Page:Institutes of the Christian Religion Vol 1.djvu/20

xii may it not have been 1536? The introductory part of a work is not unfrequently the last that is printed; and, there fore, there is nothing incredible in the supposition that though the last part was printed in March, the preface was not printed for some time after. The supposition in the general case is not incredible; and there are circumstances in which it might be difficult, if not impossible, to disprove it. In this particular case, however, it is both incredible and impossible. Had the pagination of the preface and the text been different, or even had the pagination been continuous, and the prefatory matter so short as to enable the printer to calculate within a page how much space it would occupy, though, in the latter case, the continuity of the pagination would have been a very extraordinary operation, there might have been ground to maintain it as a thing possible, that some of the matter first in order was not first in execution, and, therefore, might have borne a posterior date. But to prove that such observations have no applicability here, it is sufficient to mention, that the preface occupies forty-one pages, concluding, of course, on the ninth page of the third sheet, and that the text begins on the forty-second page, forming the reverse of the leaf on which the preface terminates.

Holding it then as certain, that the date in the preface, or Epistola Nuncupatoria of the edition 1536, ought to be filled up X. Calendas Septembres (23d August) 1535, (a date, by the way, strikingly confirmed by its identity with that of an early French translation, which is, "De Basle, le vingt troisieme d'Aoust, mil cinq cens trente cinq,") the only possible time in which the supposed first edition could have been prepared for the press, printed off, and published, is the three or four months which may have elapsed between Calvin's arrival at Basle, and the 23d August thereafter The thing is so utterly improbable, that it may be confidently