Victor R. Claveau, MJ
Were an impartial biographer to sum up the characteristic traits of the three prominent innovators of the sixteenth century, Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin, he would present to us three widely different characters. In Luther he would portray a man of fine native talents, and of good natural instincts, feelings, and tendencies, a fair scholar, but of strong passions, great ambition, and love of admiration, and a brain and nervous system in the highest degree excitable and sensitive. He would trace his modest and blameless career as a monk of the convent of Erfurt, and commend him for his unaffected piety and devotion to his duties. He would follow him to his new and strange arena of controversy and strife, analyze his ferocious and obscene tirades against friend and foe. He would hold him up to the gaze of the world as a habitual believer in and seer of fantastic visions, ghosts, and fiends, a contender with Satan as well as with lessor adversaries. He was a vow breaker, a wine drinker, a vindictive and unscrupulous opponent, and an instigator of civil wars and bloodshed. A candid biographer of this era would deplore the obvious transformation, which occurred in Luther’s mind and express sympathy for his relatives and friends. If he were reliable, he would be compelled to depict Luther’s years as an Augustinian monk as relatively peaceful. During these years, he was mentally sound, content and healthy. Contrast this period with Martin Luther the Reformer. A period of abnormal and perverted intellectual and moral traits, which distressed him during the entire period of his continually changing innovations.
He would represent Melanchthon as a noble, warm-hearted, and pious Christian, a ripe scholar, an ardent friend, but an enthusiastic, credulous, visionary, fond of novelty, and so constituted as to be readily blown about by every wind of doctrine, and dominated by wicked and designing men.
In Calvin he would present us with a perfect type of cold-hearted selfishness, cruelty, cunning, and ranting hypocrisy. He would make known to us his thrilling powers of eloquence, his high classical attainments, his polished diction, and his snake-like fascination over his rapt audiences. At the same time be would tell us of his terrible blasphemies against his Maker, and of his atrocious Puritan doctrines. He would bring before us a man who had the impious temerity to declare God the author and creator of all the sins, crimes, and calamities of the world, and that men are merely passive and impotent instruments in His hands. He would place before us a heart of stone–cold, unsympathetic, impassible, Satanic. He would not depict Calvin as an insane man, but as one consummately talented, selfish, heartless, and unscrupulous. He would display to us a perfect type of the Puritan. The theological tenets of this man have exercised a dominant influence over nearly all of the Protestant sects of the world down to the present time.
These are the characterizations of the men who took it upon themselves to destroy the Catholic Church.