consequence to the Genevan Church in particular. For example, he feared not, in his prime work, the Institutes, to speak contemptuously of the Fathers of the Council of Nicæa, and to designate the capital article of their majestic creed as little better than "an affected and childish sing-song." Another time he uttered a wish that the word "Trinity" might be discontinued in the formularies of the Church. These and other symptoms of a desire to take liberties with antiquity were not unnoticed by a new sect, just then creeping out of the ground in Italy. Socinus and his partisans, one after another, betook themselves to Geneva, as the soil most congenial to them: and the later years of Calvin, and almost all those of his successor, Beza, were disturbed by that heresy and others akin to it, both at home and among their spiritual colonies abroad: especially those in Poland and Transylvania. It is well known how violently some of these false teachers were attacked by Calvin, even to the death: and his letters altogether betray a soreness and anxiety on the subject, as if he were aware that the system of his Church was incomplete, and did not feel quite sure that it was not his own fault. If such were Calvin's misgivings, the experience of later times has furnished a sad verification of them. After a gradual declension of many years, the Church of Geneva has now, it appears, sunk down to the very lowest standard of doctrine consistent with nominal Christianity. The Trinity, the Atonement, the Incarnation of the Son of God, are, or were lately, absolutely proscribed by authority as topics of preaching in the congregations there considered orthodox. Could such a downfal so easily have taken place, had not the authority of the Primitive Church, as a witness and interpreter of holy writ, been intentionally disparaged from the beginning, and private, that is to say, popular and fashionable judgment, set up instead, for strictly Presbyterian purposes? Episcopal sway, appealing as it must to antiquity, was surely just the thing needed to watch and check that evil leaven before it had spread so far.
A like effect, proceeding as it may be thought very much from the same cause, may be seen in Holland, in the rise and growth of that school of divinity, commonly called Liberal or Latitudi-
