Farel, Viret, and Froment had begun the work at the right end. In building a temple the first process is the cutting of the stones one by one. Science has sometimes disparaged the individual. She has said, ‘An individual, of whatsoever species it be, is nothing to the universe; a hundred individuals, or a thousand, they are still nothing.’[442] It is not so with individuals that have souls. Christ anticipated and refuted these audacious assertions when he said, ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ It was by the conversion of individuals (Cornelius, Lydia, &c.) that the Apostles established the Christian religion in the world; and it was by proceeding in the same way that Farel and his friends laid the foundations of Reform. Calvin, while appreciating this work, felt nevertheless that another was necessary. After analysis must come synthesis; and after the individual, society. Catholicism neglected the individual, and concerned itself almost exclusively with society. The Gospel proceeds otherwise. Farel had been everywhere, enlightening minds one by one with the torch of the Word. It was now needful to bind together the souls thus enlightened. The Christian individual must first be created, afterwards the Christian Church. The Reformation had begun in Geneva with the law of life. Another law, the law of unity, must now be fulfilled. Calvin was alarmed when he considered the state of Geneva. ‘When I first came into this town,’ said he, ‘there was as it were nothing--no morals, no discipline, no life. Preaching went on, and that was all. To be sure they burnt the idols, but there was no reformation at all.’[443] This judgment is perhaps too severe. It was twenty-eight years after the time referred to that Calvin thus expressed himself; and the ‘wonderful conflicts’ which he had been engaged in may possibly have led him to depict in too dark colors the church which Farel had left to him. Be that as it may, Calvin, while attaching the utmost importance to individual conversion, was profoundly convinced that a task of another kind remained to be achieved. We find that the same conviction possessed Luther when he returned to Wittenberg after his confinement in the Wartburg. It is the conviction that upon the revolutionary principle (and the revolution, we must admit, had been necessary and admirable) the conservative principle must erect itself. [Sidenote: DIVISION AMONG THE HUGUENOTS.]