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 Abelard, 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