To the second he answers: ‘The Kingdom of God, we say, begins in men when they are regenerated; and we are said to be regenerated when, enlightened by faith in Christ, we yield entire obedience to God. I deny, however, that regeneration takes place in a moment; it is enough if progress be made therein even to the hour of death.’
To the third he says: ‘We do not deny that Baptism requires faith; but not such as is required in the communion of the Supper; and in respect of Baptism we see it as nugatory until the promise of God involved in the rite is apprehended in faith.’ He concludes by assimilating the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper to the Circumcision and Passover of the olden time.
Calvin, we thus see, addressed himself not only to the questions sent, but also in answer to the letter which doubtless accompanied them, in which the writer must have given some intimation of his own views.
That Calvin’s communication, couched in rigidly orthodox terms, though unobjectionable in style, was not calculated to satisfy Villeneuve, we cannot doubt. His mind was already as thoroughly made up--even more thoroughly made up, we apprehend, on some of the points advanced--than Calvin’s. We are not surprised, therefore, to find that the Genevese Reformer’s expositions were repudiated as little satisfactory by the physician of Vienne, or to discover that the correspondence on his part was not suffered to drop. He appears to have replied immediately, and must have written in sequence no fewer than thirty letters to Calvin on his favourite theological subjects, so many being printed in the ‘Christianismi Restitutio.’ In answer to these Calvin must also have sent him more than one or two, though certainly many fewer than thirty; for by the letter to Frelon, written evidently at an early period of the correspondence, we see him already weary of it.
With his hands more than full in administering the affairs of the Genevese Church, holding his political opponents the Libertines in check at home, and corresponding with friends and the heads of all the other Reformed Churches abroad, it is not wonderful that, besides feeling disquieted by the matter and offended with the manner of Villeneuve’s addresses, he had soon made up his mind to have nothing more to do with the writer. He saw, moreover, that he made no impression on him, each new epistle being, as he says to a friend, but ‘a wearisome iteration of the same cuckoo note.’ Calvin’s vocation, however, was to be helpful in what he believed to be God’s work, and to preach the Gospel as he apprehended it. True to his trust, therefore, and by way of meeting his troublesome correspondent’s further importunities,--as a balsam competent to heal the wounds and strengthen the weak places in the soul of the distempered man, he seems to have thought he might escape further molestation by referring him to his own ‘Institutions of the Christian Religion,’ his master work, the canon of the Church of which he was the founder and acknowledged head. In this view, as we venture to presume, Calvin sent Villeneuve a copy of his ‘Institutions,’ and referred him to its pages for satisfactory replies to all his propositions.