Calvin had long meditated the great subject which then absorbed him—the system of Christian faith; and his book was to be the finest body of doctrine ever possessed by the Church of Christ. During four centuries, reckoning from the twelfth, minds of the highest order had formulated abstract systems, in which scholastic rationalism and ecclesiastical authority were habitually combined; they had wasted their strength in running after expositions, contradictions, resolutions, conclusions, and interminable _pros_ and _cons_; theology was lost in an arid wilderness. It was about to come out of it in order to enter into new lands. But it was not a trifling matter to make Christian science pass from death to life, from darkness to light. It required an awakened conscience, a heart thirsting for righteousness, a high intelligence, and a powerful will boldly to break through all the _chains_,[346] to scatter to the winds the _sentences_ and the _sums_ which the schoolmen had painfully woven out of their brains or out of traditions that were often impure, and to set up in their place the living rock of the heavenly Word on which the temple of God is to be built. Calvin was the man called to this work. Until his time, dogmatics, when passing from one period to another, had always advanced in the same direction, from abstraction to abstraction. But suddenly the course was changed; Calvin refused to tread the accustomed road. Instead of advancing in the way of the schoolmen towards new developements of a more refined intellectualism, he turned eagerly backwards, he heard the voice of conscience, he felt the wants of the heart, he ran whither alone they can be satisfied, he traversed fifteen centuries. He went to the gospel springs, and there collecting in a golden cap the pure and living waters of divine revelation, presented them to the nations to quench their thirst. The Reformation was not simply a change in the doctrine or in the manners or in the government of the Church: it was a creation. The first century had witnessed the first Christian creation, the fifteenth century witnessed the second. Luther, by the power of his faith, was the principal organ of this new creation. Freeing himself from the thick darkness that had hung over mankind for so many centuries, he had with holy energy hurled his lightnings and thunderbolts in every direction around him, so that all the horizon was lighted up. Calvin appeared; he gathered up these scattered flames, and made them into an immense fire; and while the gleams of the primitive creation of the Church had been confined almost entirely within the limits of the Roman world, the fires of the new creation are spreading to the ends of the earth.