The people of Geneva and their great doctor have each left their stamp on the Reformation which issued from their walls: Calvin’s was truth, the people’s, liberty. This last consideration compels us to narrate the struggles of which Geneva was the theatre, and which, though almost unknown up to the present hour, have aided, like a slender brook, to swell the great stream of modern civilisation. But there was a second and more potent cause. Supreme among the great principles that Calvin has diffused is the sovereignty of God. He has enjoined us to _render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s_; but he has added: ‘God must always retain the sovereign empire, and all that may belong to man remains subordinate. Obedience towards princes accords with God’s service; but if princes usurp any portion of the authority of God, we must obey them only so far as may be done without offending God.’[4] If my conscience is thoroughly subject to God, I am free as regards men; but if I cling to anything besides heaven, men may easily enslave me. True liberty exists only in the higher regions. The bird that skims the earth may lose it at any moment; but we cannot ravish it from the eagle who soars among the clouds. The great movements in the way of law and liberty effected by the people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have certain relations with the Reformation of Calvin, which it is impossible to ignore. As soon as Guy de Brès and many others returned from Geneva to the Low Countries, the great contest between the rights of the people and the revolutionary and bloody despotism of Philip II. began; heroic struggles took place, and the creation of the United Provinces was their glorious termination. John Knox returned to his native Scotland from Geneva, where he had spent several years; then popery, arbitrary power, and the immorality of a French court made way in that noble country for that enthusiasm for the gospel, liberty, and holiness, which has never since failed to kindle the ardent souls of its energetic people. Numberless friends and disciples of Calvin carried with them every year into France the principles of civil and political liberty;[5] and a fierce struggle began with popery and the despotism, of the Valois first, and afterwards of the Bourbons. And though these princes sought to destroy the liberties for which the Huguenots shed their blood, their imperishable traces still remain among that illustrious nation.