Reflections on John Calvin and the Church Struggle in Geneva by David Wright
Wright was Professor of Patristic and Reformed Christianity, University of Edinburgh, New College, Edinburgh, Scotland.  Wright explains that often Calvin's time in Geneva is characterized as a "lenghty struggle followed by success for the Reformers."  Calvin wrote shortly before his death, "all I have done has been worth nothing, and I am a miserable creature... He [Calvin] departed not in splendid triumph nor in the warm glow of sunset, but with a sharp awareness that eh conflict would survive him, and might thereafter intensify."   Wright concludes, "for Calvin this earthly life as not the whole story.  he seems to have assumed it would always be a theatre of conflict.  he could no more escape it than he could opt out of human and churchly life altogether."   Sep/Oct 2001 Theology Matters p. 7