ZWINGLIUS, THE SWISS REFORMER.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4311, 14 January 1875, Page 3

ZWINGLIUS, THE SWISS REFORMER.

The Protestants may number Zwinglius among their apostles and their teachers ; we, who are Democrats, Liberals, Republicans, number him among our great tribunes, our heroes, and martyrs. Born in the great mountains, which speak of God and of the Infinite ; nursed in the bosom of nature, his intelligence nourished by great ideas and hiß body by wholesome food ; mingling with the blood of his heart the purest affections, and with the breath of his lungs the purest air; leading a rustic life in his earliest years ; of a temperament robust as the rude and sublime Alpine country ; going to sleep throughout- his boyhood at the hour when the flocks were folded and the twilight was falling, to wake at the call of the cock, when the skylarks were taking their flight, and the hope of a new day was awaking in the first flush of morning which whitened the horizon ; near to heaven and far from the world, like the mountain birds, his soul bathed in the divine as a star ; in ether, he preserved in the battles of life the candour of the shepherds, in the labors and innovations of reform a love of tradition, in the midßt of cities the aroma of the eglantine and the song of the thrush, amidst the wrath of men and of parties the infinite charity of the air and of the light, free to all beings ; and after having conversed with philosophers and saints, drinking at tho sacred fountain of Plato and the bitter tears of Job, singing the Psalms of David and the odes of Pindar, as if all the currents of the human spirit flowed to pour themselves in his own, he reduced the most abstract ideas to commonplace maxims, to Bcatter them among the people he loved in sermons and prayers. He was a hero ia battle, a sister of charity in tho hospitals, a priest in the tenrple, everywhere an apostle. One of those great characters who vary and turn with the breath of their thought, with the force of their will, the currents of .time, ho died in tho battle for truth, in the purifying embrace of a holy martyrdom. And his reform was born and grew and developed in tho midst of a democracy, a republic, a liberty ancient and deep-rooted, partaking of the character of the medium in which it grew, and marching resolutely forward to modify and improve it. Less opposed and less persecuted than other reformers, ho appears much more serene. His reform springs from the conscience rather than from passion, and reließ more upon reason than upon sentiment. Without breaking so openly as his coadjutors

in the common work with the Pope and the Church, he restricts himself solely to what he finds expressly set down in the Scriptures. He is an orator, and in his oratory there is more of philosophic light than of the fire of the tribune. He is a priest who preaches grace, and who distinguishes himself by the chanty and the grandeur of his acts, who prays and works. The logic of his argument does not damage the subtlety of his system, nor the force of reasoning the eloquence of his disclosures. He is confronted by less opposition, and consequently fights with less revolutionary energy, than other innovators. It is plain that his individual soul is a part of the soul of a great democracy; that his inner education has flowed from the two great schools of nature and society—the country and the republic. His work is at once religious and political. He preaches the merits of Christ, and exalts the rights-of every Christian; he tears from his heart the ancient theocratic faith with the same power with which he tears from the earth the feudal traditions. He speaks of the Lord's Supper as of a religious and democratic communion r he disseminates at the same time a hatred ot spiritual tyranny and a hatred of the reactionary aristocracies, and with the revolution against Roman cosmopolitanism, a worship of the Swiss fatherland. He reforms the understanding and the morals. He demands that priests should cease to carry souls to the sacrifice before the altars of an unquestionable authority, and that the Swiss shall cease to sell the blood of their dearest children to the armies of pitiless despots, that the cradle of human nature shall not become a pedestal of monarchal tyranny. His doctrine, in fact, is religion and republic, the immortal soul of Switzerland, regenerated by this archer of ideas, this soldier of logic, this William Tell of the spirit, who exalts above the material nation another more lofty and more enduring than the eternal Alps, the ideal nation of the conscience.— Harper s Magazine. ___^__^