ve foreign peoples, since the same sufferings threatened many." The
work was dedicated to the king, and Calvin says he wrote it in Latin
that it might find access to the learned in all lands.[6] Soon after it
appeared he set about translating it into French, as he himself attests
in a letter dated October 1536. This sets at rest a question, at one
time much agitated, whether the book appeared first in French or in
Latin. The earliest French edition known is that of 1540, and this was
after the work had been much enlarged, and several Latin editions had
appeared. In its first form the work consisted of only six chapters, and
was intended merely as a brief manual of Christian doctrine. The
chapters follow a traditional scheme of religious teaching: (1) The Law,
(as in the Ten Words), (2) Faith (as in the Apostles' Creed) (3) Prayer,
(4) the Sacraments; to these were added (5) False Sacraments, (6)
Christian liberty, ecclesiastical power and civil administration. The
closing chapters of the work are more polemical than the earlier ones.
His indebtedness to Luther is of course great, but his spiritual kinship
with Martin Bucer of Strassburg is even more marked. Something also he
owed to Scotus and other medieval schoolmen. The book appeared
anonymously, the author having, as he himself says, nothing in view
beyond furnishing a statement of the faith of the persecuted
Protestants, whom he saw cruelly cut to pieces by impious and perfidious
court parasites.[7] In this work, though produced when the author was
only twenty-six years of age, we find a complete outline of the
Calvinist theological system. In none of the later editions, nor in any
of his later works do we find reason to believe that he ever changed his
views on any essential point from what they were at the period of its
first publication. Such an instance of maturity of mind and of opinion
at so early an age would be remarkable under any circumstances; but in
Calvin's case it is rendered peculiarly so by the shortness of the time
which had elapsed since he gave himself to theological studies. It may
be doubted also if the history of literature presents us with another
instance of a book written at so early an age, which has exercised such
a prodigious influence upon the opinions and practices both of
contemporaries and of posterity.

After a short visit (April 1536) to the court of Renee, duchess of
Ferrara (cousin to Margaret of Navarre), which at that time affor