Disunited from each other, the three great principles of Luther, Zwingle, and Calvin would have been insufficient. Faith, if it had not possessed for its foundation the knowledge of the Word of God, would have easily degenerated into a mystical enthusiasm. The abstract authority of Scripture, separated from a living faith, would have ended in a dead orthodoxy; and the social principle, deprived of these two foundations, would have succeeded only in raising one of those artificial edifices in the air which fall down as soon as built. God, by giving in the sixteenth century a man who to the lively faith of Luther and the scriptural understanding of Zwingle joined an organising faculty and a creative mind, gave the complete reformer. If Luther laid the foundations, if Zwingle and others built the walls, Calvin completed the temple of God. We shall have to see how this doctor arrived at a knowledge of the truth; we shall have to study his labours and his struggles until the moment when, quitting for ever a country whose soil trembled under his feet and threatened to swallow him up, he went to plant upon a lowly Alpine hill that standard around which he meditated rallying the scattered members of Jesus Christ. But we must first see what was the state of France at the time when the reformer was brought to the Gospel. The history of the Reformation in France, prior to the establishment of Calvin at Geneva, is divided into two parts: the first includes the favourable times, the second the unfavourable. We confess that the favourable times were occasionally the reverse, and that the unfavourable times were often favourable; and yet we believe that, generally speaking, this distinction may be justified. This subject has been frequently treated of; we shall, however, have to describe some phases of the French Reformation which have not always been set forth by those who have written its history. Two persons, a man and a woman, whose social position and character present the most striking contrasts, laboured with particular zeal to propagate the Gospel in France at the epoch of the Reformation. The woman appears first. She is the most beautiful and intelligent, the wittiest, most amiable and influential, and, with the exception of her daughter, the greatest of her age. Sister, mother of kings, herself a queen, grandmother of the monarch whom France (right or wrong) has extolled the most, namely, Henry IV., she lived much in the great world, in great ceremonials, with great personages, among the magnificence of the Louvre, St. Germain, and Fontainebleau. This woman is Margaret of Angoulême, Duchess of Alençon, Queen of Navarre, and sister of Francis I.