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