To St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in Africa, belongs the equivocal distinction of having originated in the Christian Church a controversy respecting the Divine decrees, a controversy which dates its origin from the fifth century, and which, after the lapse of thirteen hundred years, exhibits no symptoms of approaching to its end. In the Roman Communion, it was the source of those bitter animosities, which reciprocally exasperated the Jesuits and Jansenists. The Protestant Churches, in the early days of the Reformation, were disturbed by the agitation of this perplexed and perilous subject. And when Calvin appeared as the vindicator of the Divine sovereignty in predetermining the fates of men, he only introduced to the Churches of the Reformation a doctrine which had been transmitted from earlier times, but which, perhaps, he defined with more precision, expounded with more fearless consistency, and invested with the authority of his own great and illustrious name. In the present discussion the word Calvinism is used, not to signify those doctrines of the Church which Calvin held in common with the fathers of the Reformation, but those only which relate to his extreme views of the Divine decrees, to his predestinarian theology, and to his modification of other scripture truths to render them harmonious with his principal tenets.

Whatever therefore may be the merits or the final result of this grave and earnest controversy, it leaves untouched the corruption of human nature, the deity and atonement of Christ, justification by faith, the necessity of Divine influence to renew and purify the heart, and the scriptural doctrine of predestination, according to the fore-knowledge of God. This distinction is important; since, if it be overlooked, the rejectors of Calvinism may be supposed to have also rejected the capital doctrines of the Reformed faith. Fuller has unwarrantably, perhaps undesignedly, given his sanction to this imputation in his “Calvinistic and Socinian Systems compared.” But the rejectors of Calvinistic predestination may be not less remote from Socinianism, and much nearer to genuine Christianity, than the most rigid disciple of that eminent Reformer, who, in the protestant city of Geneva, committed Servetus to the flames. The Socinian controversy relates to doctrines, which are the common faith of the Catholic Church; with the peculiarities of Calvinism it has no concern. And it is worthy of remark, that if one class of doctrinalists more than another symbolizes in any instance with Socinians, the followers of Calvin form that class; since it is not easy to discover where lies the essential difference between the doctrine of philosophical necessity, as held by the greater number of Socinians, and that of predestination, as maintained by Calvinists.

Both parties rest their dogmas on the same metaphysical grounds. At the same time, as moral reasoners, the palm of superiority must be awarded to Socinians, who reject most consistently the doctrine of human corruption, and the atonement of Christ, together with the correspondent doctrines of the Gospel, as altogether out of place in a scheme which denies the freedom of human actions and reduces all independent agency to that of the Deity alone; while the Calvinist subjects the human race to an inevitable necessity of sinning, denies to them individually, even the semblance of a probationary course makes them accountable, yet withholds the powers necessary to a moral agent, and then most unrighteously dooms to perdition all but the elect! In rejecting such a theory of religion, we reject not the fundamental doctrines of Christianity; we only vindicate them from objections, which, if unanswerable, are fatal; and we hold to the Gospel with a firmer conviction and a livelier faith, when we behold its accordance with the righteousness of the Divine administration and with the moral constitution of man.

On a subject, which has been so long and so laboriously investigated, and to the illustration of which the most vigorous and profound of human intellects have directed their energies, it would be vain to expect any novelty of argument. On either side, it may be presumed, the question has been exhausted, or, that the human mind has done all that its powers can accomplish, however unsatisfactory or inconclusive, in some respects, the result.

It appears to the writer of these pages, on a calm and summary review of the arguments by which the doctrines of freedom and necessity have been respectively supported, that those reasonings which are purely philosophical or metaphysical decidedly preponderate on the side of Necessity. The prescience of the Deity cannot, on any known principle, be reconciled with the contingency which attaches to the actions or determinations of man, on the hypothesis of freedom. And, moreover, if every event requires a cause, and every volition is guided by motives, what are called the spontaneous acts of the mind must be the necessary result of motives which direct and command its elections. “To say that in our choice we reject the stronger motive, and that we choose a thing merely because we choose it, is sheer nonsense and absurdity. And whoever, with a sound understanding, will fix his mind upon the state of the question, will perceive its impossibility.”

But, all correct moral reasoning ranges on the side of freedom. In opposition to the subtle or forcible reasonings of the metaphysician, every individual can plead his inward consciousness of voluntary agency. He feels, he knows, that he is free. The exercise of the moral sense, the judgment which the mind pronounces on its own good or evil movements, the conviction of having done or neglected a duty, the calm satisfaction of the virtuous mind, and the fierce or sullen remorse of the criminal, are associated with the insuppressible persuasion of liberty. Destroy this persuasion, and virtue is despoiled of its loveliness, vice of its deformity. But it cannot be destroyed. It is the voice of nature. The Creator has so formed us, that we cannot throw off from ourselves the sense of responsibility, nor regard our fellow creatures as unfit for praise or blame, for love or hatred. Men treat each other as free agents in all the transactions of human life, and God administers the government of the world, on the principle that mankind are capable of self-control, regulating their conduct by the hope of reward or fear of punishment. If the consciousness of freedom be a delusion, it follows that moral obligation, duty, reward, guilt, punishment, are delusions, and that religion, however salutary in its effects, is nothing better than a magnificent imposture.

Calvinism is an attempt to found the religion of Christ on the doctrine of necessity, and to accommodate its truths, which suppose and require free agency in man, to a dark and appalling fatalism. But in a case like the present, in which metaphysical reasonings, however profound or conclusive, so far as they go, are at variance with practical truth, with consciousness, with the actual state of things, and with the unquestionable procedures of the Divine government, as confirmed by the scriptures, wisdom would seem to dictate our adhesion to that side of the question, which is supported by moral arguments.

In taking this part, it does not follow that we are to repudiate, as totally without foundation, the philosophy and the metaphysics of the necessarian aequo pretio aestimentur. We may admit, that the force of his argument, in the present imperfect state of human knowledge, renders the question perplexed and difficult; that it accounts for the divided opinions of the erudite and the devout, and that it precludes the hope of a speedy termination of the controversy. But in assigning to moral reasoning the superior authority, we are governed by a just regard to the nature of the question at issue, which, being related to the destinies of moral agents, and the principles on which the Deity conducts his moral government, must be determined, not by metaphysical, but by moral arguments. When brought to this test, Calvinism appears utterly indefensible, as being a system at variance with the attributes of the Deity, and irreconcileable with the moral constitution of human beings, and with the obligations laid upon them by their Creator. It is falsified by facts.

That the predestinarian theology, which denies the freedom of the will, is supported by names of great consideration, is cheerfully granted. No man, for example, was ever endowed with a genius more commanding, with logical powers more acute, with a faculty more surprising of writing on recondite subjects with force, perspicuity, and nervous eloquence, than President Edwards. Nevertheless, the correctness of his views is not implicitly to be inferred from his transcendant intellect and fervent piety.

All the great errors, which have been propagated in the Christian Church, have found advocates in men of the first character for intellectual power and moral dignity, or they would have passed away with their authors into immediate oblivion.

In estimating the authority of Edwards as a theologian, it is requisite that we should know the temperament and habits of that very remarkable person. It is not, perhaps, generally considered, that great as were the energy and acuteness of his reasoning powers, he was less under the dominion of these than of his imagination and feelings. In early life this is not unfrequently the case with persons of imaginative character; but, commonly, the ardent enthusiasm of youth gives way afterwards to the ascendancy of the higher faculties. Edwards was, constitutionally, too much the creature of dreams and impulses ever to escape from their control. His gigantic mind was held in perpetual bondage. His natural temperament was fostered throughout the whole period which moulds and fixes the character, by his holding little converse with human beings beyond the sphere of a particular religious community in an obscure American town, and by an almost uninterrupted contemplation of nature in her gloomy and awful forms, amid the silence of uncultivated plains, and the solitude of interminable forests. The profound feeling, the intense excitement, which accompanied his early devotional exercises, were such as to insure a permanent attachment to every principle and every impression of that susceptible age. The visions of a warm, and often morbid, imagination continued to be cherished with religious confidence and love for ever afterwards. Every doubt, of what he once had received for truth, was anxiously suppressed in the manhood of his mind as an infernal suggestion; and the acuteness of his reasoning powers, by supplying him at all times with an argument, for what he conceived it his duty to believe, served, not to emancipate him from false apprehensions of truth, but to rivet upon him more firmly the chains of ignorance or error. When argument was doubtful, a dogged fanaticism supplied its place. This may be illustrated by a particular instance, and bearing directly on the subject of our present discussion.

It cannot be doubted, by any person qualified to appreciate his writings, that his views of the Divine sovereignty are resolvable into a system of absolute fatalism, so far as the actions and destinies of men are concerned. Reason and conscience revolt from the consequences involved in such a system; all our moral instincts condemn it. But it was instilled into his mind by Calvinistic instructors in the days of his boyhood; his imagination was perpetually haunted by it; and having identified it with the truth of divine revelation, which he held in religious veneration and awe, he finally vanquished every doubt respecting it, not by the deliberate exercise of his judgment, on a calm investigation of evidence, but by the force of his religious feelings, and of his ascendant imagination. Let him tell his own story.

“From my childhood up,” he says, “my mind had been full of objections against the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, in choosing whom He would to eternal life, and rejecting whom He pleased; leaving them eternally to perish, and to be everlastingly tormented in hell. It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me. But I remember the time very well, when I seemed to be convinced and fully satisfied as to this sovereignty of God, and his justice in thus eternally disposing of men, according to his sovereign pleasure. But never could give any account, how, or by what means I was thus convinced, not in the least imagining at the time, nor a long time after, that there was any extraordinary influence of God’s Spirit in it; but only that now I saw further, and my reason apprehended the justice and reasonableness of it.” In this extraordinary passage, the most instructive he ever penned, he confesses, undesignedly but clearly, that his faith in the Calvinistic theology did not rest on those arguments by which he has confirmed so many others in that tremendous creed, but was the result of supposed supernatural illumination. The true solution would be, “Sit pro ratione voluntas!”

Much as we find to admire and revere in this eminent man, the history of his mind forbids us to rely on him with implicit confidence as an expositor of divine truth. His religion was exalted, his genius wonderful, but the subordination of his judgment to his imagination was an immense evil, producing an almost superstitious dread of the operations of his own mighty mind, suppressing its energies, its growth, and its expansion. He presents an example, not less of the weakness than of the majesty of human nature. We cease to wonder, when he describes the happiness of the spirits of the redeemed in heaven, as being derived, in part, from their listening to the groans and lamentations of lost souls in hell. Nor can we doubt, that if he had been born and educated a member of the Church of Rome, he would have lived and died, like Fenelon or Pascal, a splendid ornament of that impure communion, a conscientious advocate of that servile faith.

Calvinism has never had another advocate equally qualified with Edwards to vindicate its awful dogmata; and if, by his own confession, his most potent arguments would have failed to produce conviction in his own mind, without God’s special influence, we see reason to suspect the validity of these arguments, until we have proof that he did indeed receive from heaven miraculous illumination. Such special influence we may with propriety question, since a claim to inspiration can be supported only by the exercise of miraculous powers. Deny, therefore, the inspiration of this profound writer, of which there is no proof, and we have his own authority against the conclusiveness of his own arguments; since he confesses that by their cogency alone they are insufficient to produce conviction in opposition to our just and natural conceptions of the righteous character of God.

Let us not, therefore, crouch with timid servility to great names. The opinions of men of erudition, and genius, and holy zeal for religion, are to be examined with modest deference, but not to be received with implicit credulity. In the most enlightened and holy men, who, since the decease of the apostles, have served God and his Christ; in the fathers of the ancient Church; in those who headed the Protestant Reformation, and lived as saints, or died as martyrs; in Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, Knox, we discover humiliating proofs of imperfection and fallibility. And, while the fundamental truths of Christianity have been preserved in the Catholic Church, those truths have been mingled or associated with errors so injurious and degrading, that no blind faith is to be rested on any human authority. Let us uphold the majesty of divine revelation, and vindicate our right and our duty to interpret the sacred page not by the traditions of fallible men, not by the metaphysics of the schools, not by the “special influences” which an enthusiastic mind may construe into divine teaching, and which may be pleaded, with equal truth or falsehood, for every form of error; but by a sober reference to those moral perfections of the Deity, and to those essential attributes of human nature, the knowledge of which lies at the foundation of all sound religious belief. These are to be learned from the Scriptures, and are the key to their right interpretation.

Edwards, incomparably the most able advocate of Calvinism, since the days of the reformer himself, is not a solitary example of the way in which a zealous pleader may, unwarily, betray and weaken his own cause.

Mr. Scott, in his “force of truth,” gives an account of his own conversion to Calvinism not very dissimilar to that of Edwards, and not in any degree more honourable to the cause he proposes to defend. The argument of that work may be summed up in few words. Mr. Scott entertained a great dislike of Calvinistic doctrines. He rejected the evidence by which they were supported, as being insufficient to establish a creed which appeared to him most objectionable. Yet, strong as were his prejudices against it, they ultimately gave way, and, therefore, Calvinism must be the truth. But, in both instances, the impression designed to be made on the mind of the reader is the same, that is, that the Spirit of God accomplished what the force of argument had failed to do. Mr. Scott, therefore, adds his testimony to that of President Edwards, confessing that Calvinism is not supported by proofs sufficient in themselves to carry conviction to the human mind, without special illumination from above; an illumination, which, assuredly, the religious opposers may as righteously claim, as the religious defenders of Calvinism. For what Christian man does not pray for the guidance of God’s good Spirit? The dispassionate reader of “The Force of Truth,” will naturally say, that the arguments for the Calvinistic creed were either sound or unsound. If the former, then Mr. Scott was either very obtuse or very obstinate to resist so long their power. If the latter, he acted with great weakness in yielding at length to insufficient evidence, on the score of an undefinable impulse. In either case, his name is divested of commanding authority in the view of reasonable men. Yet it can hardly be doubted, that this claim to special teaching from the fountain of wisdom and of truth, has done more, incalculably more, to awe the minds of men into submission, and thus to obtain currency for their opinions, than the joint confession of these popular writers, to the insufficiency of their own arguments, has availed to render suspected the force of their reasoning. The impression made on the generality of minds would be, that men so good, and so candid in confessing their own obstinacy, could not be mistaken, in believing themselves, at a subsequent period, to be inspired and infallible.

The advocates of Calvinism differ remarkably from each other in the tone and spirit of their writings, as their habits of thought and feeling are modified by circumstances. The American divines of the school of Edwards have carried out his principles with unflinching consistency, not hesitating to impute to the Deity, in unqualified terms, the eternal decrees which fix the weal or woe of the human race for ever. The cold and heartless manner in which these men treat the subject, and the stoical apathy with which they contemplate the result of their hard metaphysics, are extremely remote from our usual conceptions of piety and humanity. Well might that superlative woman, Mrs. Susanna Wesley, say, “The doctrine of predestination, as maintained by rigid Calvinists, is very shocking, and ought utterly to be abhorred.” The dark spirit of inflexible wrath which the American Calvinists have imputed to the Deity, together with their coarse caricatures of the Gospel, may account for, but cannot justify, the terms in which Dr. Chancing has thought fit to assail the orthodox faith, confounding on all occasions scriptural Christianity, as held by the Catholic Church, with the dogmas of an extravagant creed. To understand his eloquent and indignant declamations, we must read the transatlantic expounders of the Calvinistic theology.

In general, the English writers of any name, are more guarded and less unfeeling. They do not at once and directly charge God with being the author of sin. The late Dr. Williams of Rotherham composed a voluminous work on the subject, entitled “equity and sovereignty,” in which he gives, what he considers, a new theory of the origin of moral evil. To redeem the divine character from the imputation of harshness in the decree of reprobation, he supposes mankind under a necessary tendency to moral defection, as dependent and created beings; and that it was in mere equity, that the wicked were left, not decreed, to perdition. The hypothesis of Dr. Williams is already exploded. It was examined and refuted by the Rev. William Parry, of Wymondly, in a piece entitled “Strictures on the Origin of Moral Evil.” For reasoning, acute, profound, and perspicuous, both metaphysical and moral, this work has seldom been surpassed. And the devout and courteous spirit in which it is written, presents an example, beautiful and instructive, of dispassionate controversy.

“Upon a review of the argument,” Mr. Parry writes, “there appear to be strong reasons for considering the whole of Dr. Williams’ hypothesis, to account for the origin of evil, as highly objectionable, and worthy of rejection; because it is founded on a false principle, which identifies physical and moral tendency; is incompatible with the nature and phenomena of mind; involves the existence of an antecedent fate or absolute necessity, which controlled the divine operations; is inconsistent with the natural and moral perfections of God, and the scriptural account of the state in which man was created; is expressed in obscure and inapplicable language; and is so far from agreeing with equity, that, when taken together, it represents the Divine Being as having at first, created intelligent and accountable creatures with such powers as would enable them to sin, but with none which would enable them to avoid it.”

The theory of Dr. Williams found favour with many Calvinists, because it assumed somewhat of a philosophical aspect, and was put forth as a clear “demonstration.” But some of its ablest defenders have since abandoned it to that oblivion, from which no efforts can save an elaborate speculation, ungrounded in reason or revelation, and repugnant to common sense.

In England the public mind has been so powerfully and happily influenced by the anti-calvinistic genius of the liturgy, offices, and discipline of the Anglican Church, that the grossness and extravagancy of the American divines have been tolerated chiefly by those who have not fallen under her instructions, or who have not had the advantage of a liberal education and extensive reading. In general, whether within or without the pale of the Church, its more intelligent advocates have, until lately, exhibited it in a modified form, and thrown over it a veil of mystery which has hidden its most appalling deformities from the sight, while by the less skilful or sagacious only, it has been adapted more to the fears or affections of women, than to the understandings of men. Unhappily, the grosser representations of this doctrine are now coming into repute in quarters where, formerly, they would not have been endured, and thus afford another warning example of the “facilis descensus Averni.”

But under all possible modifications, it is essentially erroneous; and this small treatise has originated in no love of discord, or taste for polemic excitement, but in a solemn sense of duty, the duty of aiding, in some humble measure, the more learned and important labours of others who are “set for the defence of the truth.” The writer aims only at a common sense view of the subject, showing that Calvinism is a dangerous speculation, useless for every holy and salutary purpose, inapplicable to the hopes and the duties of a religious life, at variance with our knowledge of God, our obligations as Christians, and all our finer sentiments and more generous sympathies as men. So far as its influence is exerted, it contracts the understanding and hardens the heart.

Bishop Tomline’s “Refutation of Calvinism,” is too well known and justly appreciated to need recommendation from the writer of these papers. Faber “on the Primitive Doctrine of Election,” is an important work, composed with logical precision, and founded on a laborious analysis of the Scriptures. The intelligent reader will be instructed and deeply interested by “An Inquiry into the Doctrines of Necessity and Predestination,” by Dr. Copleston, the Bishop of Llandaff.

From the latter work is extracted the following summary of the peculiar and distinctive doctrines of the Calvinistic creed, in which it is exhibited, not in a moderated and qualified form, as it sometimes appears in the writings of individuals, but in its true and undisguised character, as maintained by a grave assembly of predestinarian divines.