To conclude (or possibly at least) the series of posts over recent months about John Calvin, to mark Calvin 500, this quote by Benjamin Warfield seems apt:

It is impossible to linger here on the relations of this great exploit of Calvin’s, even to point out its rooting in his fundamental religious conceptions, or its issue in thecreation of a spirit in his followers to the efflorescence of which this modern world of ours owes its free institutions. We cannot even stop to indicate other importantclaims he has upon our reverence. We say nothing here, for example, of Calvin the preacher — the “man of the Word” as Doumergue calls him, pronouncing him as such greater than he was as “man of action” or “man of thought,” as both of which hewas very great — who for twenty-five years stood in the pulpit of Geneva, preachingsometimes daily, sometimes twice a day, a word the echoes of which were heard tothe confines of Europe. We say nothing, again, of his reorganization of the worship ofthe Reformed Churches, and particularly of his gift to them of the service of song: for the Reformed Churches did not sing until Calvin taught them to do it. There are manywho think that he did few things greater or more far-reaching in their influence than the making of the Psalter — that Psalter of which twenty-five editions werepublished in the first year of its existence, and sixty-two more in the next four years; which was translated or transfused into nearly every language of Europe; and which wrought itself into the very flesh and bone of the struggling saints throughout all the “killing times” of Protestant history. The activities of Calvin were too varied and multiplex, his influence in numerous directions too enormous, to lend themselves to rapid enumeration. We can pause further only to say a necessary word of that system of divine truth which, by his winning restatement and powerful advocacy of it, he has stamped with his name, and with his eye upon which a Roman Catholic writerof our day — Canon William Barry — pronounces Calvin “undoubtedly the greatest of Protestant divines, and, perhaps, after St. Augustine, the most persistently followed by his disciples of any western writer on theology.” [B.B. Warfield]