Martin Luther's Church...

 “May a merciful God preserve me from a Christian Church in which everyone is a saint! I want to be and remain in the church and little flock of the fainthearted, the feeble and the ailing, who feel and recognize the wretchedness of their sins, who sigh and cry to God incessantly for comfort and help, who believe in the forgiveness of sins.”

Martin Luther, in Luther’s Works (St. Louis, 1957), XXII:55.

(H/T Gerda Inger)

Calvin: The Righteousness of Faith - The Righteousness of Christ

 “Now in speaking of the righteousness of faith scripture leads us to quite another place; that is, it teaches us to turn our attention away from our works to regard only God's mercy and the perfect holiness of Christ. For it shows us this order of justification: that from the beginning God receives the sinner by His pure and free goodness, not considering anything in him by which He is moved to mercy except the sinner's misery, since He sees him completely stripped and empty of good works; and that is why He finds in Himself the reason for doing him good. Then He touches the sinner with a feeling of His goodness so that, distrusting everything he has, he may put the whole sum of his salvation in the mercy which God gives him. That is the feeling of faith, by which a person enters into possession of his salvation: when he recognizes by the teaching of the gospel that he is reconciled to God because, having obtained the remission of his sins, he is justified by means of Christ's righteousness. Although he is regenerated by God's Spirit, he does not rest on the good works which he does, but is reassured that his perpetual righteousness consists in Christ's righteousness alone.”

John Calvin, The Institutes of Religion: The First English Version of the 1541 French Edition

Calvin: Justification Explained

“Lest we stumble from the first step (which would happen if we entered into dispute about something uncertain), we must first explain what these ways of speaking mean: "to be justified before God" and "to be justified by faith or by works." 

“That person is said to be justified before God who is counted righteous before God's judgment and is acceptable to His righteousness. Since iniquity is hateful to God, the sinner cannot find grace before His face; therefore, where sin is, there God's wrath and vengeance make themselves known. So that person is justified who is not counted as a sinner but as righteous, and for this reason he can rest tranquilly at God's judicial throne, before which all sinners stumble and are confounded. As when some person who was wrongly accused, when he has been examined by the judge and absolved and declared innocent, we say that he is justified in righteousness; so we say that a person is justified before God who, being separated from the number of sinners, has God as witness and proof of his righteousness. So we say that a person is justified before God by his works when there is such a purity and holiness in his life that it deserves the name of righteousness before God, or when by the integrity of his works he can satisfy God's judgment. On the contrary, that person is said to be justified by faith who, being excluded from the righteousness of works, by faith grasps Jesus Christ's righteousness and, clad in that, appears before God's face not as a sinner but as righteous.

“However, because the majority of people imagine a righteousness of faith mixed with works, let us also show (before we pass on) that the righteousness of faith is so different from that of works that if the one is established, the other is overturned. The apostle says that "he has counted all things as excrement to gain Christ and to be found in Him, not having his own righteousness which is of the law but that which is by faith in Jesus Christ, that is the righteousness which is from God by faith" (Phil. 3[8-9]). We see here that he compares the two things as opposites, and shows that it is necessary for the one who wants to obtain Christ's righteousness to abandon his own.”

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: The First English Version of the 1541 French Edition

Calvin: Forgiveness of Sins and Imputation of Christ’s Obedience

 The ground of our justification, therefore, is that God reconciles us to himself, from regard not to our works, but to Christ alone, and, by gratuitous adoption, makes us, instead of children of wrath, to be his own children. So long as God looks to our works, he perceives no reason why he ought to love us. Wherefore, it is necessary to bury our sins, and impute to us the obedience of Christ (because [his is] the only obedience which can stand his scrutiny), and adopt us as righteous through his merits.

John Calvin, The Necessity of Reforming the Church