Throughout his life, Calvin searched for assurances of God’s order in the fragile world around him. His mother had died when he was four years old. His father quickly remarried and shunted him off to a neighboring family where he received his earliest education. Exiled in later years from France, the country he loved most, he was never fully at home in Geneva. Moreover, he and his wife lost in infancy all three of the children born to them. His own personal world, like the entire cosmos, remained at risk.46
