Rise and Establishment of Protestantism at Geneva - James Aitken Wylie

Voltaire of the sixteenth century: the Libertine
club, on the shores of the Leman, would have
anticipated the Encyclopaedists who at a later
period flourished on the banks of the Seine;
Geneva would have filled the post which Paris did
two centuries after, by becoming the headquarters
of revolutionary propagandism; and the year 1593
would have been as fatal to the thrones and altars
of the Papal world as was the year 1793.
Providence postponed the tempest through the
agency of Calvin, who grappled with the young
giant of pantheistic revolution, and made Geneva
the headquarters of a Protestant propagandism,
which by restoring knowledge and faith imparted a
new life to the European nations, and laid over
again the foundations of a world that was
dissolving and about to vanish away. And not only
was the storm deferred thereby, its violence was
mitigated when at last it came, and its devastations
restricted to the one half of Europe. The Roman
Church may not see the debt it owes to Calvin;
that, however, does not make it less the fact that
there is no man who ever lived, to whom its priests
owe half what they owe to him. The inviolability of
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