which Calvin labored. He seems, to a large class
of Christians of great ability and conscientiousness,
to be narrow and one-sided, and is therefore no authority
to them; not, be it understood, in reference to the
great fundamental doctrines of Christianity, but in
his views of Predestination and the subjects interlinked
with it. And it was the great error of attaching
so much importance to mere metaphysical divinity that
led to such a revulsion from his peculiar system in
after times. It was the great wisdom of the English
reformers, like Cranmer, to leave all those metaphysical
questions open, as matters of comparatively little
consequence, and fall back on unquestioned doctrines
of primitive faith, that have given so great vitality
to the English Church, and made it so broad and catholic.
The Puritans as a body, more intellectual than the
mass of the Episcopalians, were led away by the imposing
and entangling dialectics of the scholastic Calvin,
and came unfortunately to attach as much importance
to such subjects as free-will and predestination—questions
most complicated—as they did to “the
weightier matters of the law;” and when pushed
by the logic of opponents to the
decretum horribile,
have been compelled to fall back on the Catholic doctrine
of mysteries, as something which could never be explained
or comprehended, but which it is a Christian duty
to accept as a mystery. The Scriptures certainly
speak of mysteries, like regeneration; but it is one
thing to marvel how a man can be born again by the
Spirit of God,—a fact we see every day,—and
quite another thing to make a mystery to be accepted
as a matter of faith of that which the Bible has nowhere
distinctly affirmed, and which is against all ideas
of natural justice, and arrived at by a subtle process
of dialectical reasoning.
But it was natural for so great an intellectual giant
as Calvin to make his startling deductions from the
great truths he meditated upon with so much seriousness
and earnestness. Only a very lofty nature would
have revelled as he did, and as Augustine did before
him and Pascal after him, in those great subjects
which pertain to God and his dispensations. All
his meditations and formulated doctrines radiate from
the great and sublime idea of the majesty of God and
the comparative insignificance of man. And here
he was not so far apart from the great sages of antiquity,
before salvation was revealed by Christ. “Canst
thou by searching find out God?” “What
is man that Thou art mindful of him?”
And here I would remark that theologians and philosophers
have ever been divided into two great schools,—those
who have had a tendency to exalt the dignity of man,
and those who would absorb man in the greatness of
the Deity. These two schools have advocated doctrines
which, logically carried out to their ultimate sequences,
would produce a Grecian humanitarianism on the one
hand, and a sort of Bramanism on the other,—the
one making man the arbiter of his own destiny, independently