(3) Lastly, Luther had serious scruples on the question of employing force, and although he had finally sanctioned the appeal to arms, the war was to be a defensive one, waged by those in authority, and not in alliance with rebels. Luther had no idea of leading a religious and political crusade, or of promoting missionary enterprise outside Germany. For this the world had to look elsewhere. The French have always been the most successful interpreters of new ideas to Europe. Their logical acuteness, their mastery of method, their gifts of organisation, as well as their language, with its matchless clearness and elasticity, have well fitted them for this office; and these gifts were now to be illustrated in a pre-eminent degree by their great countryman John Calvin. | John Calvin. | Condition of Geneva. This son of the notary in the episcopal court of Noyon in Picardy, was born in the year 1509. At the age of twelve he had been appointed to a chaplaincy in the cathedral, and received the tonsure. But, though he subsequently became a curé, he never proceeded any further in clerical orders; for his father, thinking that the legal profession offered more promise, sent him to Orleans, and then to Bourges to study law, 1529-1531. It was during these years that Calvin fell under the influence of Lutheran teachers, notably of Jacques Lefèvre, a man of Picardy like himself, and one of the fathers of French Protestantism. In the year 1534, Calvin was driven from his country by the persecutions instituted by Francis I., and retired to Basle. Here at the age of twenty-five he published the first edition of his great work, _The Institutes_, a manual of Christian religion, which, although subsequently enlarged, contains a complete outline of his theological system, and which probably has exercised a more profound influence than any other book written by so young a man. In the year 1536, as he passed through Geneva, he was induced by the solemn adjurations of William Farel of Dauphiné, a French exile himself, to abandon the studies he so dearly loved, and devote himself to missionary effort. The imperial city of Geneva was of importance because it commanded the valley of the Rhone, and the commercial routes which united there; it enjoyed municipal self-government, but was under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of its bishop and was threatened by the Duke of Savoy, who held the surrounding country and possessed certain judicial powers within the town itself. To emancipate themselves more completely from this double yoke of ecclesiastical and temporal authority was the constant aim of the patriots of Geneva, and with that view they had made an alliance with the canton of Freibourg in 1519, and that of Bern in 1526. An intermittent struggle had ensued, which was embittered by the adoption of the Lutheran Doctrine by the city in 1535, at the instigation of Farel. In 1536, war had broken out between the Duke and the canton of