same ground as Augustine.
It was the logical result of the doctrines of Grace which he defended
which led to the overthrow, in half of Europe, of that extensive system
of penance and self-expiation which marked the Roman Catholic Church,
and on which so many glaring abuses were based. As Athanasius rendered a
great service to the Church by establishing the doctrine of the Trinity,
and Augustine a still greater service by the overthrow of Pelagianism,
so Luther undermined the papal pile of superstition by showing
eloquently,--what indeed had been shown before,--the true ground of
justification. When we speak of Calvin, the great subject of
Predestination arises before our minds, although on this subject he made
no pretention to originality. Nor did he differ materially from
Augustine, or Gottschalk, or Thomas Aquinas before him, or Pascal and
Edwards after him. But no man ever presented this complicated and
mysterious subject so ably as he.

It is not for me to discuss this great topic. I simply wish to present
the subject historically,--to give Calvin's own views, and the effect of
his deductions on the theology of his age; and in giving Calvin's views
I must shelter myself under the wings of his best biographer, Doctor
Henry of Berlin, and quote the substance of his exposition of the
peculiar doctrines of the Swiss, or rather French, theologian.

According to Henry, Calvin maintained that God, in his sovereign will
and for his own glory, elected one part of the human race to everlasting
life, and abandoned the other part to everlasting death; that man, by
the original transgression, lost the power of free-will, except to do
evil; that it is only by Divine Grace that freedom to do good is
recovered; but that this grace is bestowed only on the elect, and elect
not in consequence of the foreknowledge of God, but by his absolute
decree before the world was made.

This is the substance of those peculiar doctrines which are called
Calvinism, and by many regarded as fundamental principles of theology,
to be received with the same unhesitating faith as the declarations of
Scripture from which those doctrines are deduced. Augustine and Aquinas
accepted substantially the same doctrines, but they were not made so
prominent in their systems, nor were they so elaborately worked out.

The opponents of Calvin, including some of the brightest lights which
have shone in the English church,--such men as Jeremy Taylor, Archbishop
Wha