CALVIN. THERE were almost from the beginning two very different classes of men engaged in the Reformation-the men of movement and of action, and the men of organisation and of policy. The first class were, in the most radical sense, reformers-those who broke through the old bonds of superstition, and, by a process of disturbance and disintegration, prepared the way for a new creative epoch in the relations of human society and the forms of religious life; the second were characteristically theologians and ecclesiastics as well as reformers those who, having accepted the principles of the reformed movement, sought to mould them into new expressions of Christian thought and life. The former were heroes heading a great insurrection in human history, which had not yet taken to itself a welldefined shape, but was moving onwards rather under the sway of an irresistible spiritual impulse than of clear regulative ideas; the latter were thinkers and legislators, whose aim it was to impress a dogmatic and constitutional character upon the disturbing elements that had been set in motion. As Luther is the greatest of the first class, so Calvin is, beyond all comparison, the greatest of the second class. In each case, however, there is a group of contrasted characters around the central figure-Melancthon, Camerarius, and others, around Luther; and Lefevre and Farel around Calvin. When we turn our gaze from Germany to France in the beginning of the sixteenth century, we find both Lefevre and Farel actively at work in the cause of religious reform. Farel particularly is seen labouring with fiery zeal, and a self-sacrificing and heroic temper. An enthusiastic priest of Dauphiny, he had, in his earlier career, exhausted almost every device of sacerdotalism with a determined self-devotion, and only reached the truth after severe spiritual struggles; with a powerful and restless energy he gave himself, so soon as his own heart was quickened, to a life of religious adventure to the kindling of a spirit of reform wherever he travelled,—in Dauphiny, in Basle, in Geneva. He is beyond doubt the most notable of the early reformers of France; and even before Luther, in his famous theses, had sounded that note of war which soon awakened all Germany, and propagated itself to France and England, Farel had in Paris raised his voice against the papal authority, and begun his evangelical labours. He wins our sympathy from something of the same frank, bold, and careless character which distinguishes the great German, bearing on his front, like him, the impress of an ever-fresh enthusiasm, and the scars of many a hard conflict. He stands, however, at a great distance from the hero of Worms. There was in all Farel's fiery earnestness too little comprehension and |