George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[152] restored them to the world. At his bidding, truth

chap. VI.} 1754.

leaped over the cloister walls, and challenged every man to make her his guest; aroused every intelligence to acts of private judgment; changed a dependent, recipient people into a reflecting, inquiring people; lifted each human being out of the castes of the Middle Age, to endow him with individuality, and summoned man to stand forth as man. The world heaved with the fervent conflict of opinion. The people and their guides recognised the dignity of labor; the oppressed peasantry took up arms for liberty; men reverenced and exercised the freedom of the soul. The breath of the new spirit moved over the earth; it revived Poland, animated Germany, swayed the North; and the inquisition of Spain could not silence its whispers among the mountains of the Peninsula. It invaded France; and though bonfires, by way of warning, were made of heretics at the gates of Paris, it infused itself into the French mind, and led to unwonted free discussions. Exile could not quench it. On the banks of the Lake of Geneva, Calvin stood forth the boldest reformer of his day; not personally engaging in political intrigues, yet, by promulgating great ideas, forming the seedplot of revolution; bowing only to the Invisible; acknowledging no sacrament of ordination but the choice of the laity, no patent of nobility but that of the elect of God, with its seals of eternity.

Luther's was still a Catholic religion; it sought to instruct all, to confirm all, to sanctify all; and so, under the shelter of principalities, it gave established forms to Protestant Germany, and Sweden, and Denmark, and England. But Calvin taught an exclusive doctrine, which, though it addressed itself to all,