from the Lutheran; a greater thoroughness, a more comprehensive spirit, a more conscious and coherent endeavour to repeat and reflect the Apostolic age. The Reformed Church was not built to meet the exigencies of an expanding personal experience, but articulated throughout according to a consciously conceived idea. It bore indeed even more than the Lutheran the impress of a single mind; but then that mind was as typical of France and the second Protestant generation as Luther was typical of Germany and the first; and it had come by a very different process and way to the convictions which drove it into action. Calvin, like Zwingli, was a humanist before he became a Reformer, and what he was at first he never ceased to be. On the intellectual side, as a scholar and thinker, his affinities were with Erasmus, though on the religious side they were rather with Luther; indeed, Calvin can hardly be better described than by saying that his mind was the mind of Erasmus, though his faith and conscience were those of Luther. He had the clear reason and the open vision of the one, but the religious fire and moral passion of the other. The conscience made the intellect constructive, the intellect made the conscience imperious-at once individual, architectonic, and collective. In Calvin the historical sense of the humanist, and the spiritual passion of the Reformer, are united; he knows the sacred literature which his reason has analysed, while his imagination has seen the Apostolic Church as an ideal which his conscience feels bound to realise. There was rigorous logic in all he did; dialectic governed him, from the humanism which furnished his premisses to the religion, which built up his conclusions. This is the man whom we must learn to know, if we would understand the Reformed Church, what it did, and. what it became in his hands.
The personal cause, then, which most of all contributed to the creation of the Reformed Church, as history knows it, is John Calvin; and him we must here attempt to understand from two points of view: first, that of descent and education; secondly, that of the place and sphere in which he did his work.
Calvin was born on July 10, 1509, at Noyon, in Picardy. It was the year when Henry VIII had succeeded to the English throne; when Colet was meditating the formation of a school which was to bear the name of the Apostle whom he loved; when Erasmus, learned and famous, was in Rome, holding high argument with the Cardinal de' Medici; when Luther attained the dignity of Sententiarius, and had been called to Wittenberg; and when Melanchthon, though only a boy of thirteen, matriculated at Heidelberg. Calvin's ancestors had been bargemen on the Oise; but his father, Gérard Calvin, had forsaken the ancestral craft, and had sometime before 1481 migrated from Pont l'Évêque to Noyon, where he had prospered, and had in due course become Notaire apostolique, Procureur fiscal du Comté, Scribe en Cour d'Église, Secrétaire de FÉveschê,
