What God says is best, indeed is best, though all men in the world are against it. Seeing, then, that God prefers his religion; seeing God prefers a tender conscience; seeing they that make themselves fools for the kingdom of heaven are wisest; and that the poor man that loveth Christ is richer than the greatest man in the world that hates him: Shame, depart, thou art an enemy to my salvation.

Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?

The most accomplished in the Scripture are fools, unless they acknowledge that they have need of God for their schoolmaster all the days of their life.

They who strive to build up a firm faith in Scripture through disputation are doing things backwards.

For the Word of God is not received by faith if it flits about in the top of the brain, but when it takes root in the depth of the heart... the heart's distrust is greater than the mind's blindness. It is harder for the heart to be furnished with assurance [of God's love] than for the mind to be endowed with thought.

Our true wisdom is to embrace with meek docility, and without reservation, whatever the holy scriptures have delivered.

Hero-worship is innate to human nature, and it is founded on some of our noblest feelings,—gratitude, love, and admiration.—but which, like all other feelings, when uncontrolled by principle and reason, may easily degenerate into the wildest exaggerations, and lead to most dangerous consequences.

Our faith in doctrine is not established until we have a perfect conviction that God is its author.

The knowledge of faith consists in assurance rather than in comprehension... We add the words "sure and firm" in order to express a more solid constancy of persuasion.

In this respect the frailty of the human mind is surely proved: even when it seems to follow the way, it limps and staggers. Yet the fact remains that some seed of political order has been implanted in all men. And this is ample proof that in the arrangement of this life no man is without the light of reason.

And so long as we give ourselves to faith in him, with calm and quiet minds, he will not permit the wicked to injure us with impunity.

When Calvin protested against allegorizing, he was protesting not against finding a spiritual meaning in a passage, but against finding one that was not there.