perrin had been through Calvin’s intrigues deprived of his post; and there was a standing feud between his friends and the Calvinistic party in power.