Crossword-Solution: CALVINS 7 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 12

Spare in body but accurately compacted, if he had ever struggled with anything more formidable than the folio hide-hound Calvins and Turretins on his father's lower shelf in James's Court, he had been no mean antagonist.

What ground had they for their belief? Did he himself really believe any thing, or had he a right to assert in any matter a positive conviction? And even if they or he asserted never so strongly, what sort of a test of truth was that? After all the Philistines, the Calvins, were as likely to be right as were a set of discontented if not disappointed artists; men whose natures would never allow them to be satisfied with any existing state of things, since it would inevitably differ from their dreamy ideals.

Undiscreet.] Oh say they, but some discretion would doe well; It is true, but take withall _Calvins_ caveat to _Melancthon_: That he affect not so the name of a moderate man, and listen to such Syrens songs, till he lose his zeale.

This was, after all, what he--the great humanist--was always doing; he the unscrupulous, indiscriminate and _casual_ reader; and if we treat him in the same spirit as that in which he treated the classical authors he loved most, we shall at least be acting under the cloak of his approval, however much we annoy the Calvins and Scaligers of our age.

This modern cult of "decency"--thrust down the throat of human joy by a set of Calvins and John Knoxes--is only one of the indications in our wretched commercialised age of how far we have sunk from the laughter of the gods and the dancing of the morning stars.