THE HUGUENOTS DEMAND AN ALLIANCE WITH FRIBURG: THE MAMELUKES OPPOSE IT. BERTHELIER IS ACQUITTED.
The cruel butchery of Navis and Blanchet, and the insolent sealed letter, were acts ruinous to those who had committed them. If the bishop had possessed only the spiritual power, he would not have been dragged into such measures; but by wishing to unite earthly dominion with religious direction, he lost both: a just punishment of those who forget the words of Christ: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ The bishop had torn the contract that bound him to the free citizens of the ancient city. The struggle was growing fiercer every day, and would infallibly end in the fall of the Roman episcopate in Geneva. It was not the Reformation that was to overthrow the representative of the pope: it was the breath of liberty and legality that was to uproot that barren tree, and the reformers were to come afterwards to cultivate the soil and scatter abroad the seeds of life. Two parties, both strangers to the Gospel, stood then face to face. On the one side were the bishop, the vicar and procurator-fiscal, the canons, priests, monks, and all the agents of the popedom; on the other were the friends of light, the friends of liberty, the partisans of law, the representatives of the people. The battle was between clerical and secular society. These struggles were not new; but while in the middle ages clerical society had always gained the victory, at Geneva, on the contrary, in the sixteenth century the series of its defeats was to begin. It is easy to explain this phenomenon. Ecclesiastical society had long been the most advanced as well as the strongest; but in the sixteenth century secular society appeared in all the vigour of youth, and was soon to gain the victories of a maturer age. It was all over with the clerical power: the weapons it employed at Geneva (the letter and the walnut-tree) indicated a thorough decline of human dignity. Out of date, fallen into childishness, and decrepid, it could no longer contend against the lay body. If the duel took place on open ground, without secret understandings, without trickery, the dishonoured clerical authority must necessarily fall. The Epicurean hog (if we may be permitted to use an ancient phrase), at once filthy and cruel, who from his episcopal throne trampled brutally under foot the holiest rights, was unconsciously preparing in Geneva the glorious advent of the Reformation.