II.  Jesus Christ died for all; so, nevertheless, that no one actually except believers is redeemed by His death.

III.  Man has not the saving belief from himself, nor out of his free will, but he needs thereto God’s grace in Christ.

IV.  This grace is the beginning, continuation, and completion of man’s salvation; all good deeds must be ascribed to it, but it does not work irresistibly.

V. God’s grace gives sufficient strength to the true believers to overcome evil; but whether they cannot lose grace should be more closely examined before it should be taught in full security.

Afterwards they expressed themselves more distinctly on this point, and declared that a true believer, through his own fault, can fall away from God and lose faith.

Before the conference, however, the Gomarite preachers had drawn up a Contra-Remonstrance of Seven Points in opposition to the Remonstrants’ five.

They demanded the holding of a National Synod to settle the difference between these Five and Seven Points, or the sending of them to foreign universities for arbitration, a mutual promise being given by the contending parties to abide by the decision.

Thus much it has been necessary to state concerning what in the seventeenth century was called the platform of the two great parties:  a term which has been perpetuated in our own country, and is familiar to all the world in the nineteenth.

These were the Seven Points: 

I. God has chosen from eternity certain persons out of the human race, which in and with Adam fell into sin and has no more power to believe and Convert itself than a dead man to restore himself to life, in order to make them blessed through Christ; while He passes by the rest through His righteous judgment, and leaves them lying in their sins.

II.  Children of believing parents, as well as full-grown believers, are to be considered as elect so long as they with action do not prove the contrary.

III.  God in His election has not looked at the belief and the repentance of the elect; but, on the contrary, in His eternal and unchangeable design, has resolved to give to the elect faith and stedfastness, and thus to make them blessed.

IV.  He, to this end, in the first place, presented to them His only begotten Son, whose sufferings, although sufficient for the expiation of all men’s sins, nevertheless, according to God’s decree, serves alone to the reconciliation of the elect.

V. God causest he Gospel to be preached to them, making the same through the Holy Ghost, of strength upon their minds; so that they not merely obtain power to repent and to believe, but also actually and voluntarily do repent and believe.

VI.  Such elect, through the same power of the Holy Ghost through which they have once become repentant and believing, are kept in such wise that they indeed through weakness fall into heavy sins; but can never wholly and for always lose the true faith.