and singularly intellectual structure. He was a thinker, rather than a man. His love of humanity was sacrificed to his love of system. The intuitions of the heart were never allowed to modify the forms of the intellect. The logical faculty was gratified at the expense of the moral and emotional. Of a workman, with disqualifications so marked, it might have been predicted, a priori, that, should he build a system, it would be sure to be marred and weakened by those very faults which we can now see, a posteriori, to be characteristic of Calvin's.

We come now to the question-How, and to what extent, did Calvin influence the Reformation, and the Protestantism in which it issued? Consider the condition of Protestantism in 1535, when he appeared on the arena. It was disorganised, convulsed, chaotic, battered by external assaults, tottering from internal weakness. Charles V. was threatening to extinguish it in Germany. In the Netherlands, its extinction seemed almost accomplished. In France it had no footing, or next to none. In England, Henry VIII. was laying his heavy crushing hand on papist and protestant alike. In Scotland, its adherents could be counted on the fingers. The fire was sickly and faint enough. Nothing more than the resolute trampling of a few kingly feet was needed to extinguish it for ever. In 1564, the year of Calvin's death, Calvinism had penetrated several places in Germany, and quickened the whole body of German protestantism; had gone like iron drops into the blood of the Netherland churches, and had nerved men in that country into heroes, wise and brave enough to win their liberties by one of the most desperate patriotic struggles on record. It had made protestantism a power in France, had converted nearly half of its people, and had enlisted under its banner almost the majority of the nobles, with the royal Condè and the gallant Coligny at their head. It had established itself in England, not certainly as the national religion, but as the Puritan party,-that party so stern in its convictions, so brave in its enthusiasm, so scrupulous in its fidelity, from which were to spring the Pilgrim Fathers of the New World, and those heroic parliamentarians of the Old, whose character, thoughts, and achievements, have graven themselves into the English constitution and history beyond the possibility of erasure. It had sent Knox to Scotland with a ready-made theology and ecclesiastical polity, and he had accomplished a revolution_more complete than had been effected in any other country. John Calvin's influence, then, had been both extensive and powerful. He had marshalled the protestant ranks into something like order, and had ranged them under a system, dogmatic and political, against which the Jesuitism and armies of Rome could not prevail.

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What, then, were the sources of this influence? They were many. There was the system itself, in its two branches complete, conclusive, practicable. The theology seemed to be reasoned, proved down to its minutest details, demonstrated from Scripture, hedged round by argument. It had the qualities, which the exigencies of protestantism demanded. Its appeal was to the Bible. It met the "Thus saith His Holiness, the Pope," with a "Thus saith the Lord." Its several doctrines stood in exact antithesis to the doctrines of the papal theology. It met salvation by the church, with salvation by Christ; the efficacy of the sacraments, with the efficacy of the Spirit; the infallibility of the Pope, with the infallibility of the Bible; the authority of tradition, with the authority of reasoned, yet scriptural doctrine; the power of the priesthood, with the power of the ever-present Christ. Then the ecclesiastical polity had the advantage of being a logical corollary from the theology, a copy of the most ancient scriptural model, and a complement apparently necessary to the formation and operation of a free civil government. It claimed an authority and position in the state, utterly incompatible with absolute monarchy, and raised the formulated religious convictions into a seeming equality with, but a real supremacy over, the established political constitution. It not only allowed but commanded its adherents to resist, even by force of arms, the state that dared to use its power in an antichristian, i.e., an anti-Calvinistic, manner. It thus allied itself with the rights of the people, and the spirit of political progress; while the papacy, latterly at least, had allied itself with the extremest absolutism,-with tyrants and tyranny. And so it happened, that while the one secured the possessors and heirs of vested authority, the other enlisted the disciples and soldiers of advancement and liberty. Calvinism thus became, in the political and ecclesiastical arena, at once the antithesis and antidote of Roman Catholicism; while in the theological, it answered the arrogant claims of its rival by the claims of a diviner authority, a more ancient origin, a higher supremacy, a more unquestionable infallibility, and a spirit more beneficent to man and glorifying to God. The two systems were perfectly antagonistic; and Calvin's skilful elaboration of this antagonism was the prime cause of his mighty influence on the protestant

movement.

But to this major cause, several minor causes may be added. Geneva, under Calvin's rule, became the Protestant city of refuge. Thither came French, Italian, and Netherland refugees;-English exiles, too, driven abroad by Mary Tudor's bloody reign, and, among them, Goodman and Whittingham, Gilbey and Cole, Myles Coverdale and John Knox. Each saw the order that

reigned in the city, the ecclesiastical supremacy and theological uniformity that prevailed. Each felt Calvin's powerful influence, acknowledged his superlative genius, beheld its splendid success. And so each came to admire and love the Geneva church-model as the most perfect realisable on earth, and went home determined to labour even unto death for its introduction and establishment. Then Calvin acquired and exercised a patriarchal, indeed an almost papal authority. He corresponded with all the Churches: advised, instructed, commanded on all questions of internal organisation, doctrine, and discipline; on the relation to the state, whether friendly or adverse; on the relation to other churches, whether protestant or popish; indeed on all subjects which then arose of general or local importance. Then Geneva was a sort of college where young men were trained for the ministry, and whence they were despatched to their own countries to teach the new faith. And of the men trained there, Michelet truly enough says-"If in any part of Europe blood and tortures were required, a man to be burnt, or broken on the wheel, that man was at Geneva, ready to depart, giving thanks to God and singing psalms to him." Can we wonder that the faith, propagated by men who feared no human face, should have spread so far, and become so prolific a nurse of heroes?

A. M. F.-B.

"MY PEACE I GIVE UNTO YOU."

WHO is it that utters these generous and wondrous words?— Is it some immensely rich man, some millionaire. The idea is preposterous. An immensely rich man might say to some of his fellow-men, "I give you that thousand pounds." Or he might say, "I give you these jewels"-"I give you these trinkets"-"I give you these glittering stones." Money, when gotten, can be given. When gotten, it can buy trinkets and precious stones. But there are things which it cannot buy. It cannot buy love. It may indeed buy flattery: it may buy hypocrisy but it cannot buy love. It cannot buy respect. Neither can it buy nobleness of soul. There are thus many of the finest things which money cannot buy. Among these, and indispensable to all the rest, is peace,-peace of heart,-peace of conscience. Money cannot buy this for the rich man's own enjoyment. Money cannot buy it for him that he may give it to others.

Who is it, then, that is able to say to his fellow-men,—moral,

immortal, and yet sinful,-"I give you peace"? Is it some great nobleman, owner of hundreds of thousands of acres of soil, and on whom, as a landlord, hundreds of tenants and of tenants' families are greatly dependent? Is it he who can say without mockery-to his fellow-men around or beneath him,-moral, immortal, and yet sinful,-"I give you peace"-"I give you peace for your hearts,-peace for your consciences"? He Perhaps, nobleman though he be, he is not half so noble a man as some poor ditcher that works in his fields, and that thinks of his God, and follows his Saviour, and lives heroically a life of moral purity and true philanthropy. He! Perhaps, nobleman though he be, peace may have been banished, almost to an immensity of distance, from the home of his castle, and from the home of his conscience and heart. How, then, can he give what he has not got, and what cannot grow on his acres, or be exchanged for anything that does grow there? Such a nobleman may indeed give dispeace to many of his tenants. He may beguile innocency into crime, and thus bring agonies into households; or he may trample with iron heel upon rising, honest independence, and deprive the mouth of its bread, or the heart of some of its cheering worldly hopes. But no nobleman, as a nobleman, has power to give "peace, peace," to the hearts and consciences of guilty immortals.

Who then is it that is warranted to say "Peace I give unto you"? Is it the poet, with his eye in a fine phrenzy rolling? Or the story-teller, with his power to convulse with laughter on the one hand, or to melt into tears on the other? Or is it the astronomer, with his measurements among the stars? Or the geologist, with his wondrous skill in reading the records of the rocks? Or the chemist, with his atoms? Or the physician, with his medicines? Or the scholar, with his Latin and Greek? Is it these, these unitedly, or these separately, who have power and authority to say to men with uneasy hearts and uneasy but immortal consciences-Peace, be still,-Peace I give unto you? Far from it. Poetry appeals to the imagination, and its grace or stateliness may win or enrapture. But distress within the heart, or guilt within the conscience, is far in beyond its reach. Story-telling is good in itself; but the deepest woes are beyond the power of laughter to expel; and sins within the conscience can neither be laughed out nor wept out. Laughter may add to them, but oceans of tears cannot obliterate them. Astronomy has to do with sun, moon, and stars, not with sins. Sins are down here, not up there. Geology has to do with stones, but, alas! not with the heart of stone. The physician, again, may cure aches of the arms, or aches of the feet, or aches of the head;

but the aches of the heart-the aches in the conscience-these are utterly beyond his skill. And they defy the chemist to analyse them, and still more to dissolve them. And neither Greek nor Latin, nor oriental lore, nor all the scholarship of the world, has any power to charm them away, and to still the troubled soul, and calm the uneasy conscience.

Away then with you, ye spiritual mountebanks, that would seek to persuade men that they will be made blessed by means of poetry, or by means of stories, or by means of physical science, or by Latin and Greek, or by mathematics, or by means of English grammar, English history, and arithmetic. Away with you. In remembering that men have aptitudes for learning things round about them, ye forget that they have consciences within them, and that their bliss depends, and must depend, upon the state of their conscience.

And away with you, too, ye that fancy that you will give to men inner peace, and make them blessed, when you get the politics of the country reformed. Reformation in politics is indeed a crying necessity of our age; and must, in its own proper and important place, be duly attended to. But as corruption in politics has arisen out of corruption in men's hearts and consciences; it is the case that even though an archangelic genius should construct for us the ideal of a government, never, until men become good, will any political system work perfectly; and never will the due arrangement of the rights of man and the duties of man be actually carried out and maintained, until—from a higher source -peace be got into men's hearts and consciences.

"Peace I give unto you." Who says it? Who? It is one, who was born in a stable and cradled in a manger;-one who in life had not where to lay his head, and who in death hung between two thieves. "Peace I give unto you," says Jesus Christ, -the poor, the lowly, but Jesus Christ the rich, the high, and the holy, the heavenly, the divine. (John xiv. 27). Yes. Jesus Christ became poor that he might, in the plenitude of his imperial moral riches, say, "Peace I give unto you, ye immortal but sinful men." Jesus Christ became little and low that he might bear our sins and carry our sorrows; and the Lord did make to meet upon him the iniquity of us all. The sin-bearer made atonement for all that harrows the heart and wounds the conscience. And now, though the Great Moral Governor of the universe hates sin with a perfect hatred, and is most righteously the sin-punishing God, there is forgiveness with him for every man that lives. Hence it is that Christ Jesus is warranted to