realism of the Fathers, who felt that all that is valuable in theology must radiate from the recognition of Almighty power in the renovation of society, and displayed, not according to our human notions of law and progress and free-will, but supernaturally and mysteriously, according to his sovereign will, which is above law, since God is the author of law.  He simply erred in enforcing a certain class of truths which must follow from the majesty of the one great First Cause, lofty as these truths are, to the exclusion of another class of truths of great importance; which gives to his system incompleteness and one-sidedness.  Thus he was led to undervalue the power of truth itself in its contest with error.  He was led into a seeming recognition of two wills in God,—­that which wills the salvation of all men, and that which wills the salvation of the elect alone.  He is accused of a leaning to fatalism, which he heartily denied, but which seems to follow from his logical conclusions.  He entered into an arena of metaphysical controversy which can never be settled.  The doctrines of free-will and necessity can never be reconciled by mortal reason.  Consciousness reveals the freedom of the will as well as the slavery to sin.  Men are conscious of both; they waste their time in attempting to reconcile two apparently opposing facts,—­like our pious fathers at their New England firesides, who were compelled to shelter themselves behind mystery.

The tendency of Calvin’s system, it is maintained by many, is to ascribe to God attributes which according to natural justice would be injustice and cruelty, such as no father would exercise on his own children, however guilty.  Even good men will not accept in their hearts doctrines which tend to make God less compassionate than man.  There are not two kinds of justice.  The intellect is appalled when it is affirmed that one man justly suffers the penalty of another man’s sin,—­although the world is full of instances of men suffering from the carelessness or wickedness of others, as in a wicked war or an unnecessary railway disaster.  The Scripture law of retribution, as brought out in the Bible and sustained by consciousness, is the penalty a man pays for personal and voluntary transgression.  Nor will consciousness accept the doctrine that the sin of a mortal—­especially under strong temptation and with all the bias of a sinful nature—­is infinite.  Nothing which a created mortal can do is infinite; it is only finite:  the infinite belongs to God alone.  Hence an infinite penalty for a finite sin conflicts with consciousness and is nowhere asserted in the Bible, which is transcendently more merciful and comforting than many theological systems of belief, however powerfully sustained by dialectical reasoning and by the most excellent men.  Human judgments or reasonings are fallible on moral questions which have two sides; and reasonings from texts which present different meanings when studied