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

etreat he had so long sought for, and fain would he
be to turn aside for awhile here and rest. Much
troubled was the world around; the passions of men
were raising frightful tempests in it; armies and
battles and stakes made it by no means a pleasant
dwelling-place; but these quiet valleys and those
distant peaks spoke of peace, and so the exile,
weary of foot, and yet more weary of heart -- for
his brethren were being led as sheep to the
slaughter -- very unobtrusively but very thankfully
entered within those gates to which Providence had
led him, and where he was to compose a work
which still keeps its place at the head of the
Reformation literature -- the Institutes.
On his way from Strasburg to Basle, Calvin had
an interview with a very remarkable man. The
person whom he now met had rendered to the
Gospel no small service in the first days of the
Reformation, and he might have rendered it ten
times more had his courage been equal to his
genius, and his piety as profound as his
scholarship. We refer to Erasmus, the great scholar
of the sixteenth century. He was at this time living
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