Nevin, again. He briefly accounts the rapid flourishing of the Reformed Churches throughout France, Switzerland, England, Scotland, Holland, and even in the German Palatinate (a German dialect of the Rhine Valley), and carefully notes that, “These different sections of the Reformed Church were regarded, in the beginning, as one and the same Confession. They were not however, like the Lutheran Church, bound together by subscription to a common creed. With an independent organization, each national branch of the general body had its own ecclesiastical standards. Hence a variety of Confessions and Catechisms; which serve strikingly however, by their general agreement, to attest the substantial unity of the faith to which they owe their existence” (J. W. Nevin, History and Genius of the Heidelberg Catechism (Chambersburg, 1847), 15).

True catholicity, that.