different aspects; but this, at least, is prominent and plain, that there breathes no sinner on the earth that has not a place in the Father's heart. He may not know it, and there may be no man caring so much for his soul as to tell him of it. But it is true. His sin, crimson-coloured though it be, cannot prevent it. That love comes over the mountains of sin. It can subdue iniquity. It works its way inward to the heart through a thousand difficulties. It longs to be welcomed, to be cherished. The divine love seeks a place in every heart that beats. This is the truth, the sublime truth with whose glory we would fill the eyes of men. When suns shall pale, it will be the light of life to myriads of men. This is the rock on which we would have men stand for ever a rock against which the waves of human systems have dashed themselves again and again, and have retired broken and powerless, without moving it from its seat, without shaking it in the least, without washing a single fragment of truth from its serene surface.

Men are taught sometimes and tempted at other times, to believe that God will love them when they love him. They invert the divine order. They would make the pyramid stand upon its apex. They would make a glow-worm kindle the sun. They would make an atom attract an orb. No, that is not the way. God comes first and seeks to pour the wealth of his heart into their heart. He takes the initiative. He makes the first advances of attachment. He passes by, and seeing men in their helplessness, makes bare his arm to deliver them. Nay, he makes bare his heart, that, if there is an eye within them, they may learn how much he loves them. Dear reader, God LOVES

YOU.

R. M.-G.

CALVIN HIS WORK AND INFLUENCE.

THE sixteenth century is pre-eminent in the Christian era; and its most pre-eminent event is the Reformation. This event not only towers above all the other occurrences of the century; it is also the centre round which they cluster, and the standard which measures their importance or triviality. It was the point to which things had been tending for many preceding generations. It is the point to which the later developments of history can be most fitly traced back. It was like a mighty geologic convulsion, ending one

age and introducing another; changing the complexion and condition of things; destroying the old that the new may be established.

The Reformation was the result of very various and complex causes. The Renaissance in literature, bringing awakened thought, extended knowledge, and new ideas to the hitherto ignorant laity; the growth of commercial enterprise and affluence,-leading to the independence, shrewdness, and enlightenment, that come from the reciprocal intercourse of men and nations; the discovery of continents and races hitherto unknown,-widening men's ideas and creating the suspicion that the old philosophies had not explained the facts of earth, nor the old theologies the truths of heaven; the attitude of the Romish Church,-blindly antagonistic to all progress and jealous of all innovations, however necessary and beneficial; the laxity of clerical morals, combined with very extensive ignorance and intellectual intolerance; and, above all, the deepened intensity of religious life among the people, receiving only depression and opprobrium from the priesthood;-these were, perhaps, the chief causes predisposing to the Reformation. Great events are climaxes ending long paragraphs of argument and sentiment, invective and appeal. Many hearers may be so dull of ear, as never to catch a single word of the paragraph, but the climax rolls out with a sound so thunderous as to startle the deaf into hearing.

The great event, however, not only demands fitting circumstances, it must also have a man of creative energy to give it being. The latent forces may have gathered to a point, and there ripened; but a commanding mind must speak before they can spring into operation. The concurrent influences that had been flowing to reformation were not allowed to stagnate. A commanding voice bade them act, and they obeyed. That voice was Martin Luther's; and he stands before the world as pre-eminently, the Reformer.

But there was another man, later and less conspicuous, whose work nevertheless may turn out to be equally, perhaps more, important, John Calvin. Luther is certainly the more prominent figure in the eye of history; but it does not therefore follow that he was the greater power. He inaugurates the movement, is perpetually seen careering like a mighty giant on its surface, swinging a huge iron flail, with which he mercilessly belabours every one foolhardy enough to become his antagonist. But Calvin appears at a later stage;-never rising, indeed, to his full height on the surface, yet all the while operating as a silent secret power behind. Luther beards Kings and confronts imperial Diets; roars defiance in the ears of every inimical monarch, hurls every epithet in a vocabulary of Billingsgate perhaps the most copious the

world has ever seen, against his foe, heedless whether it be that "elegant modern pagan," Leo X., or that most irascible of sovereigns, our Henry VIII. Calvin plays no such noisy and noticeable part; appears at no Diet; defies no King; works calmly but intensely in his student's room at Basle, or his lecture-hall at Strasburg, or in his church-state at Geneva, wielding, all the while, an influence that fashions the greater half of Protestantism after his own image, and hardens it into a form and system that neither the assaults of Romanism nor the might of kings could utterly break. The German has the giant's form that attracts the eye; but the Frenchman has the wizard's force that sways the will.

It is with the latter that we have to do meanwhile. What was Calvin's work in the Reformation? How did he accomplish it? What kind and degree of influence did he exercise? These are the questions we intend attempting to answer, without troubling ourselves with the deeper and ulterior question of the truth or falsity of the system that bears his name. The historical critic has a judgement to pronounce on Calvin, as well as the theological; and our aim is to discover what that judgement is, or should be. That he did a great work in connection with, and has exercised a powerful influence on, the Protestant religion, no one familiar with its history will deny. But what was the nature of his work? what the circumstances that at once demanded and allowed it? what the sources and extent of his influence? these are questions on which some light may be shed. The answers will be given by and by. We shall begin, however, by sketching his life.

July 10, 1509, was Calvin's birth-day; Noyon, Picardy, his birth-place. His parents were in easy circumstances. His father worldly-wise, his mother godly after the fashion of Roman Catholic godliness. John, as a boy, was moody and austere, with none of the exuberant fun and frolic of boyhood. He was designed for the church; was nominated a chaplain when only 12 years of age, a thing common enough in those corrupt times; and was soon after sent to Paris to be educated. But the worldlywise father, observing the heavy clouds that had gathered on the ecclesiastical horizon, and had so terrifically exploded in Germany and Switzerland, changed his son's profession from the church to the law. John had no objection; indeed, very willingly pursued his legal studies at Orleans, Bourges, Toulouse, and Paris, successively. He had, perhaps at Paris, more probably at Orleans, certainly at Bourges, met men who favoured the Reformed Faith, and studied the Greek New Testament. But we have no authentic narrative of his conversion,-what doubts, trials, temptations he had, if any. His reserved self-contained nature knew not the tu

mult and passion that must speak or die, and so his silence as to the exact date of the crisis of his being, has shrouded it with an impenetrable veil. Outwardly serene, however inwardly disturbed, he said nothing, and wrote nothing, until his mind was fully convinced and matured:-in this respect, strangely unlike Luther, who uttered a jubilant cry that pealed over all Europe, at each new discovery he made. So far did Calvin carry his self-control and mental reserve, that in 1532, when his mind must have been either on the eve of breaking, or had finally broken with Rome, he published a commentary on the De Clementia of Seneca, which he dedicated to a popish Bishop, and which is as innocent of allusion to his own or the world's spiritual condition, as though no such religion as Christianity had ever existed among

men.

Soon after this, however, his decidedly protestant proclivities appeared. Persecution was raging in Paris. Several reformers perished at the stake. Secrecy had to be observed, if death would be avoided. So the protestant meetings were private. Calvin was a frequent teacher at one, and might have continued evangelising in Paris for a considerable time but for one event. Cop, the rector of the university, had to deliver his Martinmas speech. He engaged Calvin to write it. The speech was such in its style and sentiments that both composer and speaker had to flee from Paris. Calvin led a very wandering life for the next few years. Now at Nerac with the Queen of Navarre; then at Saintonge; then at Poitiers; and again at Orleans, where he published a book, entitled Psychopannychia, or The Sleep of the Soul, which was designed as a refutation of some Anabaptist extravagances. We next find him at Basle, where, in 1535 or 1536, he published the first edition of his celebrated Christian Institutes. The work was very small, compared with what it afterwards became; but it contained the germ of his whole system, theological and ecclesiastical. He developed, but he never advanced beyond, the principles propounded in this first edition. His thinking reached its ultimatum thus early. He elaborated, but he nowhere modified, or retrenched, or changed. The fact is remarkable, but fatal to Calvin's reputation as a progressive and enlightened thinker. How was it possible that a young man of twenty-six years could in two or three years, at the utmost, have so excogitated and completed a system as to render all further alteration and emendation unnecessary?

Shortly after the publication of the Institutes, Calvin quitted Basle; travelled into Italy; remained with the Duchess of Ferrara awhile, and was returning through Switzerland in the August of 1536, when he rested at Geneva. Farel was then labouring to evangelise that little republic, but with

very meagre success. He heard of Calvin's arrival, and prayed him to stay and assist. Calvin reluctantly, and only after the most solemn adjuration, consented. He began the work with characteristically unsparing and uncompromising rigour. Geneva must be conformed to his ideal. He must have laws enacted, civil and ecclesiastical, linking church and state together, repressive of all immorality, heresy, insubordination. His stern rigour provoked opposition. He crushed it awhile, but ere long it almost crushed him; and he and Farel were banished, April 23, 1538. He went to Strasburg, became preacher to the French refugees there; published several works-his Commentary on the Romans, and a second edition of the Institutes being among them-and married a wife. But matters had gone wrong at Geneva without him. People and government agreed that his iron rule was better than anarchy, and so his recall was resolved on. In September, 1541, Calvin re-entered Geneva, determined to transform it into a theocracy, of which he should be the earthly head. He never left it until, on the 27th of May, 1564, he put off the earthly house of this tabernacle. Here the personal narrative may fitly end. Whatever more of his history needs to be known will be given in the account of his work.

In attempting to estimate Calvin, as a man, how does he appear?- His intellectual nature is singularly clear, simple, and penetrating. There is little complexity about it, and as little variety. He has one prevailing faculty, which subordinates, we might almost say, swallows up, all the othersthe purely logical. Minds addicted to philosophy may be divided into two classes,-the rational and the mystic, or, the logical and the emotional. The former reason, the latter feel. A mind of the former class rises into the region of the abstract: minds of the latter sink into the region of the concrete. The purely logical mind seizes on a principle and carries it out to its remotest ramifications and developments, heedless of all that might qualify or condition; the mystic seizes on a single object, person, or emotion, and freely surrenders whatever it may be thought to demand. The ultimate error of the one is Atheism, and of the other Pantheism. Now Calvin belonged to the former class. He was one of the purest specimens of the purely logical mind. He started from a single principle or axiom, and rigorously carried it out to its remotest consequences. He never paused to think whether it should be modified on this side, or limited on that; he went fearlessly on from deduction to deduction, subordinating all things in earth and heaven to his sovereign dogma. The universe must be made to suit his system; he could not make his system to suit the universe.