History of the English People, Volume IVGreen, John Richard
History
History of the English People, Volume IV
Green, John Richard
Great Britain -- History
It was this system that Calvin by a singular fortune was able to put
into actual working in the little city of Geneva, where the party of the
Reformation had become master and called him in 1536 to be their
spiritual head. Driven out but again recalled, his influence made Geneva
from 1541 the centre of the Protestant world. The refugees who crowded
to the little town from persecution in France, in the Netherlands, in
England, found there an exact and formal doctrine, a rigid discipline of
manners and faith, a system of church government, a form of church
worship, stripped, as they held, of the last remnant of the
superstitions of the past. Calvin himself with his austere and frugal
life, his enormous industry, his power of government, his quick
decision, his undoubting self-confidence, his unswerving will, remained
for three-and-twenty years till his death in 1564 supreme over
Protestant opinion. His influence told heavily on England. From the hour
of Cromwell's fall the sympathies of the English reformers had drawn
them, not to the Lutheran Churches of North Germany, but to the more
progressive Churches of the Rhineland and the Netherlands: and on the
critical question of the Lord's Supper which mainly divided the two
great branches of the Reformation Cranmer and his partizans became more
definitely anti-sacramentarian as the years went by. At Edward's death
the exiles showed their tendencies by seeking refuge not with the
Lutheran Churches of North Germany but with the Calvinistic Churches of
Switzerland or the Rhine; and contact with such leaders as Bullinger at
Zuerich or Calvin at Geneva could hardly fail to give fresh vigour to the
party which longed for a closer union with the foreign churches and a
more open breach with the past.
[Sidenote: The troubles at Frankfort.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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