Francis Spira

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Francis Spira (d. 1548) was an Italian lawyer who became a Protestant but apostasized. He died in despair thinking himself to be a reprobate. His story can be found here.

William Perkins:

[O]ft it will fall out that the conscience of Gods child shall bee so exceedingly tormented in temptation, that hee shall cry out, he is forsaken of God, and shalbe damned; when as indeed he stil remains the deare child of God, as Christ our Saviour did Gods welbeloved in the deepest assaults of Satan. And therefore the relation published of Francis Spira his desperation, doth inconsiderately taxe him for a cast-away; considering that nothing befel him in the time of his desperation but that which may befall the child of God: yea our owne land can afford many examples which match Francis Spira, whether we regard the matter of his temptation, or the deepnesse of his desperation, who yet through the mercy of God have received comfort. And therefore in this case Christian charity must ever bind us to thinke and speake the best.

Another book which played a large part in Bunyan's life was the short biography of Francis Spira, an Italian, who had died shortly before Bunyan's time. Spira had been a Protestant lawyer in Italy, but had found it expedient to abate the open profession of Protestantism with which he began, and eventually to transfer his allegiance to the Roman Church. The biography is for the most part an account of his death-bed conversation, which lasted a long time, since his illness was even more of the mind than of the body. It is an extremely ghastly account of a morbid and insane melancholia. It was the fashion of the time to take such matters spiritually rather than physically, and we read that many persons went to his death-bed and listened to his miserable cries and groanings in the hope of gaining edification for their souls. How the book came into Bunyan's hands no one can tell, but evidently he had found it in English translation, and many of the darkest parts of Grace Abounding are directly due to it, while the Man in the Iron Cage quotes the very words of Spira.

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John Bunyan:

163. I found it hard work now to pray to God, because despair was swallowing me up; I thought I was, as with a tempest, driven away from God, for always when I cried to God for mercy, this would come in, It is too late, I am lost, God hath let me fall; not to my correction, but condemnation; my sin is unpardonable; and I know, concerning Esau, how that, after he had sold his birthright, he would have received the blessing, but was rejected. About this time, I did light on that dreadful story of that miserable mortal, Francis Spira; a book that was to my troubled spirit as salt, when rubbed into a fresh wound; every sentence in that book, every groan of that man, with all the rest of his actions in his dolours, as his tears, his prayers, his gnashing of teeth, his wringing of hands, his twining and twisting, languishing and pining away under that mighty hand of God that was upon him, was as knives and daggers in my soul; especially that sentence of his was frightful to me, Man knows the beginning of sin, but who bounds the issues thereof? Then would the former sentence, as the conclusion of all, fall like a hot thunderbolt again upon my conscience; 'for you know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected; for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.'

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Charles Spurgeon:

You know, also, the wonderful death of Francis Spira. In all literature, there is nothing so awful as the death of Spira. The man had known the truth; he stood well among reformers; he was an hononred, and to a certain extent apparently a faithful man; but he went back to the Church of Rome; he apostatized; and then when conscience was aroused he did not fly to Christ, but he looked at the consequences instead of at the sin, and so, feeling that the consequences could not be altered, he forget that the sin might be pardoned, and perished in agonies extreme. May it never be the unhappy lot of any of us to stand by such a death-bed; but the Lord have mercy upon us now, and make us search our hearts. Those of you who say, “We do not want that sermon,” are probably the persons who need it most. He who shall say, “Well, we have no Judas amongst us,” is probably a Judas himself. Oh! search yourselves; turn out every cranny; look in every corner of your soul, to see whether your religion be for Christ’s sake, and for truth’s sake, and for God’s sake, or whether it be a profession which you take up because it is a respectable thing, a profession which you keep up because it keeps you up. The Lord search us and try us, and bring us to know our ways.

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Charles Spurgeon:

In musing over the very dreadful sentence which closes my text, “He also will deny us,” I was led to think of various ways in which Jesus will deny us. He does this sometimes on earth. You have read, I suppose, the death of Francis Spira. If you have ever read it, you never can forget it to your dying day. Francis Spira knew the truth; he was a reformer of no mean standing but when brought to death, out of fear, he recanted. In a short time he fell into despair, and suffered hell upon earth. His shrieks and exclamations were so horrible, that their record is almost too terrible for print. His doom was a warning to the age in which he lived.

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Charles Spurgeon:

Such a case as that happened long ago, you know, and is on record—the case of Francis Spira—the most dreadful ease, perhaps, except that of Judas, which is upon record in the memory of man. Oh! my hearers, will any of you have such a repentance? If you do, it will be a beacon to all persons who sin in future; if you have such a repentance as that, it will be a warning to generations yet to come.

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Thomas Watson:

He that refuses to suffer persecution shall never be free from suffering

Internal sufferings. He that will not suffer for conscience shall suffer in conscience. Thus Francis Spira, after he had for fear abjured that doctrine which once he professed, was in great terror of mind and became a very anatomy. He professed he felt the very pains of the damned in his soul. He who was afraid of the stake was set upon the wrack of conscience.

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John Calvin:

May the Lord Jesus Christ confirm our hearts in the full and sincere belief of his own Gospel and keep our tongues in the uniform confession of him that as we now join in one song with angels, we may at length enjoy together with them the blessed delights of the heavenly kingdom.

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Thomas Vincent:

And no wonder, when John Casa, archbishop of Benevento, and dean of the apostolical chamber, printed a book at Venice in defense of sodomy. Sleidan saith, that "he wrote a sodomitical book, than which nothing more foul could have been thought upon by man; neither did he blush to celebrate with praises that most filthy sin, too much known in Italy and Greece:" Ille quem diximus, archiepiscopus Benevetanus, libellum conscripsit plane cinaedum, et quo nihil foedius excogitari possit; nec enim puduit eum, scelus omnium longe turpissimum, sed per Italiam nimis notum, atque Graeciam, celebrare laudibus. -- SLEIDANI Comment. lib. xi. p. 652. This was that case by whom Francis Spira was seduced to revolt from his profession, the cause of such hideous terrors of conscience afterward, and so miserable an end.

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[VirginiaHuguenot]

Johannes Hoornbeeck discusses the Francis Spira case in pages 85-88 of the RHB edition of Spiritual Desertion.

 

[turmeric]

I went through a very morbid phase in my childhood - I'm glad I didn't know about this case then, or I would have thought of it for hours at night while trying to go to sleep.