When in 1536 Calvin went to live in Geneva, it was already a Protestant city. He became virtually its ruler and made it a kind of theocracy, or rather a "religious republic," which he administered with vigorous laws enforced with the greatest strictness. Zealous Protestants from many countries gathered at Geneva, and from there the influence of Calvin, somewhat modified by that of his Swiss predecessor Zwingli, spread rapidly into France, England, Scotland, and Germany. At the time of Calvin's death (1564) there were three types of Protestantism established in the world--his own, and those of Luther and Zwingli. In Great Britain, and afterward in America, the Calvinistic type came to play a most important part in religious and national development. Two estimates of Calvin, the first from a Protestant point of view, the second that of a Roman Catholic writer, are here presented. A. M. FAIRBAIRN In 1528 Calvin's father, perhaps illuminated by the disputes in his cathedral chapter, discovered that the law was a surer road to wealth and honor than the church, and decided that his son should leave theology for jurisprudence. The son, nothing loath, obeyed, and left Paris for Orleans, possibly, as he descended the steps of the College de Montaigu, brushing shoulders with a Spanish freshman named Ignatius Loyola. In Orleans Calvin studied law under Pierre de l'Estoile, who is described as _jurisconsultorum Gallorum facile princeps_, and as eclipsing in classical knowledge Reuchlin, Aleander, and Erasmus; and Greek under Wolmar, in whose house he met for the first time Theodore Beza, then a boy about ten years of age. After a year in Orleans he went to Bourges, attracted by the fame of the Italian jurist Alciati, whose ungainliness of body and speech and vanity of mind his students loved to satirize and even by occasional rebellion to chasten. In 1531 Gerard Calvin died and his son, in 1532, published his first work, a commentary on Seneca's _de Clementia_. His purpose has been construed by the light of his late career; and some have seen in the book a veiled defence of the Huguenot martyrs, others a cryptic censure of Francis I, and yet others a prophetic dissociation of himself from Stoicism. But there is no mystery in the matter; the work is that of a scholar who has no special interest in either theology or the Bible. This may be statistically illustrated: Calvin cites twenty-two Greek authors and fifty-five Latin, the quotations being most abundant and from many books; but in his whole treatise there are only three Biblical texts expressly cited, and those from the Vulgate.