Nevertheless, researches in this sphere are now a good deal eclipsed in popularity by researches in the sphere of physics, and no longer have the vogue which they once had. I have related how an eminent physicist with whose acquaintance I am honoured, imagines me to have invented the author of the Sacra Privata; and that fashionable newspaper, the Morning Post, undertaking,—as I seemed, it said, very anxious about the matter,—to supply information as to who the author really was, laid it down that he was Bishop of Calcutta, and that his ideas and writings, to which I attached so much value, had been among the main provocatives of the Indian mutiny. Therefore it is perhaps expedient to refresh our memory as to these schemes of doctrine, Calvinistic or Arminian, for the upholding of which, as has been said, British Puritanism exists, before we proceed to compare them, for correspondence with facts and for scientific validity, with the teaching of St. Paul.
Calvinism, then, begins by laying down that God from all eternity decreed whatever was to come to pass in time; that by his decree a certain number of angels and men are predestinated, out of God's mere free grace and love, without any foresight of faith or good works in them, to everlasting life; and others foreordained, according to the unsearchable counsel of his will, whereby he extends or withholds mercy as he pleases, to everlasting death. God made, however, our first parents, Adam and Eve, upright and able to keep his law, which was written in their hearts; at the same time entering into a contract with them, and with their posterity as represented in them, by which they were assured of everlasting life in return for perfect obedience, and of everlasting death if they should be disobedient. Our first parents, being enticed by Satan, a fallen angel speaking in the form of a serpent, broke this covenant of works, as it is called, by eating the forbidden fruit; and hereby they, and their posterity in them and with them, became not only liable to eternal death, but lost also their natural uprightness and all ability to please God; nay, they became by nature enemies to God and to all spiritual good, and inclined only to evil continually. This, says Calvinism, is our original sin; the bitter root of all our actual transgressions, in thought, word, and deed.
Yet, though man has neither power nor inclination to rise out of this wretched fallen state, but is rather disposed to lie insensible in it till he perish, another covenant exists by which his condition is greatly affected. This is the covenant of redemption, made and agreed upon, says Calvinism, between God the Father and God the Son in the Council of the Trinity before the world began. The sum of the covenant of redemption is this: God having, by the eternal decree already mentioned, freely chosen to life a certain number of lost mankind, gave them before the world began to God the Son, appointed Redeemer, on condition that if he humbled himself so far as to assume the human nature in union with the divine nature, submit himself to the law as surety for the elect, and satisfy justice for them by giving obedience in their name, even to suffering the cursed death of the cross, he should ransom and redeem them from sin and death, and purchase for them righteousness and eternal life. The Son of God accepted the condition, or bargain as Calvinism calls it; and in the fulness of time came, as Jesus Christ, into the world, was born of the Virgin Mary, subjected himself to the law, and completely paid the due ransom on the cross.
God has in his word, the Bible, revealed to man this covenant of grace or redemption. All those whom he has predestinated to life he in his own time effectually calls to be partakers in the release offered. Man is altogether passive in this call, until the Holy Spirit enables him to answer it. The Holy Spirit, the third person in the Trinity, applies to the elect the redemption purchased by Christ, through working faith in them. As soon as the elect have faith in Jesus Christ, that is, as soon as they give their consent heartily and repentantly, in the sense of deserved condemnation, to the covenant of grace, God justifies them by imputing to them that perfect obedience which Christ gave to the law, and the satisfaction also which upon the cross Christ gave to justice in their name. They who are thus called and justified are by the same power likewise sanctified; the dominion of carnal lusts being destroyed in them, and the practice of holiness being, in spite of some remnants of corruption, put in their power. Good works, done in obedience to God's moral law, are the fruits and evidences of a true faith; and the persons of the faithful elect being accepted through Christ, their good works also are accepted in him and rewarded. But works done by other and unregenerate men, though they may be things which God commands, cannot please God and are sinful. The elect can after justification and sanctification no more fall from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere to the end and be eternally saved; and of this they may, even in the present life, have the certain assurance. Finally, after death, their souls and bodies are joyfully joined together again in the resurrection, and they remain thenceforth for ever with Christ in glory; while all the wicked are sent away into hell with Satan, whom they have served.
We have here set down the main doctrines of Calvinistic Puritanism almost entirely in words of its own choosing. It is not necessary to enter into distinctions such as those between sublapsarians and supralapsarians, between Calvinists who believe that God's decree of election and reprobation was passed in foresight of original sin and on account of it, and Calvinists who believe that it was passed absolutely and independently. The important points of Calvinism,—original sin, free election, effectual calling, justification through imputed righteousness,—are common to both. The passiveness of man, the activity of God, are the great features in this scheme; there is very little of what man thinks and does, very much of what God thinks and does; and what God thinks and does is described with such particularity that the figure we have used of the man in the next street cannot but recur strongly to our minds.
The positive Protestantism of Puritanism, with which we are here concerned, as distinguished from the negative Protestantism of the Church of England, has nourished itself with ardour on this scheme of doctrine. It informs and fashions the whole religion of Scotland, established and nonconforming. It is the doctrine which Puritan flocks delight to hear from their ministers. It was Puritanism's constant reproach against the Church of England, that this essential doctrine was not firmly enough held and set forth by her. At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, in the Committee of Divines appointed by the House of Lords in 1641, and again at the Savoy Conference in 1661, the reproach regularly appeared. 'Some have defended,' is the Puritan complaint, 'the whole gross substance of Arminianism, that the act of conversion depends upon the concurrence of man's free will; some do teach and preach that good works are concauses with faith in the act of justification; some have defended universal grace, some have absolutely denied original sin.' As Puritanism grew, the Calvinistic scheme of doctrine hardened and became stricter. Of the Calvinistic confessions of faith of the sixteenth century,—the Helvetic Confession, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism,—the Calvinism is so moderate as to astonish any one who has been used only to its later developments. Even the much abused canons of the Synod of Dort no one can read attentively through without finding in parts of them a genuine movement of thought,—sometimes even a philosophic depth,—and a powerful religious feeling. In the documents of the Westminster Assembly, twenty-five years later, this has disappeared; and what we call the British Philistine stands in his religious capacity, sheer and stark, before us. Seriousness is the one merit of these documents, but it is a seriousness too mixed with the alloy of mundane strife and hatred to be called a religious feeling. Not a trace of delicacy of perception, or of philosophic thinking; the mere rigidness and contentiousness of the controversialist and political dissenter; a Calvinism exaggerated till it is simply repelling; and to complete the whole, a machinery of covenants, conditions, bargains, and parties-contractors, such as could have proceeded from no one but the born Anglo-Saxon man of business, British or American.
However, a scheme of doctrine is not necessarily false because of the style in which its adherents may have at a particular moment enounced it. From the faults which disfigure the performance of the Westminster divines the profession of faith prefixed to the Congregational Year-Book is free. The Congregationalists form one of the two great divisions of English Puritans. 'Congregational churches believe,' their Year-Book tells us, 'that the first man disobeyed the divine command, fell from his state of innocence and purity, and involved all his posterity in the consequences of that fall. They believe that all who will be saved were the objects of God's eternal and electing love, and were given by an act of divine sovereignty to the Son of God. They believe that Christ meritoriously obtained eternal redemption for us, and that the Holy Spirit is given in consequence of Christ's mediation.' The essential points of Calvinism are all here. To this profession of faith, annually published in the Year-Book of the Independents, subscription is not required; Puritanism thus remaining honourably consistent with the protests which, at the Restoration, it made against the call for subscription. But the authors of the Year-Book say with pride, and it is a common boast of the Independent churches, that though they do not require subscription, there is, perhaps, in no religious body, such firm and general agreement in doctrine as among Congregationalists. This is true, and it is even more true of the flocks than of the ministers, of whom the abler and the younger begin to be lifted by the stream of modern ideas. Still, up to the present time, the Protestantism of one great division of English Puritans is undoubtedly Calvinist; the Baptists holding in general the scheme of Calvinism yet more strictly than the Independents.
The other great division of English Puritanism is formed by the Methodists. Wesleyan Methodism is, as is well known, not Calvinist, but Arminian. The Methodist Magazine was called by Wesley the Arminian Magazine, and kept that title all through his life. Arminianism is an attempt made with the best intentions, and with much truth of practical sense, but not in a very profound philosophical spirit, to escape from what perplexes and shocks us in Calvinism. The God of Calvinism is a magnified and non-natural man who decrees at his mere good pleasure some men to salvation and other men to reprobation; the God of Arminianism is a magnified and non-natural man who foreknows the course of each man's life, and who decrees each of us to salvation or reprobation in accordance with this foreknowledge. But so long as we remain in this anthropomorphic order of ideas the question will always occur: Why did not a being of infinite power and infinite love so make all men as that there should be no cause for this sad foreknowledge and sad decree respecting a number of them? In truth, Calvinism is both theologically more coherent, and also shows a deeper sense of reality than Arminianism, which, in the practical man's fashion, is apt to scrape the surface of things only.
For instance, the Arminian Remonstrants, in their zeal to justify the morality, in a human sense, of God's ways, maintained that he sent his word to one nation rather than another according as he saw that one nation was more worthy than another of such a preference. The Calvinist doctors of the Synod of Dort have no difficulty in showing that Moses and Christ both of them assert, with respect to the Jewish nation, the direct contrary; and not only do they here obtain a theological triumph, but in rebutting the Arminian theory they are in accordance with historical truth and with the real march of human affairs. They allow more for the great fact of the not ourselves in what we do and are. The Calvinists seize, we say, that great fact better than the Arminians. The Calvinist's fault is in his scientific appreciation of the fact; in the reasons he gives for it. God, he says, sends his word to one nation rather than another at his mere good pleasure. Here we have again the magnified and non-natural man, who likes and dislikes, knows and decrees, just as a man, only on a scale immensely transcending anything of which we have experience, and whose proceedings we nevertheless describe as if he were in the next street for people to verify all we say about him.
Arminian Methodism, however, puts aside the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. The foremost place, which in the Calvinist scheme belongs to the doctrine of predestination, belongs in the Methodist scheme to the doctrine of justification by faith. More and more prominently does modern Methodism elevate this as its essential doctrine; and the era in their founder's life which Methodists select to celebrate is the era of his conversion to it. It is the doctrine of Anselm, adopted and developed by Luther, set forth in the Confession of Augsburg, and current all through the popular theology of our day. We shall find it in almost any popular hymn we happen to take, but the following lines of Milton exhibit it classically. By the fall of our first parents, says he:—