POT...CALLING...KETTLE...BLACK
If you'll recall the Reformation started over the greed of Pope Leo wanting to pay for the Vatican castle. He drained the coffers dried and was sucking the people financially dry with his voodoo application of scripture. The Church went along with it. People just had enough with the tax and spend policies of the Pope under the guise of Christianity.
There isn't any heresy of the Reformation. Faith comes from hearing and righteousness is imputed to us-not from works. If anything the Reformers simply handed out the scriptures and told everyone, "If you don't believe us, read it for yourselves." Much of Calvin's writings rely upon the writings of the early church fathers application of scripture. Much of the Church's writings rely upon the writings of Church fathers quoting other Church fathers who quoted others who supposely did something "miraculous". Them's the facts.
While we hear that "The Church must interpret the scriptures", it's rare to see any scriptural interpretation. I'm not even sure if the Church has ever put out a commentary. One would think had they done that they might have paid for the Vatican.
If Calvin appealed to the early Church Fathers, then Scripture Alone goes out the window. You cannot have it both ways.
There is no logic in the claim that if I’m wrong that you must be right. It is true that the Church to a certain extent irritated the people, but it was politics and greed that enabled the Reformation to succeed.
For more than thirty years the new religious movement continued to spread. Nation after nation either fell away from the centre of unity or wavered as to the attitude that should be adopted towards the conflicting claims of Rome, Wittenberg, and Geneva, till at last it seemed not unlikely that Catholicism was to be confined within the territorial boundaries of Italy, Spain, and Portugal. It is necessary to emphasise the fact that the real interests of religion played but a secondary part in the success of the Protestant revolt. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox may be taken as typical of the new apostles, and however gifted and energetic these men may have been, yet few would care to contend that either in their own lives or in the means to which they had recourse for propagating their views they can be regarded as ideal religious reformers.
Protestantism owed its success largely to political causes, and particularly in the case of Lutheranism to its acknowledgment of the principle of royal supremacy. At its inception it was favoured by the almost universal jealousy of the House of Habsburg and by the danger of a Turkish invasion. If attention be directed to the countries where it attained its largest measure of success, it will be found that in Germany this success was due mainly to the distrust of the Emperor entertained by the princes and their desire to strengthen their own authority against both the Emperor and the people; in Switzerland to the political aspirations of the populous and manufacturing cantons and their eagerness to resist the encroachments of the House of Savoy; in the Scandinavian North to the efforts of ambitious rulers anxious to free themselves from the restrictions imposed upon their authority by the nobles and bishops; in the Netherlands to the determination of the people to maintain their old laws and constitutions in face of the domineering policy of Philip II.; in France to the attitude of the rulers who disliked the Catholic Church as being the enemy of absolutism, and who were willing to maintain friendly relations with the German Protestants in the hope of weakening the Empire by civil war; in England, at first to the autocratic position of the sovereign, and later to a feeling of national patriotism that inspired Englishmen to resent the interference of foreigners in what they regarded as their domestic affairs; and in Scotland to the bitter rivalry of two factions one of which favoured an alliance with France, the other, a union with England. In all these countries the hope of sharing in the plunder of the Church had a much greater influence in determining the attitude of both rulers and nobles than their zeal for reform, as the leaders of the so-called Reformation had soon good reason to recognise and to deplore.