Calvin: The Reason for Scholarship

Read this last night in William Bouwsma's John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait, which stirred me and reminded me why I'm doing a PhD--easily forgotten in the busyness of day-to-day activity:

Calvin always believed that even his scholarship was only justified by its utility. "In all your studies," he wrote to a fellow pastor, "you must be careful that they are not for your amusement, but for the service of the church of Christ. Those who seek in scholarship nothing more than an honored occupation with which to beguile the tedium of idleness I would compare with those who pass their lives looking at paintings."

--p. 17