From Rise of Protestantism in France to Publication of the Institutes - James Aitken Wylie

lacked depth and comprehensiveness, and their
scheme of Reformation was, in the same
proportion, narrow and defective. The path which
they loved, a middle way between Wittenberg and
Rome, was a path which Calvin did not, or would
not, understand. To him there were only two faiths,
a true and a false, and to him there could be but
two paths, and the attempt to make a third between
the two was, in his judgment, to keep open the road
back to Rome. All the greater minds of the
Reformation were with Calvin on this point. Those
only who stood in the second class among the
Reformers gave way to the dream of reconciling
Rome and the Gospel: a circumstance which we
must attribute not to the greater charity of the
latter, but to their incapacity to comprehend either
the system of Rome or the system of the Gospel in
all the amplitude that belongs to each.
Calvin grew weary of hearing, day after day,
plans propounded which, at the best, could have
but patched and soldered a hopelessly rotten
system, but would have accomplished no
Reformation, and so, after a sojourn of a few
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