the truest and most characteristic of names-"Christian," yet his thought translated into law rendered, so far as the Huguenot was concerned, duty to the State and duty to conscience incompatible. And the tragic struggle in which the Huguenot was engaged made him a heroic and a potent figure. What the French Revolution did later for the European peoples, the Huguenot did for Protestantism. He made his faith illustrious; his example became infectious, and the Churches of other lands loved to emulate the Reformed Church of France. And this effect was at once intensified and heightened by the expulsive" power of the anti-Protestant legislation. It drove men out of France without expelling their love of France; they only loved her the more that she had made them fugitives for conscience' sake. Men like John Calvin and Theodore Beza did not cease to be sons of France though they became citizens of Geneva; and they used their foreign citizenship to serve their mother land more effectually than they could have done in any of her own cities. The Protestants failed in France, yet it is doubtful whether without their failure there the Reformed Church could have prospered. The events that so tended to define its creed and demeanour, helped it to fight its battles the more bravely.
Finally, the Reformed Church as organised by the French mind belongs essentially to the second Protestant generation, and its distinctive note was an enlarged historical knowledge and a clarified historical sense. The feeling for religion was in the second generation not less strong than in the first; but it knew better the problem to be solved and had become more conscious of the many and complex factors required for its solution. The new literature had almost nothing to do with determining the minds and motives of the earlier Reformers; but determined almost exclusively those of the later. With the exception of Melanchthon no Lutheran of the front rank came from the humanists, but all the creative minds of the Reformed Church were children of the Renaissance. The problem as they saw it was historical and literary as well as religious. The Old Testament which Reuchlin had recovered and the New Testament which Erasmus had published and interpreted enabled them to study both the religion which Christ had found and the religion which He had made; the Apostolic writings showed how the men who knew Him or who knew those who knew Him understood and tried to realise His mind. Their own experience had set them face to face with a Church and system which claimed to express the mind of the Apostles and to represent the apostolical society. They were not curious and scientific enquirers who wished to discover how the one had become the other, or how the twin laws of continuity and change had fulfilled themselves in history; they were convinced and sincere religious men, who studied first the Scriptures to find the idea of Christ, and then their own times to see whether it had been and how it could be realised.
There was thus an objectivity in the Reformed ideal which was absent
