James Aitken Wylie - The History of Protestantism (Complete 24 Books in One Volume)

Samson reached Zurich to find its gates closed, and the customary cup of wine – a hint that he was not expected to enter – waiting him. Feigning to be charged with a special message from the Pope to the Diet, he was admitted into the city. At his audience it was found that he had forgotten his message, for the sufficient reason that he had never received any. IIe was ignominiously sent away without having sold so much as a single pardon in Zurich. Soon thereafter he re-crossed the Alps, dragging over their steeps a wagonful of coin, the fruits of his robbery, and returned to his masters in Italy.

He was not long gone when another visitant appeared in Switzerland, sent of God to purify and invigorate the movement – to scatter the good seed on the soil which Zwingli had ploughed and broken up. That visitant was the plague or "Great Death." It broke out in the August of that same year, 1519. As it spread from valley to valley, inflicting frightful ravages, men felt what a mockery were the pardons which thousands, a few months before, had flocked to purchase. It reached Zurich, and Zwingli, who had gone to the baths of Pfaffers to recruit his health, exhausted by the labors of the summer, hastened back to his flock. He was hourly by the bedside of the sick or the dying. On every side of him fell friends, acquaintances, stricken down by the destroyer. He himself had hitherto escaped his shafts, but now he too was attacked. He lay at the point of death. Utterly prostrate, all hope of life was taken away. It was at this moment that he penned his little hymn, so simple, yet not a little dramatic, and breathing a resignation so entire, and a faith so firm –

"Lo! at the door

I hear Death's knock!

Shield me, O Lord,

My strength and rock.

"The hand once nailed

Upon the tree,

Jesus, uplift –

And shelter me,

"Willest Thou, then,

Death conquer me

In my noon-day?... So let it be!

"Oh! may I die,

Since I am Thine;

Thy home is made

For faith like mine."

Thus he examined, at that awful moment, the foundations of his faith; he lifted his eyes to the cross; he knew whom he had believed; and being now more firmly persuaded than ever of the Gospel's truth, having put it to the last awful test, he returned from the gates of the grave to preach it with even more spirituality and fervor than before. Tidings of his death had been circulated in Basle, in Lucerne – in short, all the cities of the Confederation. Everywhere men heard with dismay that the great preacher of Switzerland had gone to his grave. Their joy was great in proportion when they learned that Zwingli still lived. Both the Reformer and the country had been chastened, purified, and prepared, the one for his mighty task, and the other for the glorious transformation that awaited it.

Table of Contents

A Solemn Meeting – Zwingli Preaches with greater Life – Human Merit and Gospel Virtue – The Gospel Annihilates the one, Nourishes the other – Power of Love – Zwingli's Hearers Increase – His Labors – Conversions – Extension of the Movement to other Swiss Towns – Basle – Lucerne – Oswald Myconius – Labors in Lucerne – Opposition – Is Thrust out – Bern – Establishment of the Reformation there.

WHEN Zwingli and the citizens of Zurich again assembled in their cathedral, it was a peculiarly solemn moment for both. They were just emerging from the shadow of the "Great Death." The preacher had risen from a sick-bed which had nearly passed into a death-bed, and the audience had come from waiting beside the couches on which they had seen their relations and friends breathe their last. The Reformed doctrine seemed to have acquired a new value. In the awful gloom through which they had just passed, when other lights had gone utterly out, the Gospel had shone only the brighter. Zwingli spoke as he had never spoken before, and his audience listened as they had listened on no former occasion.

Zwingli now opened a deeper vein in his ministry. He touched less frequently upon the evils of foreign service. Not that he was less the patriot, but being now more the pastor, he perceived that a renovated Christianity was not only the most powerful renovator of his country's morals, but the surest palladium of its political interests. The fall and the recovery of man were his chief themes. "In Adam we are all dead," would he say – "sunk in corruption and condemnation." This was a somewhat inauspicious commencement of a Gospel of "good news," for which, after the terrors incident to the scenes which the Zurichers had witnessed, so many of them thirsted. But Zwingli went on to proclaim a release from prison – an opening of the sepulcher. But dead men do not open their own tombs. Christ was their life. He had become so by His passion, which was "an eternal sacrifice, and everlastingly effectual to heal." To Him must they come. "His sacrifice satisfies Divine justice for ever in behalf of alI who rely upon it with firm and unshaken faith." Are men then to live in sin? Are they to cease to cultivate holiness? No. Zwingli went on to show that, although this doctrine annihilates human merit, it does not annihilate evangelical virtue: that, although no man is saved for his holiness, no man will be saved without holiness: that as God bestows his salvation freely, so we give our obedience freely: on the one side there is life by grace, and on the other works by love. And then, going still deeper down, Zwingli would disclose that principle which is at once the strongest and the sweetest in all the Gospel system. What is that principle? Is it law? No. Law comes like a tyrant with a rod to coerce the unwilling, and to smite the guilty. Man is both unwilling and guilty. Law in his case, therefore, can but engender fear: and that fear darkens his mind, enfeebles his will, and produces a cramped, cringing, slavish spirit, which vitiates all he does. It is the Medusa-head that turns him into stone.

What then is the principle? It is love. But how comes love to spring up in the heart of a guilty and condemned man? It comes in this wise. The Gospel turns man's eye upon the Savior. He sees Him enduring His passion in his stead, bearing the bitter tree, to bestow upon him a free forgiveness, and life everlasting. That look enkindles love. That love penetrates his whole being, quickening, purifying, and elevating all his powers, filling the understanding with light, the will with obedience, the conscience with peace, the heart with joy, and making the life to abound in holy deeds, fruitful alike to God and man. Such was the Gospel that was now preached in the Cathedral of Zurich.

The Zurichers did not need any argument to convince them that this doctrine was true. They read its truth in its own light. Its glory was not of earth, but of the skies, where was the place of its birth. An unspeakable joy filled their hearts when they saw the black night of monkery departing, with its cowls, its beads, its scourges, its purgatorial fires, which had given much uneasiness to the flesh, but brought no relief to the conscience; and the sweet light of the Gospel opening so full of refreshing to their souls.

The cathedral, although a spacious building, could not contain the crowds that flocked to it. Zwingli labored with all his might to consolidate the movement. He admirably combined prudence with his zeal. He practiced the outward forms of the Church in the pale of which he still remained. He said mass: he abstained from flesh on fast-days: but all the while he labcured indefatigably to diffuse a knowledge of Divine truth, knowing that as the new growth developed, the old, with its rotten timber, and seared and shrivelled leaves, would be cast off. As soon as men should come to see that a free pardon was offered to them in the Bible, they would no longer scourge themselves to merit one, or climb the mountain of Einsiedeln with money in their hand to buy one. In short, Zwingli's first object, which he ever kept clearly in view, was not the overthrow of the Papacy, but the restoration of Christianity.