Poitiers, where the friends of the Reformation, assembling round him and hanging upon his words, for the first time celebrated the Lord’s Supper in a grotto close to the town, which still goes by the name of Calvin’s Grotto.  Being soon obliged to leave Poitiers, Calvin went to Orleans, then secretly to Paris, then to Noyon to see his family once more, and set out at last for Strasbourg, already one of the strongholds of the Reformation, where he had friends, amongst others the learned Bucer, with whom he had kept up a constant correspondence.  He arrived there at the beginning of the year 1535; but it was not at Strasbourg that he took up his quarters; he preferred Bale, where also there was a reunion of men of letters, scholars, and celebrated printers, Erasmus, Simon Grynee (Grymeus), and the Frobens, and where Calvin calculated upon finding the leisure and aid he required for executing the great work he had been for some time contemplating—­his Institution de la Religion chretienne (Christian Institutes).  This would not be the place, and we have no intention, to sum up the religious doctrines of that book; we might challenge many of them as contrary to the true meaning and moral tendency of Christianity; but we desire to set in a clear light their distinctive and original characteristics, which are those of Calvin himself in the midst of his age.  These characteristics are revealed in the preface and even in the dedication of the book.  It is to Francis I., the persecutor of the French Reformers, during one of the most cruel stages of the persecution, and at the very moment when he had just left his own country in order that he may live in security and speak with freedom, that Calvin dedicates his work.  “Do not imagine,” he says to the king, “that I am attempting here my own special defence in order to obtain permission to return to the country of my birth, from which, although I feel for it such human affection as is my bounden duty, yet, as things are now, I do not suffer any great anguish at being cut off.  But I am taking up the cause of all the faithful, and even that of Christ, which is in these days so mangled and down-trodden in your kingdom that it seems to be in a desperate plight.  And this has no doubt come to pass rather through the tyranny of certain Pharisees than of your own will.”  Calvin was at the same time the boldest and the least revolutionary amongst the innovators of the sixteenth century; bold as a Christian thinker, but full of deference and consideration towards authority, even when he was flagrantly withdrawing himself from it.  The idea of his book was at first exclusively religious, and intended for the bulk of the French Reformers; but at the moment when Calvin is about to publish it, prudence and policy recur to his mind, and it is to the King of France that he addresses himself; it is the authority of the royal persecutor that he invokes; it is the reason of Francis I. that he attempts to convince.  He acts like a respectful and faithful subject, as well as an independent and innovating Christian.