li asserted that
the subject should refuse to act contrary to his faith. From the
Middle Ages he took the doctrine of the identity of spiritual and civil
authority, but he also postulated the sovereignty of the people, as was
natural in a free-born Switzer. In fact, his sympathies were
republican through and through.

[Sidenote: Calvin]

The clear political thinking of Calvin and his followers was in large
part the result of the exigencies of their situation. Confronted with
established power they were forced to defend themselves with pen as
well as with sword. In France, especially, the ember of their thought
was blown into fierce blaze by the winds of persecution. Not only the
Huguenots took fire, but all their neighbors, until the kingdom of
{597} France seemed on the point of anticipating the great Revolution
by two centuries.

With the tocsins ringing in his ears, jangling discordantly with the
servile doctrines of Paul and Luther, Calvin set to work to forge a
theory that should combine liberty with order. Carrying a step further
than had his masters the separation of civil and ecclesiastical
authority, he yet regarded civil government as the most sacred and
honorable of all merely human institutions. The form he preferred was
an aristocracy, but where monarchy prevailed, Calvin was not prepared
to recommend its overthrow, save in extreme cases. Grasping at
Luther's idea of constitutional, or contractual, limitations on the
royal power, he asserted that the king should be resisted, when he
violated his rights, not by private men but by elected magistrates to
whom the guardianship of the people's rights should be particularly
entrusted. The high respect in which Calvin was held, and the
clearness and comprehensiveness of his thought made him ultimately the
most influential of the Protestant publicists. By his doctrine the
Dutch, English, and American nations were educated to popular
sovereignty.

[Sidenote: French republicans]

The seeds of liberty sown by Calvin might well have remained long
hidden in the ground, had not the soil of France been irrigated with
blood and scorched by the tyranny of the last Valois. Theories of
popular rights, which sprang up with the luxuriance of the jungle after
the day of St. Bartholomew, were already sprouting some years before
it. The Estates General that met at Paris in March, 1561, demanded
that the regency be put in the hands of Henry of Navarre and that th