Calvinism was partly a reversion; its emphasis on sovereignty was tyrannical, but it trained the mind in exact and intense thought.
Fox, after long searchings amid sects and parties, made the new discovery again,—God's spirit given directly, freely to man! Hence a sort of intoxication in the early Quaker, sobering to a sweet religion.
Always, in the various churches,—Roman, English, Genevan, Lutheran,—was something of the divine fire, though often hidden and choked.
In the Wesleys, the saving and seeking love of Christ was the form the revival took; and with this went "free grace," as against fatalism which crushed the will.
Edwards had something of the love-element, but it was fettered by his Calvinism. His main service was to stimulate religious thought, which, from a Calvinistic basis, worked out through Hopkins to Channing.
The revival in Liberal Orthodoxy is essentially a recognition of the true character of Jesus, and an idealization and enthronement of this as the sovereign ideal, with a clinging as yet to the supernatural basis, which inevitably grows weaker.
Meanwhile, new "ways into the Infinite" have been opened,—through nature, as by Wordsworth; through humanity by Emerson.
Science has swept away the whole supernatural machinery with which this inner life of the soul has been connected in men's minds. It finds everywhere order, growth, a present rooted in the past and flowering into the future. Opening immense vistas for the race, it sometimes seems to shrivel the individual to a transient atom.
But still there wells up in the heart of man the mysterious, profound, irresistible gladness in its Divine source,—the love that casts out fear. We may look at it soberly, assign it place, limit it in a way; it can no longer give us a cosmogony, but unimpaired is its message, "Obey and rejoice!" We correlate its impulse with the sense of moral obligation and the code of ethics which has grown up in the world's sober experience. We learn to cultivate the religious sense more wisely than of old. We make bodily health its minister. We administer and reorganize civil society, instead of confining ourselves to the church. We open our hearts to the revelation of nature and humanity. And we wait patiently the slow coming of the Kingdom; the slow growth of religion in our own character; the slow upbuilding of human societies.
Side by side with this slow process lies always the present heaven into which at times the soul enters and finds perfect peace,—a peace which embraces past, present, and future, time and eternity. We study and practice obedience, diligence, patience; and at unforeseen moments, under shocks or in highest tranquillity, comes the divine revelation.