debate every competent theologian will confess. He
_ declares the gift of Christ is the result of his infinite love to the persons for whom he is given;* that Christ really merits eternal life and all spiritual graces for those for whom he died ;+ that Christ is to us both the clear mirror and the pledge and security of the eternal and secret election of God; that God, eternally anterior to their creation and irrespective of their character, loved the elect, and hated the non-elect, predestinating the first to holiness and happiness, and the other to sin and - misery for ever.§ It is true that at times Calvin uses general terms with respect to the design of Christ’s
death, in a more unguarded manner than would now be
done by one of his consistent disciples. See Rom. v. 18.
* Institutes, b. ii., ch. xvi. { Consensus Genevensis, Niemeyer, p. 270. uri Tbe.’ boi. eh, xvii. % Institutes, b. iii., ch. xxiii.
CHAPTER’ Vv.
350 THE DESIGN OF THE ATONEMENT.
CHAPIER Vv.
But at other times he explicitly denies that he believes in an indiscriminate Atonement in the sense of Barnes and the great majority of the modern advocates of gene- ral redemption. And let it be remembered that one deliberate statement linuting the design of Christ’s death is sufficient to define the sense of any finite number of vague and indefinite expressions, such as that referred to above in his comment on Rom. v. 18. Thus in his comment on 1 John 1. 2, he declares his adhesion to the scholastic formula that ‘“‘Christ died sufficiently for all, but efficiently only for the elect;” which is very different from the opinion of those who hold that Christ died for the purpose of removing legal obstacles out of the way of all men indifferently. And at the same time he denies utterly that the apostle, in saying that Christ is the ‘“‘propitiation for the sins of the whole world” (totvus mundi) could have meant to include the reprobate : “Such a monstrous thing deserves no refutation. The design of John was no other than to make this benefit common to the whole Church. Then under the word all or whole, he does not include the reprobate, but designates those who should believe, as well as those who were then scattered through various parts of the world.” (Commentaries 1 John ii. 2.*)
3. But whatever the personal opinions of Calvin may have been, the second question, as to what is Calvinism ? is entirely independent of them. ‘The title Calvinism has—-whether with propriety or not, nevertheless as a fixed fact—hbeen given to a definite system, which pos- sesses an identity of character and of history independent
* In his treatise De Vera Participatione Christi in Coena, in reply to Heshusius, a violent Lutheran defender of the corporeal presence of Christ in the Eucharist, this passage occurs: “I would desire to know how the impious, for whom he was not crucified, could eat the flesh of Christ, and
how they can drink his blood for the expiation of whose sins it was not shed,” Cunningham’s Theology of the Reformation, p. 896. —
STANDARD OF CALVINISM. 361
of any single man that ever lived. It is doubtless con- cmarrex: venient, but it is eminently unscholarly, to attempt to = settle the theology of the Reformed Churches by refer- | ence to the writings of a single man. There are two ways of determining what several elements legitimately belong to this system: (1.) By an analysis and com- parison of all the elements of the system, trying each proposed element by the fundamental principles, the general spirit, logical relations and analogy of the whole.
This has been, I suppose, sufficiently done in the pre- ceding analysis and statement of the question. (2.) The second method is an historical appeal to the common consent of that great family of Churches who agree in protessing the fundamental principles of that system, as
this consent is expressed by their great representative Confessions and classical theological writings, prepared after the topics in question have been consciously and specifically discussed and defined.
All the world knows that the seventeenth century, including the latter part of the sixteenth, was the era when all the elements of all the great systems of theo- logy were subjected, by means of controversies, to a thorough analysis and adjustment, when each system was elaborated with a distinctness, and defined with an accuracy, and discussed with a power, and received each by its entire circle of adherents with a unanimity, which surpassed all the subsequent as much as all the precedent achievements of the Church. This was the age which, taken in its wide limits, produced the Roman Catholic, Robert Bellarmine; the Unitarian, Crellius, and the other authors of the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum ; the Lutheran, Gerhard, Calovius, Quenstedt ; the Armi- nian, Arminius, Episcopius, Limborch, and Grotius ; the Calvinistic Universalists, Cameron, Placzeus, Amyraldus,
Daillé; the Reformed Synods of Dort, Alez, and Cha-
CHAPTER Vs