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Updated: May 24, 2025
Knox's ideas, as far as he ever reasoned them out, reposed on this impregnable rock, namely that Calvinism, as held by himself, was an absolutely certain thing in every detail. If the State or 'the civil magistrate, as he put the case, entirely agreed with Knox, then Knox was delighted that the State should regulate religion.
Watch them; one is drunk, another is linked arm in arm with his paramour, a third is handcuffed, and you can see by the conduct of him who follows that he is as reckless of life as though the years were for ever. Why these? Ask science, and it answers election the election of birth and circumstance. Ask Calvinism, and it, too, answers election the election of decrees.
To the bulk of men the victory seemed wholly due to the energy and devotion of Calvinism. Rome had placed herself in the forefront of England's enemies, and it was the Calvinistic Puritan who was the irreconcileable foe of Rome. It was the Puritan who went forth to fight the Spaniard in France or in the Netherlands.
The hope of a considerable portion of the catholic nobility of his realm, although himself an excommunicated heretic; the mainstay of Calvinism while secretly bending all his energies to effect his reconciliation with the pope; the idol of the austere and grimly puritanical, while himself a model of profligacy; the leader of the earnest and the true, although false as water himself in every relation in which human beings can stand to each other; a standardbearer of both great branches of the Christian Church in an age when religion was the atmosphere of men's daily lives, yet finding his sincerest admirer, and one of his most faithful allies, in the Grand Turk,
"He lives immured within the Bastille of a word." How perfectly that sentence describes the orthodox. The Bastille in which they are immured is the word "Calvinism." "Man has no property in man." "The world is my country, to do good my religion." I ask again whether these splendid utterances came from the lips of a drunken beast? "Man has no property in man."
In the eyes of the extreme party, the mighty war had been waged, not to liberate human thought, but to enforce predestination; and heretics to Calvinism were as offensive in their eyes as Jews and Saracens had ever been to Torquemada.
"Calvinism," he told these lads, "was the spirit which rises in revolt against untruth; the spirit which, as I have shown you, has appeared and reappeared, and in due time will appear again, unless God be a delusion and man be as the beasts that perish.
But as his religion was theistic, and not orthodox; as, with characteristic meanness, he was ready to profess Catholicism or Calvinism as he might find it convenient, he has been classed among atheists by churchmen. Every thinking human being has a philosophy and a theology, a metaphysical foundation for his beliefs, and an opinion concerning the Deity.
Young Blatherwick had already begun to turn his back upon several of the special tenets of Calvinism, without, however, being either a better or a worse man because of the change in his opinions.
No system of pretended religion, invented by the perverted mind of man, under the inspiration of the Evil One, could go further in atrocity than this. Yet such was the pure, undiluted essence of Calvinism in its beginning. In our times its doctrines have been radically modified, as its adherents could not escape the soothing operations of time and calm reason.
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