258 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
was twenty-nve years younger than Luther and Zwingii, and had the great advantage of building on their foundation. He had less genius, but more talent. He was inferior to them as a man of action, but superior as a thinker and organizer. They cut the stones in the quarries, he polished them in the workshop. They produced the new ideas, he constructed them into a system. His was the work of ApoUos rather than of Paul : to water rather than to plant, God giving the increase.
Calvin's character is less attractive, and his life less dramatic than Luther's or Zwingli's, but he left his Church in a much better condition. He lacked the genial element of humor and pleasantry ; he was a Christian stoic : stern, severe, unbending, yet with fires of passion and affection glowing beneath the marble surface. His name will never rouse popular enthusiasm, as Luther's and Zwingli's did at the celebration of the fourth centennial of their birth ; no statues of marble or bronze have been erected to his memory; even the spot of his grave in the cemetery at Geneva is unknown.^ But he surpassed them in consistency and self-discipline, and by his exegetical, doctrinal, and polemical writings, he has exerted and still exerts more influence than any other Reformer upon the Protestant Churches of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon races. He made little Geneva for a hundred years the Protestant Rome and the best-disciplined Church in Christendom. History furnishes no more striking example of a man of so little personal popularity, and yet such great influence upon the people ; of such natural timidity and bashfulness combined with such strength of intellect and character, and such control over his and future generations. He was by nature and taste a retir-
1 A plain stone, with the letters "J. C," is pointed out to the stranger as marking his resting-place in the cemetery of Plein Palais outside of the city, but it is not known on what authority. He himself especially enjoined that no monument should mark his grave.
§ 65. JOHN CALVIN. 259
ing scholar, but Providence made him an organizer and ruler of churches.
The three leading Reformers were of different nationality and education. Luther, the son of a German peasant, was trained in the school of monasticism and mysticism, under the influence of St. Augustin, Tauler, and Staupitz, and retained strong churchly convictions and prejudices. Zwingli, the son of a Swiss country magistrate, a republican patriot, an admiring student of the ancient classics and of Erasmus, passed through the door of the Renaissance to the Reformation, and broke more completely away from medisevalism. Calvin, a native Frenchman, a patrician by education and taste, studied law as well as theology, and by his legal and judicial mind was admirably qualified to build up a new Christian commonwealth.
Zwingli and Luther met once face to face at Marburg, but did not understand each other. The Swiss extended to the German the hand of fellowship, notwithstanding their difference of opinion on the mode of Christ's presence in the Eucharist ; but Luther refused it, under the restraint of a narrower dogmatic conscience. Calvin saw neither, but was intimate with Melanchthon, whom he met at the Colloquies of Worms and Regensburg, and with whom he kept up a correspondence till his death. He rightly placed the German Reformer, as to genius and power, above the Swiss, and generously declared that, even if Luther should call him a devil, he would still esteem Luther as a most eminent servant of God. Luther saw, probably, only two books of Calvin, — his reply to Sadolet and his tract on the Lord's Supper ; the former he read, as he says, with singular delight (" cwm singulari voluptate "). How much more would he have been delighted with his Institutes or Commentaries ! He sent respectful greetings to Calvin through Melanchthon, who informed him that he was in high favor with the Wittenbergdoctor.