Calvinism departed much more widely from Roman Catholicism.
It did away with the episcopate and had only one order of clergy—the
presbyters. [20] It provided for a very simple form of worship. In a
Calvinistic church the service consisted of Bible reading, a sermon,
extemporaneous prayers, and hymns sung by the congregation. The Calvinists kept
only two sacraments, baptism and the eucharist. They regarded the first,
however, as a simple undertaking to bring up the child in a Christian manner,
and the second as merely a commemoration of the Last Supper.
[20] Churches governed by assemblies of presbyters were
called Presbyterian; those which allowed each congregation to rule itself were
called Congregational.
THE REFORMATION AND FREEDOM
The break with Rome did not introduce religious liberty
into Europe. Nothing was further from the minds of Luther, Calvin, and other
reformers than the toleration of Reformation beliefs unlike their own. The
early Protestant sects punished dissenters as zealously as the Roman Church
punished heretics. Lutherans burned the followers of Zwingli in Germany, Calvin
put Servetus to death, and the English government, in the time of Henry VIII
and Elizabeth, executed many Roman Catholics. Complete freedom of conscience
and the right of private judgment in religion have been secured in most
European countries only within the last hundred years.
THE REFORMATION AND MORALS
The Reformation, however, did deepen the moral life of
European peoples. The faithful Protestant or Roman Catholic vied with his
neighbor in trying to show that his particular belief made for better living
than any other. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in consequence, were
more earnest and serious, if also more bigoted, than the centuries of the
Renaissance.
