their writings. Among the disciples of Zuingli, either orally or in writing, might be named Peter Martyr, Pellican, Bullinger, and Farell, the reformer of Geneva. His most extensive influence, however, was indirectly, and by way of descent, through Calvin. Calvin, namely, as is well known, though he established the discipline of Geneva, was not one of the original reformers: its doctrines he found already established; and especially with regard to the Sacraments[1], he methodized only and arranged and here and there perhaps modified the doctrines, or, rather, perhaps, the language of Zuingli. The doctrines, the arguments, the language, the turn of expression, the subsidiary statements, the very illustrations, which Calvin employs on the subject of the Sacraments, are all to be found scattered up and down in the writings of Zuingli; only in Zuingli they are presented in a polemical form: Calvin has matured them into a doctrinal scheme. The definition of Baptism is the same: "a sign[2] of initiation, whereby we are enrolled in the society of the Church, that, being engrafted into Christ, we may be accounted among the sons of God." The mode of disposing of the old Church's definition, "a visible sign of a sacred thing," or "a visible form of an invisible grace," is the same[3]: there is the same illustration of the Sacraments by the outward sign[4] of the Old Testament: the same denial of grace[5] being imparted through the Sacraments: the assertion of the identity of the Apostles' and John's Baptism[6] (of which assertion Zuingli was the first
- ↑ It is characteristic, that the allowing the Font to he placed within the Church was one of the points in which Calvin refused obedience to the Synod of Lausanne, and so subjected himself to banishment from Geneva, wherein he had recently undertaken the cure of souls.
- ↑ Institt. 4. 15. 1.
- ↑ Viz. that it is a visible sign, or form, or figure, of a divine grace, which is invisible; which invisible grace, he says, is sacramentally united with the sign, i.e. as Zuingli explains "sacramentally," is represented by it. So also Calvin, Institt. 4. 14. 1.
- ↑ Institt. 4. 14. 18.
- ↑ Ib. 4. 14. 14 and 17. Zuingli, t. ii. f. 63.
- ↑ Ib. 4. 15. 6. sqq.
