party has always existed even among Calvinists which has had so large an interest in the autonomy of the human will, that it has been unwilling to conceive of it as “passive” with respect to that operation of God which we call regeneration, and has earnestly wished to look upon the reception of salvation as in a true sense dependent on the will’s own unmoved action. They have, therefore, invented a variety of Calvinism which supposes that it is God indeed who selects those who shall savingly be brought to Christ, and that it is the Holy Spirit who, by his grace, brings them in- fallibly to Christ, (thus preserving the principle of particularism in the application of salvation), but which imagines that the Holy Spirit thus effectually brings them to Christ, not by an almighty, creative action on their souls, by which they are made new creatures, functioning subsequently as such, but purely by suasive operations, adapted in his infallible wisdom to the precise state of mind and heart of those whom he has selected for salvation, and so securing from their own free action, a voluntary coming to Christ and embracing of him for salvation. There is no universalism here; the particularism is express. But an expedient has been found to enable it to be said that men come voluntarily to Christ, and are joined to him by a free act of their own unrenewed wills, while only those come whom God has selected so to persuade to come (he who knows the heart through and through) that they certainly will come in the exercise of their own free will. This type of [116]
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thought has received the appropriate name of “Соп- gruism," because the principle of its contention is that grace wins those to whom it is “congruously”’ offered, that is to say, that the reason why some men are saved, and some are not lies in the simple fact that God the Holy Spirit operates in his gracious suasion on some in a fashion that is carefully and in- fallibly adapted by him to secure their adhesion to the gospel, and does not operate on others with the same careful adaptation.
A warning must, however, be added to the effect that the designation “Congruists’” is so ambiguous that there exists another class bearing this name, who are as definitely anti-Calvinistic as those we have in mind are, by intention, Calvinistic in their concep- tion. The teaching of these is that God the Holy Spirit accords his suasive influences to all alike, mak- ing no distinction; but that this universalistically con- ceived grace of the Holy Spirit takes effect only ac- cording as it proves to be actually congruous or incongruous to the state of mind and heart of those to whom it equally is given. Here it is not the sov- ereign choice of God, but a native difference in men, which determines salvation, and we are on expressly autosoteric ground. The danger of confusing the Calvinistic *Congruists" with this larger, and defi- nitely anti-Calvinistic party, has led to the habit of speaking of the Calvinistic Congruists rather by the name of their most distinguished representative, (who, indeed, introduced this mode of thinking into the
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Calvinistic churches), Claude Pajon, Professor in the Theological School at Saumur in France in the middle of the seventeenth century. It was his predecessor and teacher in the same school, Moses Amyraut who first formulated in the Reformed Churches the Post- redemptionist scheme, of which Pajonism is a de- based form. Thus the school of Saumur has the bad eminence of having originated, and furnished from the names of its professors the current designations of, the two most reduced forms of Calvinism, Amyrald- ianism or Hypothetical Universalism as it is other- wise called, and Pajonism, or Congruism as it is designated according to its nature.
We have thus had brought before us four forms of Calvinism; and these, as we believe, exhaust the list of possible general types: Supralapsarianism, Sub- (or Infra-) lapsarianism, Post-redemptionism (other- wise called Amyraldianism, or Hypothetical Univer- salism), and Pajonism (otherwise called Congruism). These are all forms of Calvinism, because they all give validity to the principle of particularism as rul- ing the divine dealings with man in the matter of salvation; and, as we have seen, the mark of Calvin- ism is particularism. If now, particularism were not only the mark of Calvinism but also the substance of Calvinism, all four of these types of Calvinism, pre- serving as they all do the principle of particularism, might claim to be not only alike Calvinistic, but equally Calvinistic, and might even demand to be arranged in the order of excellence according to the
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