“Can we suppose anything more hateful or even more execrable to God than this fiction of asking the pardon of sins, while he who asks at the very time either thinks that he is not a sinner, or, at least, is not thinking that he is a sinner; in other words, a fiction by which God is plainly held in derision?”

Book 3, Chapter 20, Section 6
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

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John Calvin 161
French Protestant reformer 1509–1564

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