under 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