Calvin on the Four Gospels

The evangelical history, related by four witnesses divinely appointed, is justly compared to a chariot drawn by four horses:  for by this appropriate and just harmony God appears to have expressly prepared for his Son a triumphal chariot, from which he may make a magnificent display to the whole body of believers, and in which, with rapid progress, he may review the world.  Augustine, too, makes an apt comparison of the Four Evangelists to trumpets, the sound of which fills every region of the world, so that the church gathered from the East, and West, and South, and North, flows into a holy unity of faith.  So much the more tolerable is the curiosity of those who, not satisfied with the heavenly heralds, obtrude upon us, under the name of a Gospel, disgusting tales, which serve no purpose than to pollute the purity of the faith, and to expose the name of Christ to the sneers and ridicule of the ungodly.

 

-John Calvin in the Epistle Dedicatory to his Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke