It is to Francis I., the persecutor of the French Reformers, during one of the most cruel stages of the persecution, and at the very moment when he had just left his own country in order that he may live in security and speak with freedom, that Calvin dedicates his work.

"Do not imagine," he says to the king, "that I am attempting here my own special defence in order to obtain permission to return to the country of my birth, from which, although I feel for it such human affection as is my bounden duty, yet, as things are now, I do not suffer any great anguish at being cut off.

But I am taking up the cause of all the faithful, and even that of Christ, which is in these days so mangled and down-trodden in your kingdom that it seems to be in a desperate plight.

And this has no doubt come to pass rather through the tyranny of certain Pharisees than of your own will." Calvin was at the same time the boldest and the least revolutionary amongst the innovators of the sixteenth century; bold as a Christian thinker, but full of deference and consideration towards authority, even when he was flagrantly withdrawing himself from it.

The idea of his book was at first exclusively religious, and intended for the bulk of the French Reformers; but at the moment when Calvin is about to publish it, prudence and policy recur to his mind, and it is to the King of France that he addresses himself; it is the authority of the royal persecutor that he invokes; it is the reason of Francis I.that he attempts to convince.