"I exhibit my confession to you that you may know the nature of that doctrine which is the object of such unbounded rage to those madmen who are now disturbing your kingdom with fire and sword. For I shall not be afraid to acknowledge that this treatise contains a summary of that very doctrine which, according to their clamours, deserves to be punished with imprisonment, banishment, proscription, and flames, and to be exterminated from the face of the earth." He meant to state in calm precise fashion what Protestants believed; and he made the statement in such a way as to challenge comparison between those beliefs and the teaching of the mediæval Church. He took the _Apostles' Creed_, the venerable symbol of Western Christendom, and proceeded to show that when tested by this standard the Protestants were truer Catholics than the Romanists. He took this _Apostles' Creed_, which had been recited or sung in the public worship of the Church of the West from the earliest times, which differed from other creeds in this, that it owed its authority to no Council, but sprang directly from the heart of the Church, and he made it the basis of his _Institutio_. For the _Institutio_ is an expansion and exposition of the _Apostles' Creed_, and of the four sentences which it explains. Its basis is: _I believe in God the Father; and in His Son Jesus Christ; and in the Holy Ghost; and in the Holy Catholic Church._ The _Institutio_ is divided into four parts, each part expounding one of these fundamental sentences. The first part describes God, the Creator, or, as the Creed says: "God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth"; the second, God the Son, the Redeemer and His Redemption; the third, God the Holy Ghost and His Means of Grace; the fourth, the Holy Catholic Church, its nature and marks. This division and arrangement, based on the _Apostles' Creed_, means that Calvin did not think he was expounding a new theology or had joined a new Church. The theology of the Reformation was the old teaching of the Church of Christ, and the doctrinal beliefs of the Reformers were those views of truth which were founded on the Word of God, and which had been known, or at least felt, by pious people all down the generations from the earliest centuries. He and his fellow Reformers believed and taught the old theology of the earliest creeds, made plain and freed from the superstitions which mediæval theologians had borrowed from pagan philosophy and practices.