The next English translation of the entire work was that of John Allen (1771-1839):
Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin, translated from
the Latin and collated with the author’s last edition in French.
London: J. Walker, 1813.
Allen was a layman who had become head of a Dissenting Academy at
Hackney. His other writings included an earlier controversial work entitled
The Fathers, the Reformers, and the Public Formularies of England in
Harmony with Calvin
. . (1811), and a treatise on modern Judaism (1816).
The greater part of Allen’s translation was made from the Latin and
revised with consultation of the French version; for the remainder he used
both versions alike. Although he dismisses Norton’s translation as “long
antiquated, uncouth, and obscure,” his principle of translation differs little
from that of Norton. He states that he has “aimed at a medium between
servility and looseness and endeavored to follow the style of the original
as far as the respective idioms of the Latin and English would admit.” The
result is a conscientious though not a distinguished translation, marked by
a reserved rendering of Calvin’s vehement passages and vivid metaphors,
but with very few errors seriously affecting the sense of the original.
Allen’s version has had a continuous circulation especially in America,
where it was thirty times republished to 1936. In the edition of 1909,
commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth, B. B.
Warfield’s valuable essay, “On the Literary History of Calvin’s
Institutes
,” f24 was inserted; and in the 1936 edition (timed with reference to
the four hundred years since Calvin’s first edition), Thomas C. Pears, Jr.,
added “An account of the American Editions.” Allen’s text has undergone
several minor revisions at the hands of American editors, notably that of
Joseph Paterson Engles in 1841.