ARTICLE VI.

SEVEN FAILURES OF ULTRA-CALVINISM.

BY THE REV. JOHN MILLER, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY.

THE Northern Presbyterian Church, just now in the throes of a dangerous revolution, is the largest branch of the largest Protestant body on our planet. It is not so large as the Methodist, if we count only in America. It is not so

large as the Episcopal, if we count only in England and America. But if we count over all lands, and include all churches presbyterially governed, our reckoning will hold. So enormous an interest, just now so deranged, is worth watching, not simply if we be Presbyterians, nor solely if we be Christians, but if we be men of any school; for there are strange problems in it, and things hard to be understood, of people probably above the average of intelligence in Christendom.

These presbyterially governed men have sinned in two particulars: first, like cannel coal, they are awful for splitting up,—“Burghers" and " 'Anti-Burghers," "Associate" and "Reformed," "Free," "United," and "Established" making one nation, at least, provoke a smile, when their church course is talked of; and, second, they shock conscience by certain outrages on faith, which the best hearts dare not and ought not to endure; and which have wrecked truth and roused doubt in all seats under Presbyterian control. It is time that the world should understand this.

What we affirm is, that there have been seven strongholds of Presbyterian theology; I mean by that, seven successive fortresses of this hyper-calvinistic faith; and that

every one of them has bred defection; and that in a sense, not merely of driving men into a recoil antagonistic to the pious founders of the school, but revolutionary in the end to the pious revolutionists themselves; so that Dr. Martineau last year, a very determined Unitarian, cries out in a sort of mental agony, that he is unwilling to have spent his life in giving help to a body that can be dreamed of as a mere philosophy, and that if he is a Unitarian, he wishes to suppose his labor to have been for a scriptural and religious Unitarianism. Our position therefore is, that the world has tried ultra-calvinistic thought to the extent of seven successive centres of it; that that trial has ranged over four centuries; and with the punctuality of light has produced infidelity in every land where it has reigned. Is it not time that such centres should begin to suspect their system?

If men say, This thing is built of wickedness; it is but the usual wave by which one age is set up in pious teaching and which recedes the next, then I wish to rejoin—and this is a large motive for writing-that waves are little incident to other teaching. Methodism has growth, and without such recoil. Episcopacy works harder, and goes lower down into the slums and outways of men than an age ago. It apes Rome too much, but with more power of recovery, and with more groping back to better sense, than we have ever seen in Presbyterianism. And if we look at Rome herself, or at her Eastern rival, I know no such worsement in either, as Dr. Martineau now points at in alarm; I can find no such blood-poisoning in both, as I can find at Princeton; much as I prefer Princeton, of course, as long as it can be sheltered from itself, to anything I can find in either pope or patriarch.

Let it be understood definitely, I charge that there is a certain system of dogma that is called Calvinism; which is true in very important features; which has held the devout adherence of very pious and singularly gifted men; which has erected itself into the very highest usefulness, till its

uniform fate came hovering into view; and then, that in seven different trials it has succumbed every time, and poisoned the air with its deadly influences. The object of this article is to ask whether seven times is not enough, and whether the seventh time, if it is not already too late, ought not to find the seventh seat of this odious mischief ready to listen to terms, and to hear the summons of Providence to find out the causes of the evil.

A very unfair way of telling what Calvinism really is, viz., the quoting of single passages, is nevertheless the very fairest way to tell why it comes to grief. Moreover it tells the remedy. If Calvinism has such enormous good as to rear the noblest specimens of men, and it seems therefore unfair to quote scatteringly, why, I beg, is that not the very way to quote, and why are not they the very passages to leave out? And why, by placing wiser ones in their place, may we not keep the good, and hope to cure the deadliness of the teaching? Let me give a specimen:

"Those persons whom the Lord, in order that they may be the organs of his wrath and examples of his severity, has created to contumely of life and to destruction of death, those persons I say, in order that they may come duly to their end, he, one while, deprives of the faculty of hearing his word; and, another while, even by the very preaching of it, the more blinds and stupefies."

This is Calvin himself; and let me quote further:

"So he directs, indeed, his voice to them; but only that they may be the more deaf; he kindles light before them, but only that they may be the more blind; he propounds doctrine to them, but only that by it they may be the more stupefied; he applies the remedy to them, but only that they may not be healed."

Is it any wonder that seven schools, one after the other, should breed pestilence, when these ignorant wickednesses emerged more into day?

And again; still Calvin :

"Predestination we call the eternal decree of God, by which he has determined in himself what he would have to become of every individual of mankind; for they are not all created with similar destiny; but eternal life is fore-ordained for some, and eternal damnation for others. Every man, therefore, being created for one or the other of these ends, we say he is predestinated either to life or to death."

Is

Now, what is really the fault of this Calvinianism? there no predestination? It is bad philosophy and bad divinity, both, to imagine any such idea. Do we not see how cosmogonies even of the most godless kinds, lean heavily to the side of sequence? How can God sustain and not control? Can there be anything like Waterloo without predestination? Think of that dwarf Corsican changing the map of Europe, and God not in it. At any rate, suppose John Calvin had all he pleads for in the Deity except the horrid manner of it, and Calvinism could not have wrecked its seats as it has done one after the other.

If any one wants to convince himself of this, let him resort to Colonel Ingersoll. He does not attack the naked forms of predestination, but blurred and blotted copies. Look at Stuart Mill. If Calvinists would only listen, his words are real sermons. I can hardly object to them. “If, instead of the glad tidings that there exists a being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that 'the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving' does not sanction them; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may." "I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him,

to hell I will go." We do not say that this is in the highest taste, or betokens the highest moral temperament; but we do say that it is true in every syllable. It would be wicked

to imagine such a God, and this is the vice of Calvin; not that he teaches predestination; materialists teach the like of that; but that it sets God to predestinating with so little morals himself; and sets him to reprobating; not that reprobation is not a sequence from predestiny, but that the morale of it, in the way it is put, makes it cruel. This shines out in these words from Calvin, and it shines too in Ingersoll. Ingersoll does not attack predestiny, but, in all that pile of pamphlets, only the bad morals in which such doctrines are put. There is a certain predestiny vital to any cosmogony whatever. Ingersoll does not attack that, but the moral motives out of which it professes to begin. We have looked through his papers and have found no other point of attack. As the lightning, fond of a certain mountain, strikes it in its veins of hematite every time; so Ingersoll never strikes the fact, but only the parody of the fact. Look at the assaults of Spencer. They are like all his philosophy, resting on principles in which he has been steeped in the land of his birth. Give Spencer his "first principles" (and they are exactly the reigning philosophy, which he had been bred not to challenge), and all his agnostic iconoclasms crowd in; and allow for him his Calvinistic neighborhood, and the sentence which follows, is, like Ingersoll's pamphlets, irrefragably correct. Mark him now; he has been bred up by

the tincture of Calvinistic morals. I have no doubt that he would say that he seemed giving the gospel theism correctly. And yet listen:-"It is difficult to conceal repugnance to a creed which tacitly ascribes to the unknowable a love of adulation such as would be despised in a human being."

Let me seize upon this sentence, doubtless sincere in Spencer, as a type of the poison of his bringing up.

We have been longing to hear from some of the Revisers