This is not denying that his work was well written and that it filled a need urgently felt at the time.

Calvin cultivated style, both French and Latin, with great care, for he saw its immense utility for propaganda.

He studied especially brevity, and thought that he carried it to an extreme, though the French edition of the _Institutes_ fills more than eight hundred large octavo pages.
However, all things are relative, and compared to many other theologians Calvin is really concise and readable.
There is not one original thought in any of Calvin's works.

I do not mean "original" in any narrow sense, for to the searcher for sources it seems that {164} there is literally nothing new under the sun.

But there is nothing in Calvin for which ample authority cannot be found in his predecessors.