[ON CALVINISM.]

PART I.

GENERAL REMARKS.

To St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in Africa, belongs the equivocal distinction of having originated in the Christian Church a controversy respecting the Divine decrees, a controversy which dates its origin from the fifth century, and which, after the lapse of thirteen hundred years, exhibits no symptoms of approaching to its end. In the Roman Communion, it was the source of those bitter animosities, which reciprocally exasperated the Jesuits and Jansenists. The Protestant Churches, in the early days of the Reformation, were disturbed by the agitation of this perplexed and perilous subject. And when Calvin appeared as the vindicator of the Divine sovereignty in predetermining the fates of men, he only introduced to the Churches of the Reformation a doctrine which had been transmitted from earlier times, but which, perhaps, he defined with more precision, expounded with more fearless consistency, and invested with the authority of his own great and illustrious name. In the present discussion the word Calvinism is used, not to signify those doctrines of the Church which Calvin held in common with the fathers of the Reformation, but those only which relate to his extreme views of the Divine decrees, to his predestinarian theology, and to his modification of other scripture truths to render them harmonious with his principal tenets.

Whatever therefore may be the merits or the final result of this grave and earnest controversy, it leaves untouched the corruption of human nature, the deity and atonement of Christ, justification by faith, the necessity of Divine influence to renew and purify the heart, and the scriptural doctrine of predestination, according to the fore-knowledge of God. This distinction is important; since, if it be overlooked, the rejectors of Calvinism may be supposed to have also rejected the capital doctrines of the Reformed faith. Fuller has unwarrantably, perhaps undesignedly, given his sanction to this imputation in his “Calvinistic and Socinian Systems compared^[1].” But the rejectors of Calvinistic predestination may be not less remote from Socinianism, and much nearer to genuine Christianity, than the most rigid disciple of that eminent Reformer, who, in the protestant city of Geneva, committed Servetus to the flames. The Socinian controversy relates to doctrines, which are the common faith of the Catholic Church; with the peculiarities of Calvinism it has no concern. And it is worthy of remark, that if one class of doctrinalists more than another symbolizes in any instance with Socinians, the followers of Calvin form that class; since it is not easy to discover where lies the essential difference between the doctrine of philosophical necessity, as held by the greater number of Socinians, and that of predestination, as maintained by Calvinists.