but all the time we see in the reformer the man who respects law and order. The question whether the 'Institutes of the Christian Religion' was written first in French or in Latin has been often discussed and is not yet decided. The preface from which I have quoted the preceding passages is in French, and bears date Basle, 'the first day of August, 1535.' I have it now before me in a copy of the French edition which was published at Geneva in 1562; my copy formerly belonged to Sully, and the margin is full of notes in his own handwriting. It is said that no French edition of the work itself bearing date 1535 can now be discovered; the earliest edition known is that which was published at Basle in 1536, in Calvin's own name, and of which both the body of the work and the preface are in Latin. There was no French edition with date and the author's name until 1540. I do not intend at this time to plunge into the controversy that has been excited by the chronological difficulty which envelopes the history of this book; I have studied it carefully, and am inclined to think, with many of Calvin's latest and most learned historians, that the 'Institutes of the Christian Religion' was written originally in French, and published at Basle in 1535, without the author's name, and that it was written first of all and specially for the French nation, and was intended to remove from the mind of Francis I. and the general public, the impressions produced by the recent excesses of the Anabaptists, which their enemies laid to the charge of the reformers also. {177} It is certain that the dedication to Francis I. was written and published first of all in French, and on the first of August, 1535: these facts are beyond dispute. How was it that a preface written in French, and dated 1535, was put at the head of a book written in Latin, and not published until 1536? The book itself, in this first edition, was probably nothing more than the rather hasty and incomplete anonymous work of a young man as yet little known, who had just left France, and was still much more French than, as he became later, European. It was a first work, a sketch rather than such a treatise as the title would lead the reader to expect. Calvin himself points this out in the preface to his 'Commentaries on the Psalms,' in which he gives many important details connected with his own life and works. That which seems to me the most probable solution of the question is still beset with many difficulties, and I will not linger to discuss them. Be this as it may, from 1536 to 1559 Calvin published eight editions of his 'Christian Institutes,' and they were successively revised and enlarged to such a degree as ultimately to form a work which differs from the first known edition both in extent and form, although it is identical in spirit and in all essential points. The edition of 1559 is the last which Calvin prepared for the press, and it has therefore served as the basis for all other