Antiquity

Abstract

Scarcely any of the reproaches made by the Catholics against the Calvinists caused such quick reactions of loud-toned countercharges and flashes of anger as that of “schism.”¹ “You have rent the cloak of the Lord, severed the holy union of charity,”² intoned a chorus of Catholic voices, and the battery of Défenses, Réfutations, and Justifications which answered back showed that the vital nerve had been touched. The accusation could not be more serious: it was the question of the very right of the Calvinists to exist, the unblinking eye of a most orderly and unified Catholic century ever calling them to account; the one issue they could never push aside, which, like a magnet, drew everything they wrote and said into position around it.³