of divine agency, and the other making the Deity the only power of the universe.  With one school, God as the only controlling agency is a fiction, and man himself is infinite in faculties; the other holds that God is everything and man is nothing.  The distinction between these two schools, both of which have had great defenders, is fundamental,—­such as that between Augustine and Pelagius, between Bernard and Abelard, and between Calvin and Lainez.  Among those who have inclined to the doctrine of the majesty of God and the littleness of man were the primitive monks and the Indian theosophists, and the orthodox scholastics of the Middle Ages,—­all of whom were comparatively indifferent to material pleasure and physical progress, and sought the salvation of the soul and the favor of God beyond all temporal blessings.  Of the other class have been the Greek philosophers and the rationalizing schoolmen and the modern lights of science.

Now Calvin was imbued with the lofty spirit of the Fathers of the Church and the more religious and contemplative of the schoolmen and the saints of the Middle Ages, when he attached but little dignity to man unaided by divine grace, and was absorbed with the idea of the sovereignty of God, in whose hands man is like clay in the hands of the potter.  This view of God pervaded the whole spirit of his theology, making it both lofty and yet one-sided.  To him the chief end of man was to glorify God, not to develop his own intellectual faculties, and still less to seek the pleasures and excitements of the world.  Man was a sinner before an infinite God, and he could rise above the polluting influence of sin only by the special favor of God and his divinely communicated grace.  Man was so great a sinner that he deserved an eternal punishment, only to be rescued as a brand plucked from the fire, as one of the elect before the world was made.  The vast majority of men were left to the uncovenanted mercies of Christ,—­the redeemer, not of the race, but of those who believed.

To Calvin therefore, as to the Puritans, the belief in a personal God was everything; not a compulsory belief in the general existence of a deity who, united with Nature, reveals himself to our consciousness; not the God of the pantheist, visible in all the wonders of Nature; not the God of the rationalist, who retires from the universe which he has made, leaving it to the operation of certain unchanging and universal laws:  but the God whom Abraham and Moses and the prophets saw and recognized, and who by his special providence rules the destinies of men.  The most intellectual of the reformers abhorred the deification of the reason, and clung to that exalted supernaturalism which was the life and hope of blessed saints and martyrs in bygone ages, and which in “their contests with mail-clad infidelity was like the pebble which the shepherd of Israel hurled against the disdainful boaster who defied the power of Israel’s God.”