Theodore of Beza, who had seen several of his co-religionists burned in France for their faith, likewise wrote in 1554, in Calvinistic Geneva: "What crime can be greater or more heinous than heresy, which sets at nought the word of God and all ecclesiastic discipline? Christian magistrates, do your duty to God, Who has put the sword into your hands for the honor of His majesty; strike valiantly these monsters in the guise of men." Theodore of Beza considered the error of those who demanded freedom of conscience "worse than the tyranny of the Pope. It is better to have a tyrant, no matter how cruel he may be, than to let everyone do as he pleases." He maintained that the sword of the civil authority should punish not only heretics, but also those who wished heresy to go unpunished.[1] In brief, before the Renaissance there were very few who taught with Huss[2] that a heretics ought not to be abandoned to the secular arm to be put to death.[3]
[1] _De hæreticis a civili magistratu puniendis_, Geneva, 1554; translated into French by Colladon in 1559.
[2] In his treatise _De Ecclesia_. This was the eighteenth article of the heresies attributed to him.
[3] In general, the Protestant leaders of the day were glad of the execution of Servetus. Melancthon wrote to Bullinger: "I am astonished that some persons denounce the severity that was so justly used in that case." Among those who did denounce it was Nicolas Zurkinden of Berne. Cf. his letter in the _OEuvres complètes de Calvin_, vol. xv, p. 19. Sébastien Castellio published in March, 1554, his _Traité des hérétiques, a savoir s'il faut les persécuter_, the oldest and one of the most eloquent pamphlets against intolerance. Cf. F. Buisson, op. cit., ch. xi. This is the pamphlet that Theodore of Beza tried to refute. Castellio then attacked Calvin directly in a new work, _Contra libellum Calvini in quo ostendere conatur hæreticos jure gladii coercendos esse_, which was not published until 1612, in Holland.
Such severity, nay, such cruelty, shown to what we would call "a crime of opinion," is hard for men of our day to understand. "To comprehend it," says Lea, "we must picture to ourselves a stage of civilization in many respects wholly unlike our own. Passions were fiercer, convictions stronger, virtues and vices more exaggerated, than in our colder and self-contained time. The age, moreover, was a cruel one.... We have only to look upon the atrocities of the criminal law of the Middle Ages to see how pitiless men were in their dealings with one another. The wheel, the caldron of burning oil, burning alive, tearing apart with wild horses, were the ordinary expedients by which the criminal jurist sought to deter men from crime by frightful examples which would make a profound impression on a not over-sensitive population."[1]