Schaff - History of the Christian Church Vol. 8 - Media Sabda Org

255
‘Master of Sentences,’ and says, ‘that though thousands were
debtors to him as touching divine knowledge, yet he was to none,
only to God.’ Montesquieu declares that ‘the Genevese should
ever bless the day of his birth.’ Jewel terms him ‘a reverend Father,
and worthy ornament of the Church of God.’ ‘He that will not
honor the memory of Calvin,’ says Mr. Bancroft, ‘knows but little
of the origin of American liberty.’ Under his influence Geneva
became the ‘fertile seed-plot’ of reform for all Europe; with Zurich
and Strassburg, it was the refuge of the oppressed from the British
Isles, and thus indoctrinated England and ourselves with its own
spirit.”
From Dr. SMITH’S article “Calvin” in Appleton’s American Cyclopaedia.
“Calvin’s system of doctrine and polity has shaped more minds and
entered into more nations than that of any other Reformer. In every
land it made men strong against the attempted interference of the
secular power with the rights of Christians. It gave courage to the
Huguenots; it shaped the theology of the Palatinate; it prepared the
Dutch for the heroic defence of their national rights; it has
controlled Scotland to the present hour; it formed the Puritanism of
England; it has been the basis of the New England character; and
everywhere it has led the way in practical reforms. His theology
assumed different types in the various countries into which it
penetrated, while retaining its fundamental traits.”
Dr. George P. Fisher (b. 1827).
Professor of Church History in Yale Divinity School, New Haven.
Congregationalist.
From his History of the Reformation. New York, 1873, pp. 206 and 238.
When we look at his extraordinary intellect, at his culture—which
opponents, like Bossuet, have been forced to commend—at the
invincible energy which made him endure with more than stoical
fortitude infirmities of body under which most men would have
sunk, and to perform, in the midst of them, an incredible amount of
mental labor; when we see him, a scholar naturally fond of
seclusion, physically timid, and recoiling from notoriety and strife,
abjuring the career that was most to his taste, and plunging, with a
single-hearted, disinterested zeal and an indomitable will, into a