§ 68. TRIBUTES TO THE MEMORY OF CALVIN. 295
G. G. Hereick, D.D.
Congregational Minister of Mount Vernon Chuvcli, Boston.
From Some Heretics of Yesterday. Boston, 1890, pp. 210 sqq.
"Calvin gathered up the spiritual and intellectual forces that had been started by the Reformation movement, and marshalled and systematized them, and bound them into unity by the mastery of his logical thought, as the river gathers cloud and rill, and snow-drift and dew-fall, and constrains them through its own channel into the unity and directness of a powerful current. The action of Luther was impulsive, magnetic, popular, appealing to sentiment and feeling, that of Calvin was logical and constructive, appealing to understanding and reason. He was the systematizer of the Reformation. . . .
"Calvin's work was national, and more; he gave to the Reformation a universality like that of the gigantic system with which they [the Reformers] all were at war. Calvin, more than any other man that has ever lived, deserves to be called the Pope of Protestantism. While he was still living his opinions were deferred to by kings and prelates, and even after he was dead his power was confessed by his enemies. The papists called his Institutes The Heretics' Koran. . . . He set up authority against authority, and maintained and perpetuated what he set up by the inherent clearness and energy and vigor of his own mental conceptions. The authority of the Romish Pope was based upon the venerable tradition of the past that had grown up by the accretion of ages; the authority of the Protestant Pope rested upon a logical structure which he himself built up, out of blocks hewn from alleged Scripture assertion and legitimate inferences therefrom. . . .
"The man himself is one of the wonders of all time, and his work was admirable, beyond any words of appreciation that it is possible for me to utter. For while he himself tolerated no differences of theological opinion, and would have bound all thought by his own logical chain, this nineteenth century is as much indebted to his work as it is to that of Luther. That work constituted the world's largest step towards democratic freedom. It set the individual man in the presence of the living God, and made the solitary soul, whether of prince or pauper, to feel its responsibility to, and dependence upon. Him alone who from eternity has decreed the sparrow's flight or fall. Out of this logical conception of the equality of all men in the presence of Jehovah, he deduced the true republican character of the Church ; a theory to which all Americans, and especially we of New England, owe our rich inheritance. He gave to the world, what it had not before, a majestic and consistent conception of a kingdom of God ruling in the affairs of men ; of the beauty and the blessedness of a true Christian state; of the possibility of the city of God being one day realized in the universal subordination of human souls to divine authority. . . ."
For testimonies bearing upon Calvin's system of discipline, see below, § 110.
CHAPTER IX. FROM FRANCE TO SWITZERLAND.
§ 69. CalviTi's Youth and Training.
Calvini Opera, vol. XXI. (1879). — On Noyon and the family of Calvin, Jacques le Vasseur (Dr. of theology, canon and dean of the cathedral of Noyon) : Annales de I'e'glise cathedrale de Noyon. Paris, 1633, 2 vols. 4°. — Jacques Desmay (Dr. of the Sorbonne and vicar-general of the diocese of Rouen) : Remarques sur la vie de Jean Calvin tire'es des liegistres de Noyon, lieu de sa naissance. Rouen, 1621.
Thomas M'Crie (d. 1835) : The Early Years of Calvin. A Fragment. 1509- 1536. Ed. by William Ferguson. Edinburgh, 1880 (199 pp.). A posthumous work of the learned biographer of Knox and Melville.
Abel Lefranc : La Jeunesse de Calvin. Paris (33 rue de Seine), 228 pp.
Comp. the biographies of Calvin by Henry, large work, vol. I. chs. I. -VIII. (small ed. 1846, pp. 12-29); Dyer (1850), pp. 4-10; STAHEtiN (1862) I. 3-12; *Kampschulte (1869), I. 221-225.
"As David was taken from the sheepfold and elevated to the rank of supreme authority ; _ so God having taken me from my originally obscure and humble condition, has reckoned me worthy of being invested with the honorable office of a preacher and minister of the gospel. When I was yet a very little boy, my father had destined me for the study of theology. But afterwards, when he considered that the legal profession commonly raised those who follow it, to wealth, this prospect induced him suddenly to change his purpose. Thus it came to pass, that I was withdrawn from the study of philosophy and was put to the study of law. To this pursuit I endeavored faithfully to apply myself, in obedience to the will of my father ; but God, by the secret guidance of his providence, at length gave a different direc-