summoned to retract, which he would not do; Acontius also held firmly to his opinion, and went so far as to develope, in an admirable book, the idea, essentially Unitarian, that all dogmata which are not instrumental to eternal life must be dropped from the list of fundamentals.48

There were, furthermore, two other controversies in the Strangers' Church; that of Justus Velsius from the Hague (1563), of which we have spoken in Chapter II. (p. 50, note 18); and that of Antonio de Corro (Corranus) with Jean Cousin and Girolamo Jerlito, on predestination and free-will, which is beyond the field of our discussion.49 The Unitarian idea, planted by Ochino and watered by the blood of Georg Van Parris, was about to be developed by Acontius, and above all by the genius of the Sozzini.

48 Strype, Grindal's Life, pp. 64, 66. Cf. app. 52. See Appendix IX. 49 Ibid. pp. 185-187, 217-222. Cf. Chr. Sepp. Geschiedkundige Nasporingen, vol. iii., Corranus, dit Bellerive, een “moderaet" Theolog, Leyden, 1875.

CHAPTER VII.

Bernardino Ochino, his religious development, and his influence on English theology.-Corranus.

"All will be easy to me in Christ, For whom I live and hope to die!"

A GRAND figure is that of Fra Bernardino Ochino, the grandest, perhaps, that had appeared in Italy since Savonarola. He must indeed have been a man of more than ordinary gifts of oratory, personal character and intellectual power, to have inspired the two-fold testimony of his contemporaries, both Catholic and Protestant. Passing over the witness of Aonio Paleario, who might be suspected of partiality from his relations of fellow-citizenship and friendship with Ochino, mark what Cardinal Bembo wrote of him to Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescaro, the year when he preached his second Lent course at Venice (1539): "Ochino is literally adored at Venice. Every one praises him to the skies." We have cited above the saying of Charles V.1 Mark now the testimony of Calvin: "This testimony to the pious and holy man I feel it my duty to render, that he may be saved from incurring the slightest unmerited suspicion. For he is a man of eminent learning, and his manner of life is exemplary."? But for the Inquisition of 1542, he might have become the Luther of Italy; as it was, Ochino rendered to Switzerland and to England the

1 Lettere di M. Pietro Bembo: Venezia, 1522; p. 18. Cf. M'Crie, Reformation in Italy, p. 125. Calvini Opera, vol. xxxix. 462.

quoted by Benrath, See ante, p. 74.

service which Servetus rendered to France and Italy. He compelled Protestant dogmatics to emerge from the Catholic formulæ in which they were entrenched, and opened the way for the free development of a more human Christology, and a theodicy (divine polity) at once more rational and appealing more directly to the heart. Ochino, the Italian, was to England what Servetus, the Spaniard, had been to Italy, the initiator of the Unitarian movement. As we have already encountered Ochino at various stages of his career, we shall do no more than rapidly mention in order the principal episodes of his life.3

Born at Siena, the home of St. Catherine, in 1487, four years after Luther and twenty-two years before Calvin, Bernardino, son of Domenico Tommasini, a resident in the contrada dell'oca, received the surname of Ochino (gosling), which in Italian has the same meaning as Hus (goose) in Czech. He was ten years old when Girolamo Savonarola delivered at Florence his prophetic discourses on the freedom of Italy and the reform of the Church; and if but an echo of these, at any rate the noise of Savonarola's catastrophe must have reached Siena, situated fifteen leagues from Florence, and in constant relations with it. Yet political anarchy and the disorders of the Roman Church ran their course, scandalised all good men. Such times of public calamity evoke the call to a religious life. Like Luther, like Savonarola, Ochino, with his ardent temperament and passion for divine truth, was soon sick of life in an age when elegance of manners and literary distinction served as masks for the most shameful vices; and in 1514, at the age of twenty

3 For the details of this biography, we must refer the reader to the work by Dr. Benrath of Bonn, entitled, Bernardino von Siena: Leipzig, 1875. This work, in which the author has made use of inedited and previously unknown sources, calls Ochino to life again. Our quotations are from Miss Helen Zimmern's English translation, 1876 (portrait). 4 [This conjectural date seems several years too late.]

seven, he entered the Franciscan convent of the Osservanza, near to Siena. What he there sought was the way of gaining his own salvation, by efforts of abnegation and humility. Having encountered there only pride and sensuality, twenty years later he went over (1534-1542) to the Order of Capuchin Friars, recently founded by Matteo Baschi, a Franciscan. Like Luther, Ochino said then to himself, "The more I do pious works, the nearer shall I be to heaven ;" and still he was ever disquieted by his conscience and deceived in his aspirations. Nevertheless, the twentyeight years of his life under the rule of St. Francis were not without service to Ochino, and even after his conversion he never regretted them. If the conventual life did not lead him to the real source of salvation, at least it carefully preserved him from the world's temptations; and it brought him into relations with two men, one dead, the other living, who exercised a decisive influence over his mind, Duns Scotus and Juán de Valdés.

John Duns, called Scotus (d. 8 Nov. 1308), forms along with the mystical Bonaventura and the daring William of Ockham, the triad of illustrious theologians of the Order of St. Francis. From their works it was, rather than from the Bible, that masters and novices drew their spiritual nourishment. But it appears that our author gave the preference to Duns Scotus; for, as Mr. Gordon puts it, Ochino "threw off his Capuchin's garb, but never doffed the Scotist vesture of his thought."5 The Doctor Subtilis, by the importance he attaches to free-will, to human worth, and to the perfection of Christ as man, separated from the rest of humanity through his immaculate conception by the Virgin-lastly, by the limit he assigns to divine predestination in the prescience of

• Theological Review, July 1879, p. 293. See also A. Gordon's article (Oct. 1876) on Bernardino Tommasini (Ochino). This article, written in review of Dr. Benrath's book, gives some particulars as to English translations of Ochino's works.

human actions, appears as the spiritual father of the author of the Prediche. But it is, above all, by his critical and analytical method, by his hæcceitates and his quidditates, that the scholastic doctor of Oxford has stamped his mark on one who, by a curious return journey of ideas, was to become, two and a half centuries later, the awakener of theological thought in this same England.

Besides this, the general tendency of the Franciscans, whether Cordeliers or Capuchins, was in Ochino's time singularly evangelical. We have already remarked, while treating of the earliest relations between Italy and Switzerland, how earnestly the members of this Order sighed for the "bread of life" which is in the word of God; e.g. Baldo Lupetino, Beccaria and Benedetto of Locarno, Francesco Lismanini, &c. This tendency was unquestionably due to the blessed task, imposed on them by their founder, of preaching repentance and the gospel of forgiveness to the people. Our author by no means escaped this influence; in his mission preachings he speedily developed a talent for oratory, all the more efficacious with his hearers, as his life accorded with his word, and his outward man was but the genuine expression of the attitude of his soul. He was never seen to go otherwise than on foot, staff in hand, clothed in a woollen frock; he slept on a plank bed, and eat only bread and vegetables. His visage pale and wasted, his whitening hair, his snowy beard, which descended to his breast, all proclaimed him an ascetic, a worthy emulator of St. Benedict; while his gleaming eyes, upturned to heaven, revealed the sacred fire which burned in his heart.7 He was at that time the

6 See Chapter V. p. 106, note 34.

7 See the fine portrait of Ochino prefixed to Dr. Benrath's book. [This portrait is in profile, and represents Ochino as a capuchin. For a front-face likeness of Ochino as a Protestant minister, see the Paris reprint (1878) of the old French version of his Dialogue on Purgatory, where also will be found a brief but admirable memoir.]