# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1864_S147
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Literary Notices. 147

Miscellany.

Calvin's Reformation. In the "History of the Reformation in
Europe in the Times of Calvin, by Merle d'Aubigné" (1863), the author says
of Calvin's Reformation: "What especially characterizes it is that everywhere
it found entrance, it spread not only truth but also liberty, and that it
allowed these two fruitful principles to develop unhindered and completely.
Political liberty took up its dwelling on those hills which, at the
southernmost end of the Leman, bear the city of Calvin, and from that time
on it has not left them. But, what is still more significant, this earthly
liberty, the faithful companion of divine truth, arrived together with it in
the united provinces of the Netherlands, in England, in Scotland, then in
the United States and in other lands, and everywhere it created great
peoples. Calvin's Reformation is the Reformation of the modern age; it is
the religion destined for the whole universe. Infinitely rich in spirit, it
serves at the same time, in an admirable way, all the temporal interests of
man. It contains the promises of the present life and of the life to come."
In a review of d'Aubigné's work in the Mecklenburg journal, it is therefore
said: "The result of the Reformation, according to our author, is the modern
social life ordered according to the principles of humanity and liberty;
this new condition of the world is the ""conversion"" that he knows of. This
book, so far as it has now appeared, is one of the worst examples of what
even evangelically pious men — for such we had hitherto taken the author to
be — come to, when, instead of remaining in the sobriety of the Word of God,
they let themselves be intoxicated by the reeling wine of ""modern
society"" and of ""constitutional principles.""" Incidentally, "Merle
d'Aubigné, in his judgment of the political tendency in Calvin's work,
agrees entirely with Stahl, who in his lectures, The Present Parties in
State and Church (1863, pp. 37–59), likewise comes to speak of Calvin's
influences on the formation of the mentality of 1789 — only that, of course,
the two men's judgment of this side of Calvin's work reads differently."
For while d'A. praises the same, Stahl condemns it. How correctly, indeed,
d'A. grasps Calvin's Reformation, we here in our own Calvinistic North
America learn only too keenly.

Literary Notices.

In the bookshop of C. A. Schwetschke at Braunschweig there appeared last
year:

Corpus Reformatorum. Vol. XXIX. Joannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt
omnia. Ed. Guil. Baum, Ed. Cunitz, Ed. Reuss, theologi Argentoratenses.
Vol. I. — After the publication of the works of Melanch-