Praise for Calvin & The Institutes

The Sorbonne had the Institutes burnt in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in 1542 and 1544.

The RC Florimond de Raemond called it "the Koran or rather the Talmud of heresy, being, as it is, a mass of all errors that have ever existed in the past, or ever will exist, I verily believe, in the future." (1605).

Will Durant, a 20th C American historian called it "the most eloquent, fervent, lucid, logical, influential, and terribe... in all the literature of the religious revolution... developing the thought of [its author's] predecessors to ruinously logical conclusions," whose author, because of his doctrine of predestination, "darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense".

Jacques Desmay called Calvin "the author of a religion of the table, the stomach, the fat, the flesh, the kitchen" in whom the whole Reformation tended to "establish the reign of wine, women, and song." (1621).

Robert Raymond, John Calvin, p14, 136