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Updated: October 17, 2024
Viewed in this light, the words that were supposed to imply election teach consecration, and instead of final perseverance we read full possession. And this we do not say with any idea of refuting Calvinistic doctrine, having no "isms" of our own and little time to spend in attacking those of other people.
There is an introduction; two or three heads of discourse, formally announced; and a practical conclusion; and generally the entire Calvinistic system is set forth in every sermon. But the main difference lies in the manner in which the discourses of the two schools are delivered.
William Godwin came into the world in 1756, at Wisbech, in the Fen country, with the moral atmosphere of a dissenting home for inheritance. His father and grandfather were Independent ministers, who taught the metaphysical dissent of the extreme Calvinistic tradition. The quaint ill-spelled letters of his mother reveal a strong character, a meagre education and rigid beliefs.
About 45 years ago, a small parcel of Preston people, enamoured of the Calvinistic Methodism which the Countess of Huntingdon recognised, worshipped in a building in Cannon-street. In 1825 they built, or had raised for them, a chapel in Pole-street, which was dedicated to St. Mark.
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 king, though at this time his Calvinistic education had rivetted him in the doctrine of absolute decrees, yet, being a zealous partisan of Episcopacy, was insensibly engaged, towards the end of his reign, to favor the milder theology of Arminius.
The reasoning here reminds one of the conclusions of a still more recent writer, who while condemning what he considers the fatalism of Calvinistic theology, still asserts that its logic leaves no alternative but the denial of a personal God. And an early Buddhist philosopher has left a fragment which gives the very same reason for agnosticism.
Alas! the benighted victims of superstition hugged their chains, and preferred the tyranny under which their kindred had been tortured, burned, and buried alive for half-a-century long, to the possibility of a single Calvinistic conventicle being opened in any village of obedient Flanders.
Many who were suspected of having participated in Calvinistic rites, were foremost and loudest in putting down and denouncing all forms and shows of the reformation. The country was as completely "pacified," to use the conqueror's expression, as Gaul had been by Caesar.
It was a consolation, however, that its influence was rendered less noxious by the vastly increased strength of principles long dormant in the atmosphere. Anna van der Hoven, buried alive in Brussels, simply because her Calvinistic creed was a crime in the eyes of the monks who murdered her, was the last victim to purely religious persecution.
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