ther they will dare to speak out what they think,
and what under the constraint of their situation they publish in
their miserable writings. I will take care that they know these
maxims of their teachers:--"God is the author and cause of evil,
willing it, suggesting it, effecting it, commanding it, working
it out, and guiding the guilty counsels of the wicked to this
end. As the call of Paul, so the adultery of David, and the
wickedness of the traitor Judas, was God's own work" (Calvin,
_Institut_. i. 18; ii. 4; iii. 23, 24). This monstrous doctrine,
of which Philip Melanchthon was for once ashamed, Luther however,
of whom Philip had learned it, extols as an oracle from heaven
with wonderful praises, and on that score puts his foster-child
all but on an equality, with the Apostle Paul (Luther, _De servo
arbitrio_). I will also enquire what was in Luther's mind, whom
the English Calvinists pronounce to be "a man given of God for
the enlightenment of the world," when he wished to take this
versicle out of the Church's prayers, "Holy Trinity, one God,
have mercy on us."

I will proceed to the person of Christ. I will ask what these
words, "Christ the Son of God, God of God," mean to Calvin, who
says, "God of Himself" (_Instit._ i. 13); or to Beza, who says,
"He is not begotten of the essence of the Father" (Beza in Josue,
nn. 23, 24). Again. Let there be set up two hypostate unions in
Christ, one of His soul with His flesh, the other of His Divinity
with His Humanity (Beza, _Contra Schmidel_). The passage in John
x. 30, _I and the Father are one_, does not show Christ to be
God, consubstantial with God the Father (Calvin on John x.), the
fact is, says Luther, "my soul hates this word, _homousion._" Go
on. Christ was not perfect in grace from His infancy, but grew in
gifts of the soul like other men, and by experience daily became
wiser, so that as a little child He laboured under ignorance
(Melanchthon on the gospel for first Sunday after Epiphany).
Which is as much as to say that He was defiled with the stain and
vice of original sin. But observe still more direful utterances.
When Christ, praying in the Garden, was streaming with a sweat of
water and blood, He shuddered under a sense of eternal damnation,
He uttered an irrational cry, an unspiritual cry, a sudden cry
prompted by the force of His distress, which He quickly checked
as not sufficiently premeditated (Marlorati in Matth. xxvi.;
Calvin _in Harm. Evangel._).