“I am very much obliged to you for it. No, Mr Catterall, I do not believe anything of the sort. If that be what you mean by Calvinism, I abhor it as heartily as you do.”
“Why, I thought all Calvinists believed that!”
“I answer most emphatically, No. I believe that men are elect, but that they are elected ‘unto sanctification’: and a man who has not the sanctification shows plainly—unless he repent and amend—that he is not one of the elect.”
“Now I know a man who says, rolling the whites of his eyes and clasping his palms together as if he were always saying his prayers, like the figures on that old fellow’s tomb in the chancel—he says he was elected to salvation from all eternity, and cannot possibly be lost: and he is the biggest swearer and drinker in the parish. What say you to that? Am I to believe him?”
“Can you manage it?”
“I can’t: that is exactly the thing.”
“Don’t, then. I could not.”
“But now, do you believe, Mr Liversedge,—I have picked up the words from this fellow—that God elected men because He foreknew them, or that He foreknew because He had elected them?”
Ambrose gave a little wink at Fanny and me, sitting partly behind him, as if he thought that he had driven the Vicar completely into a corner.
“When the Angel Gabriel is sent to tell me, Mr Catterall, I shall be most happy to let you know. Until then, you must excuse my deciding a question on which I am entirely ignorant.”