Note 55 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

At this period (1552), on the same issue of predestination, Calvin broke utterly with one of his closest friends, Jacques de Bourgogne, Sieur de Falais.55 It seemed as if the Protestant polity were disrupting in a continuous convulsion of dogmatic strife; and Melanchthon wrote to Bucer in despair over the madness and misery of a time in which Geneva was returning to the fatalism of the Stoics, and imprisoning whosoever would not agree with Zeno.56 By this time it must have been clear to some that behind the strifes of raging theologians there lay a philosophic problem which they could not sound. It is therefore not surprising to learn that already Basel University, as fifty years before at Erfurt, there was a latitudinarian group of professors who aimed at a universal religion, and came near “naturalism” in the attempt;57 while elsewhere in Switzerland, as we shall see later, there grew up the still freer way of thought which came to be known as Deism.