Calvin and the Wine Bribe

Reading more of Calvin in His Letters I came across a fun piece where John Calvin uses a cask of wine to try and lure a friend to join him in Geneva. I couldn’t help laughing as this seems like the sort of trick I might use to get a friend to join me (or that could be used on me).

When he would induce his friend M. de Falais to come to Geneva and take up his abode there, he slyly adds that he has laid in a cask of good wine for his benefit. “I wish very much that it may please God to bring you hither to drink of the wine upon the spot and that soon. If the bearer had left this earlier in the morning, you might have had a flask of it. If there were any means of sending you the half of it, I should not have failed to do so, but when I inquired, I found that it could not be done.” Calvin, we see, had some very human traits.

Henry Henderson, Calvin in His Letters (Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 2009), 27.

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