It is a work of enormous labor and thought.

Its rigid logic, comprehensiveness, and clarity have secured it the same place in the Protestant Churches that the _Summa_ of Aquinas has in the Roman theology.

It is like the _Summa_, in other ways, primarily in that it is an attempt to derive an absolute, unchangeable standard of dogma from premises considered infallible.

Those who have found great freshness in Calvin, a new life and a new realism, can do so only in comparison with the older schoolmen.

Calvin simply went over their ground, introducing into their philosophy all the connotations that three centuries of progress had made necessary.