No authoritative or influential teacher appeared to support Gottschalk's views for seven hundred years. The most conspicuous of those who did so was Thomas Bradwardine (A. I). 1290-1349), warden ofMerton Col- lege, and afterwards archbishop of Canterbury. His work on the subject is entitled Di Causa Dei contra Peldgium </ de VirtuU caiisarum ad suos .Wertonenses, and in this he i^ave free will so Iowa place that he may be almost called a necessitarian. Thomas Aquinas, who flourished during the 13th century, wrote largely upon the nature of grace and predestination. His opinions upon these subjects were nearly the same with those of
Augustine: and so much, indeed, was he c teived to
resemble in genius and understanding thai distinguished prelate, thai it was asserted the soul of Augustine bad been sent into t lie body of Aquinas. IK' taught that God from all eternity, and without any regard to their works, predestinated a certain number to life and hap- piness; bui be found .^reat, delight in endeavoring to
rec ile this position with the freedom of the human
will. His celebrated antagonist, John Duns Scotus, an inhabitant of Britain, surnamed, from the acutenes.s and bent of his mind, the Subtile Doctor, also directed his attention in the following century to the same thorny speculations, but he took a different view of them from Aquinas; and we find in the works of these two brill- iant lights of the schoolmen all that the most learned in the dark ages though! upon this question.
In the midst of the ferment of the Reformation, the subject of predestination was revived by a con- troversy between Erasmus and Luther, the former writing an able Diatribt i/' Libero A rbitrio in 1524, and Luther following it up with bis halting treatise De Servo Arbitrio,in which be went so near to the Dredes- tinarians as to deny thai any free will can exist in man before he has received the gift of faith. Bui al this Btage siepped forth John Calvin (q. v.) as the champion
of pn destinarianism. He found the Reformed churches in a perfectly chaotic state as respects doctrines. They possessed no coherent creed or Bystem, They were held together by agreement in mere negations. They needed nothing so much as a positive system. Calvin, a strip- ling of twenty-five, gave them one. It answered all the essential conditions. Ii was anti-popish, anti-Lutheran, anti-Socinian. In the pressing exigency ii was seized upon, and Calvin became the dictator of all the Re- formed churches. Scotland sent her young men to him to be educated, so aUo did Holland, the Puritans of England, and the Protestants of trance. Among the Romanists, the Molinists (q. v.), and Jansenists (q. v.),
in their controversy on the subject of free will, carried on with great acrimony, the opinions of Gottsehalk were discussed anew, but without lessening the major- ity of the Arminianists (see Sismondi, Hist. Prcedest. in Zachariusta Thesaur. TheoU ii. 199).
In the < burch of England the later Low-Church party have tempered down the opinions of their Puritan pred- ecessor.-, and are not often disposed to go beyond the doctrine of "predestination to life" as stated in the seventeenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, which carefully excludes the double predestination of Gottsehalk and the predestinarians. This article of the Church of England is often adduced by Calvinists as favorable to their peculiar views of absolute predestina- tion; 1 ait such a representation ofil is rendered plausi- ble only by adding to its various clauses qualifying expressions to suit that purpose. In our articles < in R( ii 01 Engl lira), CONl I "ins-;, and Calvinism, have been exhibited the just and liberal views of Cranmer and the principal English reformers on this subject, the sources from which they drew the Arti- cles of Religion and the public formularies of devotion, and some of the futile attempts of the high predestina- rians in the Church to inoculate the public creed with their dogmas. Cartwright and his followers, in their second "Admonition to Parliament" in 1572, complained that the Articles speak dangerously of "falling from grace;" and in 1587 they preferred a similar complaint. The labors of the Westminster Assembly at a subse- quent period, and their abortive result, in relation to this subject, are well known. Long before Arminius
had turned his thoughts to the considerate f general
redemption, a great number of the English clergy hail publicly taught and defended the same doctrine. It was about 1571 that Dr. I'eter Baroe, "a zealous anti- Calvinian," was made Margaret professor of divinity in the University of Cambridge, and be went on teach- ing in his lectures, preaching in his sermons, determin- ing in the schools, and printing in several books, divers points contrary to Calvinism. And this he did for sev- eral years, without any manner of disturbance or inter- ruption. The beads of the university, in a letter to lord Burleigh, dated March 8, 1595, say he had done it for fourteen or fifteen years preceding, and they might have said twenty : for he printed some of his lectures in 1574, and the prosecution he was at last under, which will be considered hereafter, was not till 1595. In 1584 Mr. Harsnet, afterwards archbishop of York, preached against absolute reprobation at St, Paul's Cross, the greatest audience then in the kingdom; as did the ju- dicious Mr. Hooker at the Temple iii the year follow ing. In the year 1594 Mr. Barret preached at St. Mary's in Cambridge against Calvinism, with very smart reflec- tions upon Calvin himself. Pe/.a, Zauchi. and several others of the most noted writers in that scheme. In the same year Dr. Baroe preached at the same place to the same purpose. By this time Calvinism bad gained considerable ground, being much promoted by the learned Whitaker and Mr. Perkins: and several of the here Is of the university being in that scheme, they com- plained of the two ser s above mentioned to lord Bur- leigh their chancellor. Their d< termination was t,, bring Panel to a retraction. He modi tied his statements, but it may reasonably be doubted w hi tbei lie ever submitted according to the form they drew up. When the matter was laid before archbishop Whitgift, be was offended at their proceedings, and wrote to lord Burleigh that some of the points which the beads had enjoined Barrel to retract were such as the most learned Protestants then living varied in judgment upon, and that the most an- cient and best divines in the land were in the chiefest