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

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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....”