hereupon abandoned his former life with tears.

In the spring of 1534 Calvin gave up the sinecure benefices he had
held, and towards the end of the year left France because of the
growing persecution, for he had already rendered himself suspect.
After various wanderings he reached Basle, where he published the first
edition of his _Institutes of the Christian Religion_. [Sidenote:
Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1536] It was dedicated, like two
of Zwingli's works, to Francis I, with a strong plea for the new faith.
It was, nevertheless, condemned and burnt publicly in France in 1542.
Originally written in Latin it was translated by the author into French
in 1541, and reissued from time to time in continually larger editions,
the final one, of 1559, being five times as bulky as the first
impression. The thought, too, though not fundamentally changed, was
rearranged and developed. Only in the redaction of 1541 was {163}
predestination made perfectly clear. The first edition, like Luther's
catechism, took up in order the Decalogue, the Creed, the Lord's
Prayer, and the Sacraments. To this was added a section on Christian
liberty, the power of the church, and civil government. In the last
edition the arrangement followed entirely the order of articles in the
Apostles' Creed, all the other matter being digested in its relation to
faith.

[Sidenote: A system of theology]

In the _Institutes_ Calvin succeeded in summing up the whole of
Protestant Christian doctrine and practice. It is a work of enormous
labor and thought. Its rigid logic, comprehensiveness, and clarity
have secured it the same place in the Protestant Churches that the
_Summa_ of Aquinas has in the Roman theology. It is like the _Summa_,
in other ways, primarily in that it is an attempt to derive an
absolute, unchangeable standard of dogma from premises considered
infallible. Those who have found great freshness in Calvin, a new life
and a new realism, can do so only in comparison with the older
schoolmen. Calvin simply went over their ground, introducing into
their philosophy all the connotations that three centuries of progress
had made necessary. This is not denying that his work was well written
and that it filled a need urgently felt at the time. Calvin cultivated
style, both French and Latin, with great care, for he saw its immense
utility for propaganda. He studied especially brevity, and thought
that he carried it to an extreme,