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

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biographer of Archbishop Laud, says that “Calvin’s book of Institutes was
for the most part the foundation on which the young divines of those times
did build their studies.” Hardwick, speaking of the latter part of the
Elizabethan period, asserts that “during an interval of nearly thirty years,
the more extreme opinions of the school of Calvin, not excluding his theory
of irrespective reprobation, were predominant in almost every town and
parish.” f1247
The nine Lambeth Articles of 1595, and the Irish Articles of Archbishop
Ussher of 1615, give the strongest symbolical expression to the Calvinistic
doctrine of unconditional election and reprobation, but lost their authority
under the later Stuarts. f1248
Calvin, however, always maintained his commanding position as a
commentator among the scholars of the Anglican Church. His influence
revived in the evangelical party, and his sense of the absolute dependence
on divine grace for comfort and strength found classical expression in some
of the best hymns of the English language, notably in Toplady’s
“Rock of Ages cleft for me.”
CALVIN AND THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND.
Still greater and more lasting was Calvin’s influence upon Scotland. It
extended over discipline and church polity as well as doctrine.
The Presbyterian Church of Scotland, under the sole headship of Christ, is
a daughter of the Reformed Church of Geneva, but has far outgrown her
mother in size and importance, and is, upon the whole, the most flourishing
of the Reformed Churches in Europe, and not surpassed by any
denomination in general intelligence, liberality, and zeal for the spread of
Christianity at home and abroad.
The hero of the Scotch Reformation, though four years older than Calvin,
sat humbly at his feet and became more Calvinistic than Calvin. John Knox,
the Scot of the Scots, as Luther was the German of the Germans, spent the
five years of his exile (1554–1559), during the reign of the Bloody Mary,
mostly at Geneva, and found there “the most perfect school of Christ that
ever was since the days of the Apostles.” f1249 After that model he led the
Scotch people, with dauntless courage and energy, and the perfervidum
ingenium Scotorum, from mediaeval semi-barbarism into the light of
modern civilization, and acquired a name which, next to those of Luther,