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Updated: May 24, 2025
The Lutheran Church, resulting from the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century, became immediately after the death of Luther, and remained during generations, more inexcusably cruel and intolerant than Catholicism had ever been; the revolution which enthroned Calvinism in large parts of the British Empire and elsewhere brought new forms of unreason, oppression, and unhappiness; the revolution in France substituted for the crudities and absurdities of the old religion a "purified worship of the Supreme Being" under which came human sacrifices by thousands, followed by a reaction to an unreason more extreme than anything previously known.
These questions are so fundamental that the strife of Calvinism and Arminianism and the question of the double procession of the Holy Spirit, which seemed vital to our fathers have faded into relative insignificance. While these storms were agitating the upper air, and the thunderous echoes reverberated through the mountains, the work on the plain went rapidly forward.
Yet it would be ridiculous to deny that the aggressive, uncompromising; self-sacrificing, intensely believing, perfectly fearless spirit of Calvinism had been the animating soul, the motive power of the great revolt.
In spite of Cecil she refused to recognize Murray's government, renewed her demands for the Queen's release, and encouraged the Hamiltons in their designs of freeing her. She was in fact stirred by more fears than her dread of Calvinism and of Calvinistic liberty.
A considerable portion of the lower nobility, a few merchants and business men, and many magistrates conformed to Calvinism openly; the majority of great lawyers and men of learning adhered to it in public or in secret. Probably from a twentieth to a thirtieth of the total population embraced Calvinism.
Neither of the two men had strong religious convictions, but circumstances brought it about that they were to range themselves irrevocably on opposite sides in a quarrel between fanatical theologians on the subject of predestination and grace. From early times Calvinism in the northern Netherlands had been divided into two schools.
Up to 1849 or thereabouts, my father in religion was Independent and Calvinist, the creed which, as he thought then, best suited him. But a change was at hand. His political opinions remained unaltered to his death, but in 1851 he had completed his discovery that the "simple gospel" which Calvinism preached was by no means simple, but remarkably abstruse.
Calvinism, while it was believed, produced characters nobler and grander than any which Republican Rome produced. But the Catholic Church turned its penances into money payments. Calvinism made demands on faith beyond what truth would bear; and when doubt had once entered, the spell of Calvinism was broken.
And yet, notwithstanding this consciousness that we are necessarily and irremediably the bound prisoners of ignorance, and that all the great truths lie outside our prison, we can almost be content that, in most cases, it should be so not, however, with regard to those great unattainable truths which lie in the track of Calvinism.
When he mentions that, in his time, "of young men at Oxford not one in five seemed to have any convictions at all," he seems to imply that it was on account of the desire for a new religion; whereas it was far more traceable to the after-effects of Calvinism and Puritanism, which have stuck, as spiritual limpets, to England's religious rocks ever since they first reached them.
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