The new edition of the Institution was now a large volume of twenty-one chapters; some of the chapters, not as yet divided into sections, had become very unwieldy. Wendel has said of this edition that ‘the alterations and additions [made in it] are of much less importance than those of the edition of 1539’. Certainly many of the changes and additions were simply amplificatory, or designed to ward off past or potential criticism; the host of quotations from Augustine was in the main of this sort. Others again simply used up material which Calvin presumably prepared for the various colloquia he attended. But the most amplified, changed and reworked section was that on ecclesiology, concentrated almost entirely into the exposition of the Creed's Credo unam sanctam catholicam ecclesiam, which now formed one chapter of enormous length. Here, as well as much material reproduced verbatim from previous editions, there were substantial and important novelties, and given that Calvin regarded ecclesiology as part of theology, it will hardly do to leave the matter at the comment that the new edition now ‘contained a somewhat detailed exposition of Calvin's ideas about ecclesiastical organization’. What it contained was the image of a godly church, defined not merely by exclusion (as non-papist) but positively, and with a decisiveness and clarity of outline without precedent elsewhere.

In this respect, the general tendency of the discussion to consolidate and make doctrinal the conclusions reached in public and private between 1538 and 1541 is indeed impressive.