The Institutes grew for twenty three years alongside its author. The first edition of 1536, published when Calvin was twenty six and newly exiled from France, was a small book of six chapters patterned on Luther's catechisms, treating the law, the creed, the Lord's Prayer, the sacraments, and prefaced by a bold open letter to King Francis I defending French evangelicals against the charge of sedition. Each revision reorganised as well as enlarged.
The 1539 Strasbourg edition tripled the size and turned a catechism into a theology textbook; the 1543 edition added material on the church; and the final Latin edition of 1559, produced while Calvin was ill and racing his own strength, recast everything into four books whose order follows the Apostles' Creed: the knowledge of God the Creator, the knowledge of God the Redeemer in Christ, the way the grace of Christ is received through the Holy Spirit, and the external means by which God invites and sustains, the church, the sacraments and civil government. Calvin translated the work into French himself, beginning in 1541, in a plain vigorous style that historians of the language treat as a landmark, and he described the whole as a guide and key for readers of Scripture, the doctrine gathered in one place so his biblical commentaries could stay lean.