early and potently raised, and in a most significant quarter. Zanchius, himself an Italian, who so emphasised the will of God as to anticipate Spinoza and represent God as the only free Being in nature and the sole cause in history, wrote in 1565 to Bullinger warning him against being too easy in the matter of credentials of orthodoxy, as he had many heretical compatriots. "Hispanus (Servetus) gallinas peperit; Italia jbvet ova; nos jam pipientes pullos audimus." And it is curious that the attempts to find a simpler conception of God than Calvin's, or to modify his notion of the will by the notion of the Deity whose will it was, came mainly from men of Latin stock. Servetus was the son of a Spanish father and a French mother; Lelio and Fausto Sozzini, uncle and nephew, the one the father of the doctrine, the other of the sect, which respectively bear their name, were Italians, as were also Bernardino Ochino, who wrote a once famous book concerning the freedom and bondage of the will, "the Labyrinth," in which he argued that man ought to act as if he were free, but when he did good he was to give all the glory to God as if he were necessitated, and Celio Secondo Curione, who desired to enlarge the number of the elect till it should comprehend Cicero as well as Paul; while Sebastian Castellio, who is described by some contemporaries as French, though by others as Italian-as a matter of fact he was born in a Savoyard village not far from Geneva-argued that as God is good His will must be the same, and if all had happened according to it there could have been no sin. These views may be regarded as the recrudescence of the Latin Renaissance in the Reformed Church, and are marked as attempts to bring in a humaner and sweeter conception of God. They failed, possibly because of the severity and efficiency of the Reformed legislation, or possibly because they did not reckon with the Augustinian sense of sin, or most probably for reasons which were both political and intellectual. It is indeed strange, that positions so strongly rational and so well and powerfully argued should not have been maintained and crystallised into important religious societies; but as Boehme helps us to see, the man who knows himself to be evil expects and appreciates wrath as well as mercy in God. This may be the reason why the attempts made by some of the finest minds in the sixteenth century to soften the severer ideas of Deity seemed to their contemporaries heresies, and seem to the student of history ineffective failures.
The problem was soon attacked from another side. The field in which the will of God was exercised was the soul of man. That will concerned, therefore, him and his acts; if these acts were done because God had so determined, then two consequences followed; the acts would show the quality of the will, and the man would not be consciously free, would know himself an instrument rather than an agent. The criticism from these points of view was mainly northern; those who urged it did so in the interests of man and morality. In Calvin's own lifetime the doctrine of foreordination, or of the operation of the Divine will in its relation
