I certainly won't be wrestling with a communion thief.
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Correction, Perrin was an instigator in the affair I was thinking of, bu t a man named Bertelier was the excommunicant. There were other occasions where Perrin was a threat to Calvin's life.
From Beza's Life of John Calvin:
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Correction, Perrin was an instigator in the affair I was thinking of, bu t a man named Bertelier was the excommunicant. There were other occasions where Perrin was a threat to Calvin's life.
From Beza's Life of John Calvin:
But Calvin though he had been informed of what was done only two days before the usual period of celebrating the Lord's Supper raising his voice and his hand in the course of his sermon after he had spoken at some length of the despisers of sacred mysteries exclaimed in the words of Chrysostom, "I will die sooner than this hand shall stretch forth the sacred things of the Lord to those who have been judged despisers." These words strange to say had such an effect upon these men however lawless that Perrin secretly advised Bertelier not to come forward to the Table. The sacrament was celebrated with extraordinary silence not without some degree of trembling as if the Deity himself were actually present. In the afternoon Calvin taking for his text the celebrated passage in the Acts of the Apostles in which Paul bids farewell to the Church of Ephesus declared that he was not a man who knew or taught others to fight against magistrates, and after exhorting his audience at great length to persevere in the doctrine which they had heard as if it was the last sermon he was to deliver at Geneva concluded thus: "Since these things are so allow me also brethren to use these words of the Apostle I commend you to the Lord and to the Word of his grace." These words made a wonderful impression even on the most abandoned while they at the same time seriously warned good men what their duty was.
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