" Here both the worthies, "freshened the nip," as Captain Truck called it, and then the conversation soon got to be too philosophical and contemplative for this unpretending record of events and ideas.

Now Calvin was imbued with the lofty spirit of the Fathers of the Church and the more religious and contemplative of the schoolmen and the saints of the Middle Ages, when he attached but little dignity to man unaided by divine grace, and was absorbed with the idea of the sovereignty of God, in whose hands man is like clay in the hands of the potter.