Calvinism - pagina 70

CALVINISM AND RELIGION.

66

Every attempt

weight

to explain sin, as an incomplete

on the way to perfection, aroused

stage

He

an insult to the majesty of God. beginning,

the

may show

appearance

de-

in his "-'History of Civilization in

that the

vl^.,

confessed, from

same truth which Buckle has

the

monstrated empirically

England",

his wrath, as

forms

which

in

makes

sin

its

us a gradual refinement, but that

moral condition of the human heart, as such, has

the

remained the same throughout

all

the centuries.

To

the

de proftindis with which, thirty centuries ago, the soul of David

God

of

child

unto God,

cried

in

the troubled soul of every

the sixteenth century

still

sounded a

the corruption of sin as the source

The conception of of all human misery

was nowhere more profound than

in Calvin's environ-

response with undiminished power.

Even

ment. in

in the assertions

which the Calvinist made,

accordance with Holy Scripture, concerning

damnation, there

life,

is

the result of the utmost seriousness

and the undaunted courage of a deep-rooted

conviction

of the

holiness of the

from

whose

lips

He,

and

no coarseness, no rudeness, but only

is

that clearness which

of

hell

most winning words,

most High.

Did not

flowed the most tender, and the

— did

not He, Himself also speak

most decidedly and repeatedly of an "outer darkness", of a that

*''fire

dieth

that cannot be quenched", and of a ''worm not".-*

And

in this, also,

for to refuse to assent to these

words

lack of thoroughgoing consistency. sincerity

in

is

nothing but a

shews a want of

our confession of the holiness of God, and

of the destructive power of iin

It

Calvin was right,

this spiritual

sin.

experience of

sin,

And

on the contrary,

in this empirical con-

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