to spiritual and ecclesiastical supremacy
over the powers of earth reappeared in this theory. Calvin like the
Papacy ignored all national independence, all pretensions of peoples as
such to create their own system of church doctrine or church government.
Doctrine and government he held to be already laid down in the words of
the Bible, and all questions that rose out of those words came under the
decision of the ecclesiastical body of ministers. Wherever a reformed
religion appeared, there was provided for it a simple but orderly
organization which in its range and effectiveness rivalled that of the
older Catholicism. On the other hand this organization rested on a
wholly new basis; spiritual and ecclesiastical power came from below not
from above; the true sovereign in this Christian state was not Pope or
Bishop but the Christian man. Despotic as the authority of pastor and
elders seemed, pastor and elders were alike the creation of the whole
congregation, and their judgement could in the last resort be adopted or
set aside by it. Such a system stood out in bold defiance against the
tendencies of the day. On its religious side it came into conflict with
that principle of nationality, of ecclesiastical as well as civil
subjection to the prince, on which the reformed Churches and above all
the Church of England had till now been built up. As a vast and
consecrated democracy it stood in contrast with the whole social and
political framework of the European nations. Grave as we may count the
faults of Calvinism, alien as its temper may in many ways be from the
temper of the modern world, it is in Calvinism that the modern world
strikes its roots, for it was Calvinism that first revealed the worth
and dignity of Man. Called of God, and heir of heaven, the trader at his
counter and the digger in his field suddenly rose into equality with the
noble and the king.

[Sidenote: Calvin and the Exiles.]

It was this system that Calvin by a singular fortune was able to put
into actual working in the little city of Geneva, where the party of the
Reformation had become master and called him in 1536 to be their
spiritual head. Driven out but again recalled, his influence made Geneva
from 1541 the centre of the Protestant world. The refugees who crowded
to the little town from persecution in France, in the Netherlands, in
England, found there an exact and formal doctrine, a rigid discipline of
manners and faith, a system of church gove