how their general spirit and meaning,
rather than to draw conclusions from any particular class of subjects.
Any system of deductions from texts of Scripture which are offset by
texts of equal authority but apparently different meaning, is
necessarily one-sided and imperfect, and therefore narrow. That is
exactly the difficulty under which Calvin labored. He seems, to a large
class of Christians of great ability and conscientiousness, to be narrow
and one-sided, and is therefore no authority to them; not, be it
understood, in reference to the great fundamental doctrines of
Christianity, but in his views of Predestination and the subjects
interlinked with it. And it was the great error of attaching so much
importance to mere metaphysical divinity that led to such a revulsion
from his peculiar system in after times. It was the great wisdom of the
English reformers, like Cranmer, to leave all those metaphysical
questions open, as matters of comparatively little consequence, and fall
back on unquestioned doctrines of primitive faith, that have given so
great vitality to the English Church, and made it so broad and catholic.
The Puritans as a body, more intellectual than the mass of the
Episcopalians, were led away by the imposing and entangling dialectics
of the scholastic Calvin, and came unfortunately to attach as much
importance to such subjects as free-will and predestination--questions
most complicated--as they did to "the weightier matters of the law;" and
when pushed by the logic of opponents to the _decretum horribile_, have
been compelled to fall back on the Catholic doctrine of mysteries, as
something which could never be explained or comprehended, but which it
is a Christian duty to accept as a mystery. The Scriptures certainly
speak of mysteries, like regeneration; but it is one thing to marvel how
a man can be born again by the Spirit of God,--a fact we see every
day,--and quite another thing to make a mystery to be accepted as a
matter of faith of that which the Bible has nowhere distinctly
affirmed, and which is against all ideas of natural justice, and arrived
at by a subtle process of dialectical reasoning.

But it was natural for so great an intellectual giant as Calvin to make
his startling deductions from the great truths he meditated upon with so
much seriousness and earnestness. Only a very lofty nature would have
revelled as he did, and as Augustine did before him and Pascal after
him, in those great