Whereas the Lutherans had stood for passive obedience and the Anabaptists for revolutionary communism, the Calvinists appealed to the independent middle classes and gave them not only the enthusiasm to endure martyrdom but also--what the others had lacked--the will and the power to resist tyranny by force.

Calvin's polity, as worked out in Geneva, was a subordination of the state to the church.

His reforms were thorough and consciously social and political.

Calvinism in all lands aroused {248} republican passions and excited rebellion against the powers that be.

This feature was the more prominent in the Netherlands [Sidenote: 1545] in that its first missionaries were French exiles who irrigated the receptive soil of the Low Countries with doctrines subversive of church and state alike.