Then it was that Calvin appeared. Calm in the midst of violent excitement, strong in the midst of fatal weakness, he did not confine his attention to the little city in which he had been twice settled. He went bravely forward over a burning soil, the shot hissing right and left of him; he stretched out his hand to Christendom. Raising his eyes to his Chief, who was in heaven, he besought his aid; and for the purpose of influencing men he took into his hands the sovereign Word of God. Commander of the armies of the Lord, if we may so speak, nothing disturbed the serenity, the security, or the majesty of his aspect. Called to introduce order in the midst of great confusion, his penetrating glance was turned to the conflict in which the combatants were engaged hand to hand. He distinguished in the crowd who were friends and who were foes. He saw who ought to be repulsed and who ought to be encouraged. He understood that he had to contend not only with Rome, which was making open war on the Gospel, but also with those perfidious adversaries who insinuated themselves into the ranks of the evangelicals, and under shelter of their colors promulgated deadly errors, and even overthrew the counsel of God from its foundation. He did more. Those who were fighting for the same cause as himself gave him hardly less trouble. It was necessary to prevent their firing madly at one another, to make peace between their divided chiefs, to establish order and to promote unity. Above all it was necessary to baffle and repulse with a face of brass the crafty and powerful enemy, Jesuitism, which was mustering against him all the forces of the papacy. After the great Luther, the bold Zwinglius, and the indefatigable Farel, there was need of a man who should temper and restrain the minds of men, who should demand and get, not the factitious unity of Rome, but the spiritual and true unity of the people of God, and whose forehead, ‘as an adamant, harder than flint,‘[208] should repulse and disperse Rome and her army. The first three champions whom we have just named carried the sword. Calvin, humble, poor and of mean appearance, held in one hand a balance, and in the other a sceptre; and if the first three were the heroes of the reformation, if Luther was, under God, its great founder, Calvin seems to have been its lawgiver and its king. [Sidenote: Calvin, The Pilot.]