We are not to conceive the Christian faith as a bare knowledge of God which rattles around the brain and affects the heart not at all... But it is a form and solid confidence of the heart by which we securely repose in God's mercy promised us through the Gospel.
-- John Calvin, 1538 Catechism, Art. 14 quoted by I. John Hesselink's "Calvin's Theology" in McKim, Donald K., Ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, Cambridge (Cambridge Univ. Press): 2004, 86.