The premises from which this doctrine is deduced are those Scripture texts which have the authority of the Apostle Paul, such as these: "According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world;" "For whom he did foreknow he also did predestinate;" "Jacob have I loved and Esau have I hated;" "He hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth;" "Hath not the potter power over his clay?" No one denies that from these texts the Predestination of Calvin as well as Augustine--for they both had similar views--is logically drawn. It has been objected that both of these eminent theologians overlooked other truths which go in parallel lines, and which would modify the doctrine,--even as Scripture asserts in one place the great fact that the will is free, and in another place that the will is shackled. The Pelagian would push out the doctrine of free-will so as to ignore the necessity of grace; and the Augustinian would push out the doctrine of the servitude of the will into downright fatalism. But these great logicians apparently shrink from the conclusions to which their logic leads them. Both Augustine and Calvin protest against fatalism, and both assert that the will is so far free that the sinner acts without constraint; and consequently the blame of his sins rests upon himself, and not upon another. The doctrines of Calvin and Augustine logically pursued would lead to the damnation of infants; yet, as a matter of fact, neither maintained that to which their logic led. It is not in human nature to believe such a thing, even if it may be dogmatically asserted.
And then, in regard to sin: no one has ever disputed the fact that sin is rampant in this world, and is deserving of punishment. But theologians of the school of Augustine and Calvin, in view of the fact, have assumed the premise--which indeed cannot be disputed--that sin is against an infinite God. Hence, that sin against an infinite God is itself infinite; and hence that, as sin deserves punishment, an infinite sin deserves infinite punishment,--a conclusion from which consciousness recoils, and which is nowhere asserted in the Bible. It is a conclusion arrived at by metaphysical reasoning, which has very little to do with practical Christianity, and which, imposed as a dogma of belief, to be accepted like plain declarations of Scripture, is an insult to the human understanding. But this conclusion, involving the belief that inherited sin is infinite, and deserving of infinite punishment, appals the mind. For relief from this terrible logic, the theologian adduces the great fact that Christ made an atonement for sin,--another cardinal declaration of the Scripture,--and that believers in this atonement shall be saved. This Bible doctrine is exceedingly comforting, and accounts in a measure for the marvellous spread of Christianity. The wretched people of the old Roman world heard the glad tidings that Christ died for them, as an atonement for the sins of which they were conscious, and which had chained them to despair. But another class of theologians deduced from this premise, that, as Christ's death was an infinite atonement for the sins of the world, so all men, and consequently all sinners, would be saved. This was the ground of the original Universalists, deduced from the doctrines which Augustine and Calvin had formulated. But they overlooked the Scripture declaration which Calvin never lost sight of, that salvation was only for those who believed. Now inasmuch as a vast majority of the human race, including infants, have not believed, it becomes a logical conclusion that all who have not believed are lost. Logic and consciousness then come into collision, and there is no relief but in consigning these discrepancies to the realm of mystery.
I allude to these theological difficulties simply to show the tyranny to which the mind and soul are subjected whenever theological deductions are invested with the same authority as belongs to original declarations of Scripture; and which, so far from being systematized, do not even always apparently harmonize. Almost any system of belief can be logically deduced from Scripture texts. It should be the work of theologians to harmonize them and show their general spirit and meaning, rather than to draw conclusions from any particular class of subjects. Any system of deductions from texts of Scripture which are offset by texts of equal authority but apparently different meaning, is necessarily one-sided and imperfect, and therefore narrow. That is exactly the difficulty 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 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 Abélard, 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." And he was thus brought into close sympathy with the realism of the Fathers, who felt that all that is valuable in theology must radiate from the recognition of Almighty power in the renovation of society, and displayed, not according to our human notions of law and progress and free-will, but supernaturally and mysteriously, according to his sovereign will, which is above law, since God is the author of law. He simply erred in enforcing a certain class of truths which must follow from the majesty of the one great First Cause, lofty as these truths are, to the exclusion of another class of truths of great importance; which gives to his system incompleteness and one-sidedness. Thus he was led to undervalue the power of truth itself in its contest with error. He was led into a seeming recognition of two wills in God,--that which wills the salvation of all men, and that which wills the salvation of the elect alone. He is accused of a leaning to fatalism, which he heartily denied, but which seems to follow from his logical conclusions. He entered into an arena of metaphysical controversy which can never be settled. The doctrines of free-will and necessity can never be reconciled by mortal reason. Consciousness reveals the freedom of the will as well as the slavery to sin. Men are conscious of both; they waste their time in attempting to reconcile two apparently opposing facts,--like our pious fathers at their New England firesides, who were compelled to shelter themselves behind mystery.
The tendency of Calvin's system, it is maintained by many, is to ascribe to God attributes which according to natural justice would be injustice and cruelty, such as no father would exercise on his own children, however guilty. Even good men will not accept in their hearts doctrines which tend to make God less compassionate than man. There are not two kinds of justice. The intellect is appalled when it is affirmed that one man justly suffers the penalty of another man's sin,--although the world is full of instances of men suffering from the carelessness or wickedness of others, as in a wicked war or an unnecessary railway disaster. The Scripture law of retribution, as brought out in the Bible and sustained by consciousness, is the penalty a man pays for personal and voluntary transgression. Nor will consciousness accept the doctrine that the sin of a mortal--especially under strong temptation and with all the bias of a sinful nature--is infinite. Nothing which a created mortal can do is infinite; it is only finite: the infinite belongs to God alone. Hence an infinite penalty for a finite sin conflicts with consciousness and is nowhere asserted in the Bible, which is transcendently more merciful and comforting than many theological systems of belief, however powerfully sustained by dialectical reasoning and by the most excellent men. Human judgments or reasonings are fallible on moral questions which have two sides; and reasonings from texts which present different meanings when studied by the lights of learning and science are still more liable to be untrustworthy. It would seem to be the supremest necessity for theological schools to unravel the meaning of divine declarations, and present doctrines in their relation with apparently conflicting texts, rather than draw out a perfect and consistent system, philosophically considered, from any one class of texts. Of all things in this wicked and perplexing world the science of theology should be the most cheerful and inspiring, for it involves inquiries on the loftiest subjects which can interest a thoughtful mind.
But whatever defects the system of doctrines which Calvin elaborated with such transcendent ability may have, there is no question as to its vast influence on the thinking of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The schools of France and Holland and Scotland and England and America were animated by his genius and authority. He was a burning and a shining light, if not for all ages, at least for the unsettled times in which he lived. No theologian ever had a greater posthumous power than he for nearly three hundred years, and he is still one of the great authorities of the church universal. John Knox sought his counsel and was influenced by his advice in the great reform he made in Scotland. In France the words Calvinist and Huguenot are synonymous. Cranmer, too, listened to his counsels, and had great respect for his learning and sanctity. Among the Puritans he has reigned like an oracle. Oliver Cromwell embraced his doctrines, as also did Sir Matthew Hale. Ridicule or abuse of Calvin is as absurd as the ridicule or abuse with which Protestants so long assailed Hildebrand or Innocent III. No one abuses Pascal or Augustine, and yet the theological views of all these are substantially the same.
In one respect I think that Calvin has received more credit than he deserves. Some have maintained that he was a sort of father of republicanism and democratic liberty. In truth he had no popular sympathies, and leaned towards an aristocracy which was little short of an oligarchy. He had no hand in establishing the political system of Geneva; it was established before he went there. He was not even one of those thinkers who sympathized with true liberty of conscience. He persecuted heretics like a mediaeval Catholic divine. He would have burned a Galileo as he caused the death of Servetus, which need not have happened but for him. Calvin could have saved Servetus if he had pleased; but he complained of him to the magistrates, knowing that his condemnation and death would necessarily follow. He had neither the humanity of Luther nor the toleration of Saint Augustine. He was the impersonation of intellect,--like Newton, Leibnitz, Spinoza, and Kant,--which overbore the impulses of his heart. He had no passions except zeal for orthodoxy. So pre-eminently did intellect tower above the passions that he seemed to lack sympathy; and yet, such was his exalted character, he was capable of friendship. He was remarkable for every faculty of the mind except wit and imagination. His memory was almost incredible; he remembered everything he ever read or heard; he would, after long intervals, recognize persons whom he had never seen but once or twice. When employed in dictation, he would resume the thread of his discourse without being prompted, after the most vexatious interruptions. His judgment was as sound as his memory was retentive; it was almost infallible,--no one was ever known to have been misled by it. He had a remarkable analytical power, and also the power of generalization. He was a very learned man, and his Commentaries are among the most useful and valued of his writings, showing both learning and judgment; his exegetical works have scarcely been improved. He had no sceptical or rationalistic tendencies, and therefore his Commentaries may not be admired by men of "advanced thought," but his annotations will live when those of Ewald shall be forgotten; they still hold their place in the libraries of biblical critics. For his age he was a transcendent critic; his various writings fill five folio volumes. He was not so voluminous a writer as Thomas Aquinas, but less diffuse; his style is lucid, like that of Voltaire.