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Updated: May 24, 2025
In other words, the ultimate certainty of dissolution does not nullify the beauty and strength of physical life, and the putrescence of Jesuit methods and ideas is no more a reproach to those who first found succour in them, than the cant and formalism of any other degenerate form of active faith, say monachism or Calvinism, prove Calvin or Benedict or Bernard to have been hypocritical and hollow.
Calvinism was its characteristic religion, even in the Catholic Church, the insistence on the narrowness of the way and the fewness of the chosen. Suspicion was the note of its politics "put not your trust in princes." It tried to thrash everything out by learned, virulent, and ceaseless controversy; and it weeded its population by witch-burning.
Then, in the end, I put it squarely up to him: if he must preach at all, why not choose a church that stood for law and order in the universe, a church that, hanging to the old traditions, yet held out her arms to the new interpretations of the law and gospel, instead of sticking to the cast-iron, white-hot Calvinism which hadn't marched an inch, hadn't so much as changed the focus of its spectacles, since the pre-Darwin days of the very first of his ancestral parsons."
Doubtless in great measure from the subtle spirit of Jansenism which spread so widely in its day and is so hard to outlive from remains of the still darker spirit of Calvinism which hangs about convert teachers of a rigid school from vehement and fervid spiritual writers, addressing themselves to the needs of other times perhaps most of all from the old lie which was from the beginning, the deep mistrust of God which is the greatest triumph of His enemy.
If what now so clearly appears to be the truth is so or not, it is certain that it has not been embraced out of a spirit of opposition to Calvinism, or to any other system of religious faith whatever.
Though there was little in him of the Calvinism of his maternal ancestors, he judged himself on this point with the severity of an austere moralist. In the world of pleasure in which he moved such offences were considered venial, but he looked upon them with the disgust of a man who reckons personal freedom beyond all earthly goods, and who sees himself in danger of becoming a slave.
Between Whitefield and John Wesley, in 1741, a separation occurred on points of doctrine, Whitefield adhering to a rigid Calvinism, while Wesley inclined to Arminianism, and thenceforth they followed their several paths. Although Whitefield founded no sect, he exerted a widespread influence by his presence and voice.
The presence of the steamer awakens a faint simulacrum of life and interest in sleepy Boeroe, and a native woman, in the rusty black calico wherewith Dutch Calvinism counteracts the Eastern love of glowing colours, brings a rickety chair from her dingy hut, and sets the precious possession under a shadowy nutmeg-tree in the village street.
His father's death in 1840 left him independent, and the boy who was brought up in Toryism and Calvinism, became a philosophic radical and free-thinker. He travelled, he read, he acquired facility in nineteen languages and fluency in seven.
The venerable minister who bore it had his thousands of ardent young disciples, as well as defenders and followers of mature age and acknowledged talent; a hundred pulpits propagated the dogmas which he had engrafted on the stock of Calvinism. Nor did he lack numerous and powerful antagonists.
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