rn at Noyon,
in Picardy, on the 10th of July 1509. His father, Gerard Cauvin or
Calvin,[1] was a notary-apostolic and procurator-fiscal for the lordship
of Noyon, besides holding certain ecclesiastical offices in connexion
with that diocese. The name of his mother was Jeanne le Franc; she was
the daughter of an innkeeper at Cambrai, who afterwards came to reside
at Noyon. Gerard Cauvin was esteemed as a man of considerable sagacity
and prudence, and his wife was a godly and attractive lady. She bore him
five sons, of whom John was the second. By a second wife there were two
daughters.

Of Calvin's early years only a few notices remain. His father destined
him from the first for an ecclesiastical career, and paid for his
education in the household of the noble family of Hangest de Montmor. In
May 1521 he was appointed to a chaplaincy attached to the altar of La
Gesine in the cathedral of Noyon, and received the tonsure. The actual
duties of the office were in such cases carried out by ordained and
older men for a fraction of the stipend. The plague having visited
Noyon, the young Hangests were sent to Paris in August 1523, and Calvin
accompanied them, being enabled to do so by the income received from his
benefice. He lived with his uncle and attended as an out-student the
College de la Marche, at that time under the regency of Mathurin
Cordier, a man of character, learning and repute as a teacher, who in
later days followed his pupil to Switzerland, taught at Neuchatel, and
died in Geneva in 1564. In dedicating to him his _Commentary on the
First Epistle to the Thessalonians_, as "eximiae pietatis et doctrinae
viro," he declares that so had he been aided by his instruction that
whatever subsequent progress he had made he only regarded as received
from him, and "this," he adds, "I wish to testify to posterity that if
any utility accrue to any from my writings they may acknowledge it as
having in part flowed from thee." From the College de la Marche he
removed to the College de Montaigu,[2] where the atmosphere was more
ecclesiastical and where he had for instructor a Spaniard who is
described as a man of learning and to whom Calvin was indebted for some
sound training in dialectics and the scholastic philosophy. He speedily
outstripped all his competitors in grammatical studies, and by his skill
and acumen as a student of philosophy, and in the college disputations
gave fruitful promise of that consummate excellence as a