He had intimate personal relations with Budé and Cop, who were allied to the “group of Meaux,” and were leaders among the Humanists in the University. His earliest book, a Commentary on the De Clementia of Seneca, shows how wide and minute was his knowledge of the Greek and Latin classical authors. Like Erasmus, he does not seem to have been much influenced by the mystical combination of Platonism and Christianity which entranced the Christian Humanists of Italy and filled the minds of the “group of Meaux”; and like him he broke through the narrow circle of elegant trifling within which most of the Italian scholars were confined, and used the New Learning for modern purposes. Humanism taught him to think imperially in the best fashion of ancient Rome, to see that great moral ideas ought to rule in the government of men. It filled him with a generous indignation at the evils which flowed from an abuse of absolute and arbitrary power. The young scholar (he was only three-and-twenty) attacked the governmental abuses of the times with a boldness which revived the best traditions of Roman statesmanship. He denounced venal judges who made “justice a public merchandise.” He declared that princes who slew their people or subjected them to wholesale persecution were not legitimate rulers, but brigands, and that brigands were the enemies of the whole human race. At a time when persecution was prevalent everywhere, the Commentary of the young Humanist pleaded for tolerance in language as lofty as Milton employed in his Areopagitica. He was not blind to the defects of the stoical morality displayed in the book he commented upon. He contrasted the stoical indifference with Christian sympathy, and stoical individualism with the thought of Christian society; but he seized upon and made his own the loftier moral ideas in Stoicism, and applied them to public life. Luther was great, none greater, in holding up the liberty of the Christian man; but there he halted, or advanced beyond it with very faltering step. Humanism taught Calvin the claims and the duties of the Christian society; he proclaimed them aloud, and his thoughts spread throughout that portion of the Reformation which followed his leadership and accepted his principles. The Holy Scriptures, St. Augustine, and the imperial ethics of the old Roman Stoicism coming through Humanism, were a trinity of influence on all the Reformed Churches.