÷00 Calvin and Calvinism

By Professor Benjamin B. Warfield, D.D., LL.D.

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÷00c Table of Contents

I. John Calvin: The Man and His Work

II. Calvin's Doctrine of the Knowledge of God

III. Calvin's Doctrine of God

IV. Calvin's Doctrine of the Trinity

V. Calvin's Doctrine of the Creation

VI. Calvinism

VII. On the Literary History of Calvin's "Institutes of the Christian Religion"

APPENDIX

Address One - John Calvin the Theologian

Address Two - The Theology of Calvin

Address Three - Present-Day Attitude to Calvinism

÷ 01 John Calvin: The Man and His Work

by Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

[From The Methodist Review, Quarterly edited by Gross Alexander, October, 1909 (lviii. pp. 642-M). Reprinted in pamphlet form, 1909, Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South.]

JOHN CALVIN was born on the tenth of July, 1509, at Noyon, in Picardy. His boyhood was spent under the shadow of the "long, straight-backed" cathedral which dominates his native town. His mother, a woman of notable devoutness, omitted no effort to imbue her son with her own spirit. His father, a successful advocate and shrewd man of affairs, holding both ecclesiastical and civil offices, stood in close relations with the cathedral chapter, and seems to have been impressed with the advantages of a clerical life. At all events, he early devoted his promising son to it. According to the bad custom of the times, a benefice in the cathedral was assigned to the young Calvin at an early age, and to it was afterwards added a neighboring curacy; thus funds were provided for his support. His education was conducted in companionship with the youthful scions of the local noble house of Montmor, and began, therefore, with the training proper to a gentleman. As changing circumstances dictated changes of plan, he was educated, first as a churchman, then as a lawyer, and through all and most abundantly of all as a man of letters. He was an eager student, rapidly and solidly mastering the subjects to which he turned his attention, and earning such admiration from his companions as to be esteemed by them rather a teacher than a fellow pupil. His youth was as blameless as it was strenuous. It is doubtless legendary, that the censoriousness of his bearing earned for him from his associates the nickname of "The Accusative Case." But serious-minded he undoubtedly was, dominated by a scrupulous piety and schooled in a strict morality which brooked with difficulty immorality in his associates; an open-minded, affectionate young man, of irreproachable life and frank manners; somewhat sensitive, perhaps, but easy to be entreated, and attracting not merely the confidence but the lasting affection of all with whom he came into contact.

At the age of twenty-two this high-minded young man is found established at Paris as a humanist scholar, with his ambition set upon literary fame. His debut was made by the publication of an excellent commentary on Seneca's treatise "On Clemency" (April, 1532), in which a remarkable command of the whole mass of classical literature, a fine intelligence, and a serious interest in the higher moralities are conspicuous. A great career as a humanist seemed opening before him, when suddenly he was "converted," and his whole life revolutionized. He had always been not only of an elevated ethical temper, but of a deeply religious spirit; but now the religious motive took complete possession of him and directed all his activities. "Renouncing all other studies," says Beza, "he devoted himself to God." He did not, indeed, cease to be a "man of letters," any more than he ceased to be a man. But all his talents and acquisitions were henceforth dedicated purely to the service of God and His gospel. Instead of annotating classical texts, we find him now writing a Protestant manifesto for the use of his friend Nicholas Cop (November 1, 1533), a detailed study of the state of the soul after death (1534), and, in his enforced retirement at Angouleme (1534), making a beginning at least with a primary treatise on Christian doctrine, designed for the instruction of the people as they came out into the light of the gospel -which, however, when driven from France, he was destined to publish from his asylum at Basle (spring of 1536), in circumstances which transformed it into "at once an apology, a manifesto, and a confession of faith." It is interesting to observe the change which in the meantime had come over his attitude toward his writings. When he sent forth his commentary on Seneca's treatise - his first and last humanistic work - he was quivering with anxiety for the success of his book; he wanted to know how it was selling, whether it was being talked about, what people thought of it. He was proud of his performance; he was zealous to reap the fruits of his labor; he was eager for his legitimate reward. Only four years have passed, and he issues his first Protestant publication -it is the immortal "Institutes of the Christian Religion" in its "first state" - free from all such tremors. He is living at Basle under an assumed name, and is fully content that no one of his acquaintance shall know him for the author of the book which was creating such a stir in the world. He hears the acclamations with which it was greeted with a certain personal detachment. He has sent it forth not for his own glory, but for the glory of God; he is not seeking his own advantage or renown by it, but the strengthening and the succoring of the saints. His sole joy is that it is doing its work. He has not ceased to be a "man of letters," we repeat; but he has consecrated all his gifts and powers as a "man of letters" without reserve to the service of God and His gospel.

What we see in Calvin, thus, fundamentally is the "man of letters" as saint. He never contemplated for himself, he never desired, in all his life he never fully acquiesced in, any other vocation. He was by nature, by gifts, by training-by inborn predilection and by acquired capacities alike - a "man of letters"; and he earnestly, perhaps we may even say passionately, wished to dedicate himself as such to God. This was the life which he marked out for himself, from which he was diverted only under compulsion, and which he never in principle abandoned. It was only by "the dreadful imprecation" of Farel that he was constrained to lay aside his cherished plans and enter upon the direct work of the reformation of Geneva (autumn of 1536). And when, after two years of strenuous labor at this uncongenial employment, he was driven from that turbulent city, it came to him only as a release. Once more he settled down at Basle and applied himself to his beloved studies. It required all of Bucer's strategy as well as entreaties to entice him away from his books to an active ministry at Strasburg; and he yielded at last only when it was made clear to him that there would be leisure there for literary labors. That leisure he certainly not so much found as made for himself. His little conventicle of French refugees quickly became under his hand a model church. His lectures at the school attracted ever wider and wider attention. As time passed, he was called much away to conferences and colloquies, where as "the Theologian," as Melanchthon admiringly called him, he did important service. But it was at Strasburg that his literary activity as a Protestant man of letters really began. There he transformed his "little book" of religion - the "Institutes" of 1536, which was not much more than an extended catechetical manual - into an ample treatise on theology (August, 1539). There, too, he inaugurated the series of his epoch-making expositions of Scripture with his noble commentary on Romans (March, 1540). Thence, too, he sent out his beautiful letter to Sadoleto, the most winningly written of all his controversial treatises (September, 1539). There, too, was written that exquisite little popular tract on the Lord's Supper, which was the instruction and consolation of so many hundreds of his perplexed fellow-countrymen (published in 1541). It caused Calvin great perturbation when these fruitful labors were broken in upon by a renewed call to Geneva. It was with the profoundest reluctance that he listened to this call, and he obeyed it only under the stress of the sternest sense of duty. Returning to Geneva was to him going "straight to the cross": he went, as he said, "as a sacrifice slain unto God" - "bound and fettered to obedience to God." He was not the man to take up a cross and not bear it; and this cross, too, he bore faithfully to the end. But neither was he the man to forget the labor of love to which he had given his heart. Hence the unremitting toil of his pen, with which he wore out the days and nights at Geneva; hence the immensity of his literary output, produced in circumstances as unfavorable as any in which a rich literary output was ever produced. Even "on this rack" Calvin remained fundamentally the "man of letters."

It requires fifty-nine quarto volumes to contain the "Works of John Calvin" as collected in the great critical edition of Baum, Cunitz, and Reuss. Astonishing for their mere mass, these " works "are still more astonishing for their quality. They are written in the best Latin of their day, elevated, crisp, energetic, eloquent with the eloquence of an earnest and sober spirit - almost too good Latin, as Joseph Scaliger said, for a theologian; or in a French which was a factor of importance in the creation of a worthy French prose for the discussion of serious themes. The variety of their literary form runs through the whole gamut of earnest discourse, from lofty discussion and pithy comment laden with meaning, to burning exhortation, vehement invective, and biting satire. The whole range of subjects proper to a teacher of fundamental truth, who was also both a churchman and a statesman, a minute observer of the life of the people, and a student of the forces by which peoples are moved, is treated, and never without that touch of illumination which we call genius.

At the head of the list of his writing stands, of course, his great dogmatic treatise - the "Institutes of the Christian Religion." In a very literal sense this book may indeed be called his life-work. It was the first book he published after he had "devoted himself to God," and thus introduces the series of his works consecrated to the propagation of religion. But from its first appearance in the spring of 1536 to the issue of its definitive edition in 1559 - throughout nearly a quarter of a century - Calvin was continually busy with it, revising, expanding, readjusting it, until from a simple little handbook, innocent of constructive principle, it had grown into a bulky but compact and thoroughly organized textbook in theology. The importance to the Protestant cause of the publication of this book can hardly be overstated. It is inadequate praise to describe it, as the Roman Catholic historian, Kampschulte, describes it, as "without doubt the most outstanding and the most influential production in the sphere of dogmatics which the Reformation literature of the sixteenth century presents." This goes without saying. What demands recognition is that the publication of the "Institutes" was not merely a literary incident but an historical event, big with issues which have not lost their importance to the present day. By it was given to perplexed, hard-bestead Protestantism an adequate positive programme for its Reformation. As even a not very friendly critic is compelled to bear witness, in this book Calvin at last raised banner against banner, and sounded out a ringing sursum corda which was heard and responded to wherever men were seeking the new way. "The immense service which the Institutes rendered to the 'Evangelicals,'" expounds this critic - it is M. Buisson in his biography of Sebastien Castellion, and he is thinking particularly of the "Evangelicals" of France though, mutatis mutandis, what he says has its application elsewhere too - "was to give a body to their ideas, an expression to their faith." Protesting against superstitious and materialistic interpretations of doctrine and worship, "their vague aspirations would, undoubtedly, have issued in nothing in the Church or out of it." What they needed, and what the "Institutes" did for them, was the disengagement of a principle "from this vortex of ideas," and the development of its consequences. "Such a book," continues M. Buisson, "is equally removed from a pamphlet of Ulrich von Hutten, from the satire of Erasmus, from the popular preaching, mystical and violent, of Luther: it is a work of a theologian in the most learned sense of the term, a religious work undoubtedly, penetrated with an ethical inspiration, but before all, a work of organization and concentration, a code of doctrine for the minister, an arsenal of arguments for simple believers: it is the Summa of Reformed Christianity." "The author's concernment is far more to bring out the logical force and the moral power of his own doctrine than to descant on the weak points of the opposing doctrine. What holds his attention is not the past but the future - it is the reconstruction of the Church." What wonder, then, that it has retained its influence through all succeeding time? As the first adequate statement of the positive programme of the Reformation movement, the "Institutes" lies at the foundation of the whole development of Protestant theology, and has left an impress on evangelical thought which is ineffaceable. After three centuries and a half, it retains its unquestioned preeminence as the greatest and most influential of all dogmatic treatises. "There," said Albrecht Ritschl, pointing to it, "There is the masterpiece of Protestant theology."

Second only to the service he rendered by his "Institutes" was the service Calvin rendered by his expositions of Scripture. These fill more than thirty volumes of his collected works, thus constituting the larger part of his total literary product. They cover the whole of the New Testament except II and III John and the Apocalypse, and the whole of the Old Testament except the Solomonic and some of the Historical books. It was doubtless in part to his humanistic training that he owed the acute philological sense and the unerring feeling for language which characterize all his expositions. A recent writer who has made a special study of Calvin's Humanism, at least, remarks: "In his sober grammatico-historical method, in the stress he laid on the natural sense of the text, by the side of his deep religious understanding of it - in his renunciation of the current allegorizing, in his felicitous, skillful dealing with difficult passages, the humanistically trained master is manifest, pouring the new wine into new bottles." Calvin was, however, a born exegete, and adds to his technical equipment of philological knowledge and trained skill in the interpretation of texts a clear and penetrating intelligence, remarkable intellectual sympathy, incorruptible honesty, unusual historical perception, and an incomparable insight into the progress of thought, while the whole is illuminated by his profound religious comprehension. His expositions of Scripture were accordingly a wholly new phenomenon, and introduced a new exegesis - the modern exegesis. He stands out in the history of biblical study as, what Diestel, for example, proclaims him, "the creator of genuine exegesis." The authority which his comments immediately acquired was immense - they "opened the Scriptures" as the Scriptures never had been opened before. Richard Hooker - "the judicious Hooker" - remarks that in the controversies of his own time, "the sense of Scripture which Calvin alloweth" was of more weight than if "ten thousand Augustines, Jeromes, Chrysostoms, Cyprians were brought forward." Nor have they lost their value even to-day. Alone of the commentaries of their age the most scientific of modern expositors still find their profit in consulting them. As Professor A. J. Baumgartner, who has set himself to investigate the quality of Calvin's Hebrew learning (which he finds quite adequate), puts it, after remarking on Calvin's "astounding, multiplied, almost superhuman activity" in his work of biblical interpretation: "And - a most remarkable thing - this work has never grown old; these commentaries whose durable merit and high value men of the most diverse tendencies have signalized, - these commentaries remain to us even to-day, an astonishingly rich, almost inexhaustible mine of profound thoughts, of solid and often ingenious interpretation, of wholesome exposition, and at the same time of profound erudition."

The Reformation was the greatest revolution of thought which the human spirit has wrought since the introduction of Christianity; and controversy is the very essence of revolutions. Of course Calvin's whole life, which was passed in the thick of things, was a continuous controversy; and directly controversial treatises necessarily form a considerable part of his literary output. We have already been taught, indeed, that his fundamental aim was constructive, not destructive: he wished to rebuild the Church on its true foundations, not to destroy its edifice. But, like certain earlier rebuilders of the Holy City, he needed to work with the trowel in one hand and the sword in the other. Probably no more effective controversialist ever wrote. "The number of Calvin's polemical treatises," remarks an unfriendly critic, "is large; and they are all masterpieces in their kind." At the head of them, in time as well as in attractiveness, stands his famous "Letter to Cardinal Sadoleto," written in his exile at Strasburg for the protection from an insidious foe of the Church which had cast him out. Courteous, even gentle and deferential in tone, and yet cogent, conclusive, in effect, it perfectly exemplifies the precept of suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. Others are, no doubt, set in a different key. The critic we have just quoted (E. F. Bahler) tells of the one he thinks "the harshest and bitterest of all," the "Defense Against the Calumnies of Peter Caroli." "The letter to Sadoleto," he remarks, " was certainly written in a good hour; the contrary must be said of the present book. From the point of view of literary history, the Defense, no doubt, merits unrestricted praise. The elegant, crisp style, the skill with which the author not only casts a moral shadow upon his opponent, but brands him as an unsavory person not to be taken seriously, while over all is poured the most sovereign disdain, brings to the reader of this book, now almost four hundred years old, such aesthetic pleasure that it is only with difficulty that he recalls himself to righteous indignation over the gross unfairness and open untruthfulness which the author permits himself against Caroli." No doubt Calvin often spoke in harsh terms of his opponents; they were harsh things they were seeking for him; and the contest in which he was engaged was not a sparring match for the amusement of the onlookers. Nor need it be asserted that he was infallible; though "even his enemies will admit," as even Mark Pattison allows, "that he knows not how to decorate or disguise a fact." Between the suavity of the "Letter to Sadoleto" and the furiousness of the "Defense Against Caroli," a long list of controversial writings of very varying manners range themselves. A frankness of speech characterizes them which never balks at calling a spade a spade; we meet in them with depreciatory, even defamatory, epithets which jar sadly on our modern sensibilities. These are faults not of the man, but of the times: as we are reminded by M. Lenient, the historian of French satire, of all figures of rhetoric euphemism was the least in use in the sixteenth century. But none of Calvin's controversial tracts fails to be informed from beginning to end with a loftiness of purpose, to be conducted with a seriousness and directness of argument, and to be filled with a solid instruction, such as raise them far above the plane of mere partisan wrangle and give them a place among the permanent possessions of the Church.

Fault was found with him in his own day -as, for example, by Castellion - for permitting himself the use of satire in religious debate. This was not merely a result of native temperament with him, but a matter of deliberate and reasoned choice. Of course he had nothing in common with the mere mockers of the time - des Periers, Marot, Rabelais - whose levity was almost as abominable to him as their coarseness. Satire to him was a weapon, not an amusement. The proper way to deal with folly, he thought, was to laugh at it. The superstitions in which the world had been so long entangled were foolish as truly as wicked; and how could it be, he demanded, that in speaking of things so ridiculous, so intrinsically funny, we should not laugh at them "with wide-open mouth"? Of course this laugh was not the laugh of pure amusement; and as it gained in earnestness it naturally lost in lightness of touch. It was a rapier in Calvin's hands, and its use was to pierce and cut. And how well he uses it! The Sorbonne, for example, issued a series of "Articles," declaring the orthodox doctrine on the points disputed by the Protestants. Calvin republishes these "Articles," and subjoins to each of them a quite innocent-looking "Proof," conceived perfectly in the Sorbonnic manner, but issuing in each case in a hopeless reductio ad absurdum. Thus: "It is proved, moreover, that vows are obligatory from their being dispensed and loosed: the Pope could not dispense vows were it not for the power of the keys, and hence it follows that they bind the conscience," - truly as fine a specimen of lucus a non lucendo as one will find in a day's search. It is only rarely that the mask is dropped a moment and a glimpse given of the mocking eyes behind - as thus: "But that our masters, when congregated in one body, are the Church, is proved from this, that they are very like the ark of Noah -since they form a herd of all sorts of beasts." The matter is indeed in general so subtly managed that perhaps the "Antidote," which in each instance follows on the "Proof," was not altogether unnecessary. There is no such subtlety in what is, perhaps, the best known of Calvin's satirical pieces - his "Admonition, Showing the Advantage which Christendom Might Derive from an Inventory of Relics." Here we have a simple, straightforward enumeration of the relics exposed in various churches for the veneration of the people. 'The effect is produced by the incongruity, which grows more and more monstrous, of the reduplication of these relics. "Everybody knows that the inhabitants of Tholouse think that they have got six of the bodies of the apostles. Now, let us attend to those who have had two or three bodies. For Andrew has another body at Malfi, Philip and James the Less have each another body at the Church of the Holy Apostles, and Simeon and Jude, in like manner, at the Church of St. Peter. Bartholomew has also another in the church dedicated to him at Rome. So here are six who each have two bodies, and also, by way of a supernumerary, Bartholomew's skin is shown at Pisa. Matthias, however, surpasses all the rest, for he has a second body at Rome, in the church of the elder Mary, and a third one at Treves. Besides, he has another head, and another arm, existing separately by themselves. There are also fragments of Andrew existing at different places, and quite sufficient to make up half a body." And so on endlessly; and of course monotonously -which, however, is part of the calculated effect. As M. Lenient remarks, "his pitiless calculations give to a mathematical operation all the piquancy of a bon mot, and the irony of numbers destroys the credit of the most respected pilgrimages." It is, however, in such a tract as the "Excuse of the Nicodemites" that Calvin's satire is found at its best, as he rails at those weak Protestants who were too timid to declare themselves. "His pen," says M. Lenient, "was never more light or incisive. Moralist and painter after the fashion of La Bruyere, he amuses himself sketching all these profiles of effeminate Christians, with their slacknesses, their compromises of conscience, their calculations of selfishness, and indifferent luke-warmness." Literature this all is, doubtless, and good literature; and by virtue of it "Calvinistic satire" - Calvin, Beza, and Viret were its first masters - has a recognized place in the history of French satire. But it is not primarily or chiefly literature, and it had its part to play among the moral and religious forces which Calvin liberated for the accomplishment of his reforming work.

Perhaps enough has been said to suggest how Calvin fulfilled his function as reformer by his literary labors. There were, of course, other forms of his literary product which have not been mentioned - creeds and catechisms, Church ordinances and forms of worship, popular tracts and academic consilia. We need not stop to speak of them particularly. Of one other product of his literary activity, however, a special word seems demanded. Calvin was the great letter-writer of the Reformation age. About four thousand of his letters have come down to us, some of them almost of the dimensions of treatises, many of them practically theological tractates, but many of them also of the most intimate character in which he pours out his heart. In these letters we see the real Calvin, the man of profound religious convictions and rich religious life, of high purpose and noble strenuousness, of full and freely flowing human affections and sympathies. In them he rebukes rulers and instructs statesmen, and strengthens and comforts saints. Never a perplexed pastor but has from him a word of encouragement and counsel; never a martyr but has from him a word of heartening and consolation. Perhaps no friend ever more affectionately leaned on his friends; certainly no friend ever gave himself more ungrudgingly to his friends. Had he written these letters alone, Calvin would take his place among the great Christians and the great Christian leaders of the world.

It is time, however, that we reminded ourselves that Calvin's work as a reformer is not summed up in his literary activities. A "man of letters" he was fundamentally; and a "man of letters" he remained in principle all his life. But he was something more than a "man of letters." This was his chosen sphere of service; and he counted it a cross to be compelled to expend his energies through other channels. But this cross was laid upon him, and he took it up and bore it. And the work which he did under the cross was such that had we no single word from his pen, he would still hold his rank among the greatest of the Reformers. We call him "the Reformer of Geneva." But in reforming Geneva he set forces at work which have been world-wide in their operation and are active still to-day. Were we to attempt to characterize in a phrase the peculiarity of his work as a reformer, perhaps we could not do better than to say it was the work of an idealist become a practical man of affairs. He did not lack the power to wait, to make adjustments, to advance by slow and tentative steps. He showed himself able to work with any material, to make the best of compromises, to abide patiently the coming of fitting opportunities. The ends which he set before himself as reformer he attained only in the last years of his strenuous life. But he was incapable of abandoning his ideals, of acquiescing in half measures, of drifting with the tide. Therefore his whole life in Geneva was a conflict. But in the end he made Geneva the wonder of the world, and infused into the Reformed Churches a spirit which made them not only invincible in the face of their foes, but an active ferment that has changed the face of the world. Thus this "man of letters," entering into life with his ideals, was "the means," to adopt the words of a critic whose sympathy with those ideals leaves much to be desired, "of concentrating in that narrow corner" of the world "a moral force which saved the Reformation"; or rather, to put it at its full effect, which "saved Europe." "It may be doubted," as the same critic - Mark Pattison - exclaims in extorted admiration, "if all history can furnish another instance of such a victory of moral force."

When Calvin came to Geneva, he tells us himself, he found the gospel preached there, but no Church established. "When I first came to this Church," he says, "there was as good as nothing here - il n'y avoit quasi comme rien. There was preaching, and that was all." He would have found much the same state of things everywhere else in the Protestant world. The "Church" in the early Protestant conception was constituted by the preaching of the Word and the right administration of the sacraments: the correction of the morals of the community was the concern not of the Church but of the civil power. As a recent historian - Professor Karl Rieker - rather flippantly expresses it: "Luther, when he had preached and sowed the seed of the Word, left to the Holy Spirit the care of producing the fruit, while with his friend Philip he peacefully drank his glass of Wittenberg beer." Calvin could not take this view of the matter. "Whatever others may hold," he observed, "we cannot think so narrowly of our office that when preaching is done our task is fulfilled, and we may take our rest." In his view the mark of a true Church is not merely that the gospel is preached in it, but that it is "followed." For him the Church is the "communion of saints," and it is incumbent upon it to see to it that it is what it professes to be. From the first he therefore set himself strenuously to attain this end, and the instrument which he sought to employ to attain it was, briefly - Church discipline. It comes to us with a surprise which is almost a shock to learn that we owe to Calvin all that is involved, for the purity and welfare of the Church, in the exercise of Church discipline. But that is the simple truth, and so sharp was the conflict by which the innovation won a place for itself, and so important did the principle seem, that it became the mark of the Reformed Churches that they made "discipline" one of the fundamental criteria of the true Church. Moreover, the application of this principle carried Calvin very far, and, indeed, in its outworking gave the world through him the principle of a free Church in a free State. It is ultimately to him, therefore, that the Church owes its emancipation from the State, and to him goes back that great battle-cry which has since fired the hearts of many saints in many crises in many lands: "The Crown Rights of King Jesus in His Church."

Censorship of manners and morals was not introduced by Calvin into Geneva. Such a censorship, often of the most petty and galling kind, was the immemorial practice not only of Geneva but of all other similarly constituted towns. It was part of the recognized police regulations of the times. Calvin's sole relation to this censorship was through his influence - he never bore civil office or exercised civil authority in Geneva, and, indeed, acquired the rights of citizenship there only late in life - gradually to bring some order and rationality into its exercise. What Calvin introduced - and it was so revolutionary with respect both to the State and to the Church that it required eighteen years of bitter struggle before it was established -was distinctively Church discipline. The principles on which he proceeded were already laid down in the first edition of his "Institutes" (spring of 1536). And when he came to Geneva in the autumn of 1536 he lost no time in seeking to put them into practice. Already at the opening of 1537 we find a document drawn up by him in the name of the ministers of Geneva before the Council, in which the whole new conception is briefly outlined. This great charter of the Church's liberties - for it is as truly such as the "Magna Charta" is the charter of British rights - opens with these simple and direct words: "It is certain that a Church cannot be said to be well ordered and governed unless the Holy Supper of our Lord is frequently - celebrated and attended in it, and that with such good regulation that no one would dare to present himself at it except with piety and deep reverence. And it is therefore necessary for the Church to maintain in its integrity the discipline of excommunication, by which those should be corrected who are unwilling to yield themselves amiably and in all obedience to the holy Word of God." In the body of the document the matter is argued, and three things are proposed: First, that it be ascertained at the outset who of the inhabitants of the town wished "to avow themselves of the Church of Jesus Christ." For this, it is suggested that a brief and comprehensive Confession of Faith be prepared, and "all the inhabitants of your town" be required to "make confession and render reason of their faith, that it may be ascertained which accord with the Gospel, and which prefer to be of the kingdom of the Pope rather than of Jesus Christ." Secondly, that a catechism be prepared, and the children be diligently instructed in the elements of the faith. And thirdly, that provision be made by the appointment of "certain persons of good life and good repute among all the faithful, and likewise of constancy of spirit and not open to corruption," who should keep watch over the conduct of the Church members, advise with them, admonish them, and in obstinate cases bring them to the attention of the ministers, when, if they still prove unamenable, they are "to be held as rejected from the company of Christians," and "as a sign of this, rejected from the communion of the Lord's Supper, and denounced to the rest of the faithful as not to be companied with familiarly." By this programme Calvin became nothing less than the creator of the Protestant Church. The particular points to be emphasized in it are two. It is purely Church discipline which is contemplated, with none other but spiritual penalties. And the Church is for this purpose especially discriminated from the body of the people -the State - and a wedge is thus driven in between Church and State which was bound to separate the one from the other.

In claiming for the Church this discipline, Calvin, naturally, had no wish in any way to infringe upon the police regulations of the civil authorities. They continued, in their own sphere, to command his approval and cooperation. He has the clearest conception of the limits within which the discipline of the Church must keep itself, and expressly declares that it is confined absolutely to the spiritual penalty of excommunication. But he just as expressly suggests that the State, on its own part, might well take cognizance of spiritual offenses; and even invokes the aid of the civil magistrate in support of the authority of the Church. "This," he says to the Council, after outlining his scheme for the appointment of lay helpers - in effect elders - in the exercise of discipline, - "this seems to us a good way to introduce excommunication into our Church, and to maintain it in its entirety. And beyond this correction the Church cannot proceed. But if there are any so insolent and abandoned to all perversity that they only laugh at being excommunicated, and do not mind living and dying in such a condition of rejection, it will be for you to consider how long you will endure and leave unpunished such contempt and such mockery of God and His Gospel." This is not requiring the State to execute the Church's decrees: the Church executes her own decrees, and its extremest penalty is excommunication. It is only recognizing that the State as well as the Church may take account of spiritual offenses. And particularly it is declaring that while the Church by her own sanctions protects her own altars, it is the part of the State by its own sanctions to sustain the Church in protecting its altars. Calvin has not risen to the conception of the complete mutual independence of Church and State: his view still includes the conception of an "established Church." But the "established Church" which he pleads for is a Church absolutely autonomous in its own spiritual sphere. In asking this he was asking for something new in the Protestant world, and something in which lay the promise and potency of all the freedom which has come to the Reformed Churches since.

Of course Calvin did not get what he asked for in 1537. Nor did he get it when he returned from his banishment in 1541. But he never lost it from sight; he never ceased to contend for it; he was always ready to suffer for its assertion and defense; and at last he won it. The spiritual liberties which he demanded for the Church in 1536, for the assertion of which he was banished in 1538, for the establishment of which he ceaselessly struggled from 1541, he measurably attained at length in 1555. In the fruits of that great victory we have all had our part. And every Church in Protestant Christendom which enjoys to-day any liberty whatever, in performing its functions as a Church of Jesus Christ, owes it all to John Calvin. It was he who first asserted this liberty in his early manhood - he was only twenty-seven years of age when he presented his programme to the Council; it was he who first gained it in a lifelong struggle against a determined opposition; it was he who taught his followers to value it above life itself, and to secure it to their successors with the outpouring of their blood. And thus Calvin's great figure rises before us as not only in a true sense the creator of the Protestant Church, but the author of all the freedom it exercises in its spiritual sphere.

It is impossible to linger here on the relations of this great exploit of Calvin's, even to point out its rooting in his fundamental religious conceptions, or its issue in the creation of a spirit in his followers to the efflorescence of which this modern world of ours owes its free institutions. We cannot even stop to indicate other important claims he has upon our reverence. We say nothing here, for example, of Calvin the preacher - the "man of the Word" as Doumergue calls him, pronouncing him as such greater than he was as "man of action" or "man of thought," as both of which he was very great - who for twenty-five years stood in the pulpit of Geneva, preaching sometimes daily, sometimes twice a day, a word the echoes of which were heard to the confines of Europe. We say nothing, again, of his reorganization of the worship of the Reformed Churches, and particularly of his gift to them of the service of song: for the Reformed Churches did not sing until Calvin taught them to do it. There are many who think that he did few things greater or more far-reaching in their influence than the making of the Psalter - that Psalter of which twenty-five editions were published in the first year of its existence, and sixty-two more in the next four years; which was translated or transfused into nearly every language of Europe; and which wrought itself into the very flesh and bone of the struggling saints throughout all the "killing times" of Protestant history. The activities of Calvin were too varied and multiplex, his influence in numerous directions too enormous, to lend themselves to rapid enumeration. We can pause further only to say a necessary word of that system of divine truth which, by his winning restatement and powerful advocacy of it, he has stamped with his name, and with his eye upon which a Roman Catholic writer of our day - Canon William Barry - pronounces Calvin "undoubtedly the greatest of Protestant divines, and, perhaps, after St. Augustine, the most persistently followed by his disciples of any western writer on theology."

It has become very much the custom of modern historians to insist that Calvin's was not an original but only a systematizing genius. Thus, for example, Reinhold Seeberg remarks: "His was an acute and delicate but not a creative mind." "As a dogmatician, he furnished no new ideas; but with the most delicate sense of perception he arranged the dogmatic ideas at hand in accordance with their essential character and their historical development." "He possessed the wonderful talent of comprehending any given body of religious ideas in its most delicate refinements and giving appropriate expression to the results of his investigations." Accordingly, he did not leave behind him "uncoined gold, like Luther," or "questionable coinage, like Melanchthon," but good gold well minted - and in this lies the explanation of the greatness of his influence as a theologian. The contention may very easily be overpressed. But at its basis there lies the perception of a very important fact; perhaps we may say the most important fact in the premises.

Calvin was a thoroughly independent student of Scripture, and brought forth from that treasure-house things not only old but new; and if it was not given to him to recover for the world so revolutionizing a doctrine as that of Justification by Faith alone, the contributions of his fertile thought to doctrinal advance were neither few nor unimportant. He made an epoch in the history of the doctrine of the Trinity: by his insistence on "self-existence" as a proper attribute of Son and Spirit as well as of the Father, he drove out the lingering elements of Subordinationism, and secured to the Church a deepened consciousness of the co-equality of the Divine Persons. He introduced the presentation of the work of Christ under the rubrics of the threefold office of Prophet, Priest, and King. He created the whole discipline of Christian Ethics. But above all he gave to the Church the entire doctrine of the Work of the Holy Spirit, profoundly conceived and wrought out in its details, with its fruitful distinctions of common and efficacious grace, of noëtic, aisthetic, and thelematic effects, - a gift, we venture to think, so great, so pregnant with benefit to the Church as fairly to give him a place by the side of Augustine and Anselm and Luther, as the Theologian of the Holy Spirit, as they were respectively the Theologian of Grace, of the Atonement, and of Justification.

Nevertheless, despite such contributions – contributions of the first order - to theological advance, it is quite true - and it is a truth deserving the strongest emphasis - that the system of doctrine which Calvin taught, and by his powerful commendation of which his greatest work for the world was wrought, was not peculiar to himself, was in no sense new, - was, in point of fact, just "the Gospel" common to him and all the Reformers, on the ground of which they spoke of themselves as "Evangelicals," and by the recovery of which was wrought out the revolution which we call the Reformation. Calvin did not originate this system of truth; as "a man of the second generation "he inherited it, and his greatest significance as a religious teacher is that by his exact and delicate sense of doctrinal values and relations and his genius for systematic construction, he was able, as none other was, to cast this common doctrinal treasure of the Reformation into a well-compacted, logically unassailable, and religiously inspiring whole. In this sense it is as systematizer that he makes his greatest demand on our admiration and gratitude. It was he who gave the Evangelical movement a theology.

The system of doctrine taught by Calvin is just the Augustinianism common to the whole body of the Reformers for the Reformation was, as from the spiritual point of view a great revival of religion, so from the theological point of view a great revival of Augustinianism. And this Augustinianism is taught by him not as an independent discovery of his own, but fundamentally as he learned it from Luther, whose fertile conceptions he completely assimilated, and most directly and in much detail from Martin Bucer into whose practical, ethical point of view he perfectly entered. Many of the very forms of statement most characteristic of Calvin - on such topics as Predestination, Faith, the stages of Salvation, the Church, the Sacraments - only reproduce, though of course with that clearness and religious depth peculiar to Calvin, the precise teachings of Bucer, who was above all others, accordingly, Calvin's master in theology. Of course he does not take these ideas over from Bucer and repeat them by rote. They have become his own and issue afresh from him with a new exactness and delicacy of appreciation, in themselves and in their relations, with a new development of implications, and especially with a new richness of religious content. For the prime characteristic of Calvin as a theologian is precisely the practical interest which governs his entire thought and the religious profundity which suffuses it all. It was not the head but the heart which made him a theologian, and it is not the head but the heart which he primarily addresses in his theology.

He takes his start, of course, from God, knowledge of whom and obedience to whom he declares the sum of human wisdom. But this God he conceives as righteous love - Lord as well as Father, of course, but Father as well as Lord; whose will is, of course, the prima causa rerum (for is He not God?), but whose will also it will be our joy as well as our wisdom to embrace (for is He not our Father?). It was that we might know ourselves to be wholly in the hands of this God of perfect righteousness and goodness - not in those of men, whether ourselves or some other men - that he was so earnest for the doctrine of predestination: which is nothing more than the declaration of the supreme dominion of God. It was that our eternal felicity might hang wholly on God's mighty love-and not on our sinful weakness -that he was so zealous for the doctrine of election: which is nothing more than the ascription of our entire salvation to God. As he contemplated the majesty of this Sovereign Father of men, his whole being bowed in reverence before Him, and his whole heart burned with zeal for His glory. As he remembered that this great God has become in His own Son the Redeemer of sinners, he passionately gave himself to the proclamation of the glory of His grace. Into His hands he committed himself without reserve: his whole spirit panted to be in all its movement subjected to His government - or, to be more specific, to the "leading of His Spirit." All that was good in him, all the good he hoped might be formed in him, he ascribed to the almighty working of this Divine Spirit. The "glory of God alone" - the "leading of the Spirit" (or, as a bright young French student of his thought has lately expressed it, la maitrise, the "mastery," the control, of the Spirit),-became thus the twin principles of his whole thought and life. Or, rather, the double expression of the one principle; for - since all that God does, He does by His Spirit - the two are at bottom one.

Here we have the secret of Calvin's greatness and the source of his strength unveiled to us. No man ever had a profounder sense of God than he; no man ever more unreservedly surrendered himself to the Divine direction. "We cannot better characterize the fundamental disposition of Calvin the man and the reformer," writes a recent German student of his life - Bernhard Bess - "than in the words of the Psalm: 'What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?' After that virtuoso in religion of ancient Israel, no one has spoken of the majesty of God and the insignificance of man with such feeling and truth as Calvin. The appearance which Luther's expressions often give, as if God exists merely for man's sake, never is given by Calvin. God is for him the almighty will which lies behind all that comes to pass. What comes to pass in the world serves no doubt man, the Church, and salvation; but this is not its ultimate end, but the revelation of the glory and the honor of God." If there is anything that will make a man great, surely it is placing himself unreservedly at the disposal of God and seeking not only to do nothing but God's will, but to do all God's will. This is what Calvin did, and it is because he did this that he was so great. He was, of course, not without his weaknesses. He had no doubt a high temper, though to do him justice we must take the term in all its senses. He did not in all things rise superior to the best opinion of his age. We have seen, for example, that he was in full accord with his time in its extension of the cognizance of the civil courts to spiritual offenses; and it was by the consent of his mind to this universal conviction of the day that he was implicated in that unhappy occurrence - the execution of Servetus. But to do him justice here we must learn to speak both of his connection with that occurrence and of Servetus himself in quite other terms than the reckless language with which a modern writer of repute speaks when he calls Calvin "the author of the great crime of the age - the murder of the heroic Servetus." Servetus, that "fool of genius," as a recent writer, not without insight, characterizes him, was anything but an heroic figure. The "crime" of his "murder," unfortunately, had scores of fellows in that age, in which life was lightly valued, and it was agreed on all hands that grave heresy and gross blasphemy were capital offenses in well-organized states. And Servetus was condemned and executed by a tribunal of which Calvin was not a member, with which he possessed little influence, and which rejected his petition against the unnecessary cruelty of the penalty inflicted.

"There are people," remarks Paul Wernle, who is certainly under the influence of no glamour for Calvin or Calvinism - "There are people who have been told at school that Servetus was burned through Calvin's fault, and are therefore done with this man. They ought to remember that had they lived at the time, they would in all probability have joined in burning him. It is not so easy to be done with the man who was the most luminous and penetrating theologian of his time and the source from which flowed that power which Protestantism showed in Scotland, France, England, Holland. We are all glad, no doubt, that we did not live under his rod; but who knows what we would all be, had not this divine ardor possessed him? Concentrated, well-directed enthusiasm that is his essence; it was himself, first of all, whom he consumed in his zeal; his rule at Geneva was no more rigorous than the heroism was glorious with which he compacted half the Protestantism of Europe into a power which nothing could break. Calvin was in very truth the soul of the battling and conquering Reformed world; it was he who fought on the battlefields of the Huguenots and the Dutch, and in the hosts of the Puritans. In scarcely another of the Reformers is there to be seen such thoroughness, absoluteness. And yet what moderation, what real dread of every kind of excess; with what deference and tact did he know how to speak to the great! If you would know the man, how he lived with and for God and the world, read first of all in the Institutes the section On the Life of the Christian Man. It is the portrait of himself. And then for his religious individuality add the sections On Justification and On Predestination, where will be found what is most profound, most moving in his life of faith."

Such a man was John Calvin; and such was the work he did for God and His Kingdom on earth. Adolf Harnack has said that between Paul the Apostle and Luther the Reformer, Augustine was the greatest man God gave His Church. We may surely add that from Luther the Reformer to our day God has given His Church no greater man than John Calvin.

÷ 02 Calvin's Doctrine of the Knowledge of God1

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

The first chapters of Calvin's "Institutes" are taken up with a comprehensive exposition of the sources and guarantee of the knowledge of God and divine things (Book I. chs. i.-ix.). A systematic treatise on the knowledge of God must needs begin with such an exposition; and we require no account of the circumstance that Calvin's treatise begins with it, beyond the systematic character of his mind and the clearness and comprehensiveness of his view. This exposition therefore makes its appearance in the earliest edition of the "Institutes," which attempted "to give a summary of religion in all its parts," redacted in orderly sequence; that is to say, which was intended as a textbook in theology. This was the second edition, published in 1539, which was considered by Calvin to be the first which at all corresponded to its title. In this edition this exposition already stands practically complete. Large insertions were made into it subsequently, by which it was greatly enriched as a detailed exposition and validation of the sources of our knowledge of God; but no modifications were made in its fundamental teaching by these additions, and the ground plan of the exposition as laid down in 1539 was retained unaltered throughout the subsequent development of the treatise.

We may observe in the controversies in which Calvin had been engaged between 1536 and 1539 a certain preparation for writing this comprehensive and admirably balanced statement, with its equal repudiation of Romish and Anabaptist error and its high note of assurance in the face of the scepticism of the average man of the world. We may trace in it the fruits of his eager and exhaustive studies prosecuted in the interval, as pastor, professor, and Protestant statesman; and especially of his own ripening thought as he worked more and more into detail his systematic view of the body of truth. But we can attribute to nothing but his theological genius the feat by which he set a compressed apologetical treatise in the forefront of his little book - for the "Institutes" were still in 1539 a little book, although already expanded to more than double the size of their original form (edition of 1536). Thus he not only for the first time supplied the constructive basis for the Reformation movement, but even for the first time in the history of Christian theology drew in outline the plan of a complete structure of Christian Apologetics. For this is the significance in the history of thought of Calvin's exposition of the sources and guarantee of the knowledge of God, which forms the opening topic of his "Institutes." "Thus," says Julius Köstlin, after cursorily surveying the course of the exposition, "there already rises with him an edifice of Christian Apologetics, in its outlines complete (fertig). With it, he stands, already in 1539, unique (einzig) among the Reformers, and among Christian theologians in general up to his day. Only as isolated building-stones can appear in comparison with this, even what Melanchthon, for example, offered in the last elaboration of the Loci with reference to the proofs for the existence of God."2 In point of fact, in Augustine alone among his predecessors do we find anything like the same grasp of the elements of the problem as Calvin here exhibits; and nowhere among his predecessors do we find these elements brought together in a constructive statement of anything like the completeness and systematic balance which he gave to it.

At once on its publication, however, Calvin's apologetical construction became the property of universal Christian thought, and it has entered so vitally into Protestant, and especially Reformed, thinking as to appear now-a-days very much a matter of course. It is difficult for us to appreciate its novelty in him or to realize that it is not as native to every Christian mind as it now seems to us the inevitable adjustment of the elements of the problems raised by the Christian revelation. Familiar as it seems, therefore, it is important that we should apprehend it, at least in its outlines, as it lies in its primary statement in Calvin's pages. So only can we appreciate Calvin's genius or estimate what we owe to him. A very brief abstract will probably suffice, however, to bring before us in the first instance the elements of Calvin's thought. These include the postulation of an innate knowledge of God in man, quickened and developed by a very rich manifestation of God in nature and providence, which, however, fails of its proper effect because of man's corruption in sin; so that an objective revelation of God, embodied in the Scriptures, was rendered necessary, and, as well, a subjective operation of the Spirit of God on the heart enabling sinful man to receive this revelation - by which conjoint divine action, objective and subjective, a true knowledge of God is communicated to the human soul.

Drawn out a little more into detail, this teaching is as follows. The knowledge of God is given in the very same act by which we know self. For when we know self, we must know it as it is: and that means we must know it as dependent, derived, imperfect, and responsible being. To know self implies, therefore, the co-knowledge with self of that on which it is dependent, from which it derives, by the standard of which its imperfection is revealed, to which it is responsible. Of course, such a knowledge of self postulates a knowledge of God, in contrast with whom alone do we ever truly know self: but this only the more emphasises the fact that we know God in knowing self, and the relative priority of our knowledge of two objects of knowledge which we are conscious only of knowing together may for the moment be left undetermined. Meanwhile, it is clear than man has an instinctive and ineradicable knowledge of God, which, moreover, must produce appropriate reactions in his thought, feeling, and will, whence arises what we call religion. But these reactions are conditioned by the state of the soul which reacts. Although, then, man cannot avoid possessing a knowledge of God, and this innate knowledge of God is quickened and developed by the richest manifestations of God in nature and providence, which no man can escape either perceiving or so far apprehending, yet the actual knowledge of God which is framed in the human soul is affected by the subjective condition of the soul. The soul, being corrupted by sin, is dulled in its instinctive apprehension of God; and God's manifestation in nature and history is deflected in it. Accordingly the testimony of nature to God is insufficient that sinful man should know Him aright, and God has therefore supernaturally revealed Himself to His people and deposited this revelation of Himself in written Scriptures. In these Scriptures alone, therefore, do we possess an adequate revelation of God; and this revelation is attested as such by irresistible external evidence and attests itself as such by such marks of inherent divinity that no normal mind can resist them. But the sin-darkened minds to which it appeals are not normal minds, but disordered with the awful disease of sin. What is to give subjective effect in a sin-blinded mind to even a direct revelation from God? The revelation of God is its own credential. It needs no other light to be thrown upon it but that which emanates from itself: and no other light can produce the effect which its own splendor as a revelation of God should effect. But all fails when the receptivity is destroyed by sin. For sinners, therefore, there is requisite a repairing operation upon their souls before the light of the Word itself can accredit itself to them as light. This repairing operation on the souls of sinful men by which they are enabled to perceive light is called the testimony of the Holy Ghost: which is therefore just the subjective action of the Spirit of God on the heart, by virtue of which it is opened for the perception and reception of the objective revelation of God. The testimony of the Spirit cannot, then, take the place of the objective revelation of the Word: it is no revelation in this strict sense. It presupposes the objective revelation and only prepares the heart to respond to and embrace it. But the objective revelation can take no effect on the unprepared heart. What the operation of the Spirit on the heart does, then, is to implant, or rather to restore, a spiritual sense in the soul by which God is recognized in His Word. When this spiritual sense has been produced the necessity of external proofs that the Scriptures are the Word of God is superseded: the Word of God is as immediately perceived as such as light is perceived as light, sweetness as sweetness - as immediately and as inamissibly. The Christian's knowledge of God, therefore, rests no doubt on an instinctive perception of God native to man as man, developed in the light of a patefaction of God which pervades all nature and history; but particularly on an objective revelation of God deposited in Scriptures which bear in themselves their own evidence of their divine origin, to which every spiritual man responds with the same strength of conviction with which he recognizes light as light. This is the basis which Calvin in his " Institutes " places beneath his systematic exposition of the knowledge of God.

The elements of Calvin's thought here, it will readily be seen, reduce themselves to a few great fundamental principles. These embrace particularly the following doctrines: the doctrine of the innate knowledge of God; the doctrine of the general revelation of God in nature and history; the doctrine of the special revelation of God and its embodiment in Scriptures; the doctrine of the noetic effects of sin; the doctrine of the testimony of the Holy Spirit. That we may do justice to his thought we must look in some detail at his treatment of each of these doctrines and of the subordinate topics which are necessarily connected with them.

I. NATURAL REVELATION

That the knowledge of God is innate (I. iii. 3), naturally engraved on the hearts of men (I. iv. 4), and so a part of their very constitution as men (I. iii. 1), that it is a matter of instinct (I. iii. 1, I. iv. 2), and every man is self-taught it from his birth (I. iii. 3), Calvin is thoroughly assured. He lays it down as incontrovertible fact that "the human mind, by natural instinct itself, possesses some sense of a deity" (I. iii. 1, ad init. et ad fin.; 3 - sensus divinitatis or deitatis),3 and defends the corollaries which flow from this fact, that the knowledge of God is universal and indelible. All men know there is a God, who has made them, and to whom they are responsible. No savage is sunk so low as to have lost this sense of deity, which is wrought into his very constitution: and the degradation of men's worship is a proof of its ineradicableness - since even such dehumanization as this worship manifests has not obliterated it (I. iii. 1). It is the precondition of all religion, without which no religion would ever have arisen; and it forms the silent assumption of all attempts to expound the origin of religion in fraud or political artifice, as it does also of all corruptions of religion, which find their nerve in men's incurable religious propensities (I. iii. 1). The very atheists testify to its persistence in their ill-concealed dread of the deity they profess to despise (I. iv. 2); and the wicked, strive they ever so hard to banish from their consciousness the sense of an accusing deity, are not permitted by nature to forget it (I. iii. 3). Thus the cases alike of the savages, the atheists, and the wicked are made contributory to the establishment of the fact, and the discussion concludes with the declaration that it is by this innate knowledge of God that men are discriminated from the brutes, so that for men to lose it would be to fall away from the very law of their creation (I. iii. 3, ad fin.).4

If the knowledge of God enters thus into the very idea of humanity and constitutes a law of its being, it follows that it is given in the same act of knowledge by which we know ourselves. This position is developed at length in the opening chapter. The discussion begins with a remark which reminds us of Augustine's familiar contention that the proper concern of mankind is the knowledge of God and the soul; to which it is added at once that these two knowledges are so interrelated that it is impossible to assign the priority to either. The knowledge of self involves the knowledge of God and also profits by the knowledge of God: the better we know ourselves the better we shall know God, but also, we shall never know ourselves as we really are save in contrast with God, by whom is supplied the only standard for the formation of an accurate judgment upon ourselves (I. i. 2). In his analysis of the mode of the implication of the knowledge of God in the knowledge of self, Calvin lays the stress upon our nature as dependent, derived, imperfect, and responsible beings, which if known at all must be known as such, and to be known as such must be known as over against that Being on whom we are dependent, to whom we owe our being, over against whom our imperfection is manifest, and to whom we are responsible (I. i. 1). As we are not self-existent, we must recognize ourselves as "living and moving" in Another. We recognize ourselves as products, and in knowing the product know the cause; thus our very endowments, seeing that they distil to us by drops from heaven, form so many streams up which our minds must needs travel to their Fountainhead. The perception of our imperfections is at the same time the perception of His perfection; so that our very poverty displays to us His infinite fulness. Our sense of dissatisfaction with ourselves directs our eyes to Him whose righteous judgment we can but anticipate; and when in the presence of His majesty we realize our meanness and in the presence of His righteousness we realize our sin, our perception of God passes into consternation as we recognize in Him our just Judge.

The emphasis which Calvin places in this analysis upon the sense of sin and the part it plays in our knowledge of God, at once attracts attention. It is perhaps above everything the "miserable ruin" in which we find ourselves, which compels us, according to him, to raise our eyes towards heaven, spurred on not merely by a sense of lack but by a sense of dread: it is only, he declares, when we have begun to be displeased with ourselves that we energetically turn our thoughts Godward. This is already an indication of the engrossment of Calvin in this treatise with practical rather than merely theoretical problems. He is less concerned to show how man as man attains to a knowledge of God, than how man as he actually exists upon the earth attains to it. In the very act of declaring that this knowledge is instinctive and belongs to the very constitution of man as such, therefore, he so orders the exposition of the mode of its actual rise in the mind as to throw the emphasis on a quality which does not belong to man as such, but only to man as actually existing in the world - in that "miserable ruin into which we have been plunged by the defection of the first man" (I. i. 1). Man as unfallen, by the very necessity of his nature would have known God, the sphere of his being, the author of his existence, the standard of his excellences; but for man as fallen, Calvin seems to say, the strongest force compelling him to look upwards to the God above him, streams from his sense of sin, filling him with a fearful looking forward to judgment.

It is quite obvious that such a knowledge of God as Calvin here postulates as the unavoidable and ineradicable possession of man, is far from a mere empty conviction that such a being as God exists. The knowledge of God which is given in our knowledge of self is not a bare perception, it is a conception: it has content. "The knowledge of ourselves, therefore," says Calvin (I. i. 1, ad fin.), " is not only an incitement to seek after God, but becomes a considerable assistance towards finding God." The knowledge of God with which we are natively endowed is therefore more than a bare conviction that God is: it involves, more or less explicated, some understanding of what God is. Such a knowledge of God can never be otiose and inert; but must produce an effect in human souls, in the way of thinking, feeling, willing. In other words, our native endowment is not merely a sensus deitatis, but also a semen religionis (I. iii. 1, 2; iv. 1, 4; v. 1). For what we call religion is just the reaction of the human soul to what it perceives God to be. Calvin is, therefore, just as insistent that religion is universal as that the knowledge of God is universal. "The seeds of religion," he insists, "are sown in every heart " (I. iv. 1; cf. v. 1); men are propense to religion (I. iii. 2, med.); and always and everywhere frame to themselves a religion, consonant with their conceptions of God.

Calvin's ideas of the origin and nature of religion are set forth, if succinctly, yet with eminent clearness, in his second chapter. Wherever any knowledge of God exists, he tells us, there religion exists. He is not speaking here of a competent knowledge of God such as redeemed sinners have in Christ. But much less is he speaking of that mere notion that there is such a being as God which is sometimes called a knowledge of God. It may be possible to speculate on "the essence" of God without being moved by it. But certainly it is impossible to form any vital conception of God without some movement of intellect, feeling, and will towards Him; and any real knowledge of God is inseparable from movements of piety towards Him. Piety means reverence and love to God; and the knowledge of God tends therefore to produce in us, first, sentiments of fear and reverence; and, secondly, an attitude of receptivity and praise to Him as the fountain of all blessing. If man were not a sinner, indeed, such would be the result: men, knowing God, would turn to Him in confidence and commit themselves without reserve to His care - not so much fearing His judgments, as making them in sympathetic loyalty their own (I. ii. 2). And herein we see what pure and genuine religion is: "it consists in faith, united with a serious fear of God, comprehending a voluntary reverence, and producing legitimate worship agreeable to the injunctions of the law " (I. ii. 2, ad fin.).5

The definition of religion to which Calvin thus attains is exceedingly interesting, and that not merely because of its vital relation to the fundamental thought of these opening chapters, but also because of its careful adjustment to the state of the controversy in which he was engaged as a leader of the Reformation. In the first of these aspects, as we have already pointed out, religion is with him the vital effect of the knowledge of God in the human soul; so that inevitably religions will differ as the conceptions of God determining our thought and feeling and directing our life differ. In the estate of purity, the knowledge of God produces reverence and trust: and the religion of sinless man will therefore exhibit no other traits but trust and love. In sinful man, the same knowledge of God must produce, rather, a reaction of fear and hate - until the grace of God intervenes with a message of mercy. Sinful man cannot be trusted, therefore, to form his own religion for himself, but must in all his religious functioning place himself unreservedly under the direction of God in His gracious revelation. In its second aspect, then, we perceive Calvin carefully framing his definition so as to exclude all "will-worship" and to prepare the way for the condemnation of the "formal worship" and "ostentation in ceremonies" which had become prevalent in the old Church. The position he takes up here is essentially that which has come down to us under the name of "the Puritan principle." Religion consists, of course, not in the externalities of worship, but in faith, united with a serious fear of God, and a willing reverence. But its external expression in worship is not therefore unimportant, but is to be strictly confined to what is prescribed by God: to "legitimate worship, agreeable to the injunctions of the law" (I. ii. 2, ad fin.). This declaration is returned to and expounded in a striking section of the fourth chapter (I. iv. 3; cf. I. v. 13), where Calvin insists that "the divine will is the perpetual rule to which true religion is to be conformed," and asserts of newly invented modes of worshipping God, that they are tantamount to idolatry. God cannot be pleased by showing contempt for what He commands and substituting other things which He condemns; and none would dare to trifle in such a manner with Him unless they had already transformed Him in their minds into another and different Being: and in that case it is of little importance whether you worship one god or many.6

From this digression for the sake of asserting the "Puritan," that is, the "Reformed," principle with reference to acceptable worship, it is already apparent that Calvin did not suppose that men have been left to the notitia Dei insita for the framing of their religion, although he is insistent that therefrom proceeds a propensity to religion which already secures that all men shall have a religion (I. ii. 2). On the contrary, he teaches that to the ineradicable revelation of Himself which He has imprinted on human nature, God has added an equally clear and abundant revelation of Himself externally to us. As we cannot know ourselves without knowing God, so neither can we look abroad on nature or contemplate the course of events without seeing Him in His works and deeds (I. v.). Calvin is exceedingly emphatic as to the clearness, universality, and convincingness of this natural revelation of God. The whole world is but a theatre for the display of the divine glory (I. v. 5); God manifests Himself in every part of it, and, turn our eyes whichever way we will, we cannot avoid seeing Him; for there is no atom of the world in which some sparks of His glory do not shine (I. v. 1). So pervasive is God in nature, indeed, that it may even be said by a pious mind that nature is God (I. v. 5) - though the expression is too readily misapprehended in a Pantheistic (I. v. 5) or Materialistic (I. v. 4) sense to justify its use. Accordingly, no man can escape this manifestation of God; we cannot open our eyes without seeing it, and the language in which it is delivered to us penetrates through even the densest stupidity and ignorance (I. v. 1). To every individual on earth, therefore, with the exclusion of none (I. v. 7), God abundantly manifests Himself (I. v. 2). Each of the works of God invites the whole human race to the knowledge of Him; while their contemplation in the mass offers an even more prevalent exhibition of Him (I. v. 10). And so clear are His footsteps in His providence, that even what are commonly called accidents are only so many proofs of His activity (I. v. 8).

In developing this statement of the external natural revelation of God, Calvin presents first His patefaction in creation (I. v. 1-6) and then His patefaction in providence (I. v. 7-9), and under each head lays the primary stress on the manifestations of the divine wisdom and power (I. v. 2-5, Wisdom 6, power; 8, wisdom and power). But the other attributes which enter into His glory are not neglected. Thus, under the former caption, he points out that the perception of the divine power in creation "leads us to the consideration of His eternity; because He from whom all things derive their origin must necessarily be eternal and self-existent," while we must postulate goodness and mercy as the motives of His creation and providence (I. v. 6). Under the second caption, he is particularly copious in drawing out the manifestations of the divine benignity and beneficence - of His clemency - though he does not scruple also to point to the signs of His severity (I. v. 7, cf. 10). From the particular contemplation of the divine clemency and severity in their peculiar distribution here, indeed, he pauses to draw an argument for a future life when apparent irregularities will be adjusted (I. v. 10).

The vigor and enthusiasm with which Calvin prosecutes his exposition of the patefaction of God in nature and history is worth emphasising further. He even turns aside (I. v. 9) to express his special confidence in it, in contrast to a priori reasoning, as the "right way and the best method of seeking God." A speculative inquiry into the essence of God, he suggests, merely fatigues the mind and flutters in the brain. If we would know God vitally, in our hearts, let us rather contemplate Him in His works. These, we shall find, as the Psalmist points out, declare His greatness and conduce to His praise. Once more, we may observe here the concreteness of Calvin's mind and method, and are reminded of the practical end he keeps continually in view.7 So far is he from losing himself in merely speculative elaborations or prosecuting his inquiries under the spur of "presumptuous curiosity," that the practical religious motive is always present, dominating his thought. His special interest in the theistic argument is, accordingly, due less to the consideration that it rounds out his systematic view of truth than to the fact that it helps us to the vital knowledge of God. And therefore he is no more anxious to set it forth in its full force than he is to point out the limitations which affect its practical value.8 In and of itself, indeed, it has no limitations; Calvin is fully assured of its validity and analyses its data with entire confidence; to him nothing is more certain than that in the mirror of His works God gives us clear manifestations both of Himself and of His everlasting dominion (I. v. 11). But Calvin cannot content himself with an intellectualistic contemplation of the objective validity of the theistic argument. So dominated is he by practical interests that he actually attaches to the chapter in which he argues this objective validity a series of sections in which he equally strongly argues the subjective inability of man to receive its testimony. Objectively valid as the theistic proofs are, they are ineffective to produce a just knowledge of God in the sinful heart. The insertion of these sections here is the more striking in that they almost seem unnecessary in view of the clear exposition of the noetic effects of sin which had been made in the preceding chapter (ch. iv.) - although, of course, there the immediate reference was to the notitia Dei insita, while here it is to the notitia Dei acquisita.

Thus, however, our attention is drawn very pointedly to Calvin's doctrine of the disabilities with reference to the knowledge of God which are induced in the human mind by sin. He has, as has just been noted, adverted formally to them twice in these opening chapters of his treatise - on the earlier occasion (ch. iv.) with especial reference to the revelation of God made in the constitution of human nature, and on the later occasion (ch. v. §§ 11-15) with especial reference to the revelation of God made in His works and deeds. Were man in his normal state, he could not under this double revelation, internal and external, fail to know God as God would wish to be known. If he actually comes short of an adequate knowledge of God, therefore, this cannot be attributed to any shortcomings in the revelation of God. Calvin is perfectly clear as to the objective adequacy of the general revelation of God. Men, however, do come short of an adequate knowledge of God; and that not merely some men, but all men: the failure of the general revelation of God to produce in men an adequate knowledge of Him is as universal as is the revelation itself. The explanation is to be found in the corruption of men's hearts by sin, by which not merely are they rendered incapable of reading off the revelation of God which is displayed in His works and deeds, but their very instinctive knowledge of God, embedded in their constitution as men, is dulled and almost obliterated. The energy with which Calvin asserts this is almost startling, and matches in its emphasis that which he had placed on the reality and objective validity of the revelation of God. Though the seeds of religion are sown by God in every heart, yet not one man in a hundred has preserved even these seeds sound, and in no one at all have they grown to their legitimate harvest. All have degenerated from the true knowledge of God, and genuine piety has perished from the earth (I. iv. 1). The light which God has kindled in the breasts of men has been smothered and all but extinguished by their iniquity (I. iv. 4). The manifestation which God has given of Himself in the structure and organization of the world is lost on our stupidity (I. v. 11). The rays of God's glory are diffused all around us, but do not illuminate the darkness of our mind (I. v. 14). So that in point of fact, "men who are taught only by nature, have no certain, sound or distinct knowledge, but are confined to confused principles; they worship accordingly an unknown God " (I. v. 12, fin.): "no man can have the least knowledge of true and sound doctrine without having been a disciple of the Scriptures" (I. vi. 2, ad fin.): "the human mind is through its imbecility unable to attain any knowledge of God without the assistance of the Sacred Word" (I. vi. 4, ad fin.).

Calvin therefore teaches with great emphasis the bankruptcy of the natural knowledge of God. We must keep fully in mind, however, that this is not due in his view to any inadequacy or ineffectiveness of natural revelation, considered objectively.9 He continues to insist that the seeds of religion are sown in every heart (I. v. l, ad init.) ; that through all man's corruption the instincts of nature still suggest the memory of God to his mind (I. v. 2); that it is impossible to eradicate that sense of the deity which is naturally engraved on all hearts (I. iv. 4, ad fin.); that the structure and organization of the world, and the things that daily happen out of the ordinary course of nature, that is under the providential government of God, bear a witness to God which the dullest ear cannot fail to hear (I. v. 1, 3, 7, esp. II. vi. 1); and that the light that shines from creation, while it may be smothered, cannot be so extinguished but that some rays of it find their way into the most darkened soul (I. v. 14). God has therefore never left Himself without a witness; but, "with various and most abundant benignity sweetly allures men to a knowledge of Him, though they persist in following their own ways, their pernicious and fatal errors" (I. v. 14). The sole cause of the failure of the natural revelation is to be found, therefore, in the corruption of the human heart. Two results flow from this fact. First, it is not a question of the extinction of the knowledge of God, but of the corruption of the knowledge of God. And secondly, men are without excuse for their corruption of the knowledge of God. On both points Calvin is insistent.

He does not teach that all religion has perished out of the earth, but only that no "genuine piety" remains (I. iv. 1, ad init.): he does not teach that men retain no knowledge of God, but no "certain, sound or distinct knowledge" (I. v. 12, ad fin.). The seed of religion remains their inalienable possession, "but it is so corrupted as to produce only the worst fruits" (I. iv. 4, ad fin.). Here we see Calvin's judgment on natural religion. Its reality he is quick to assert: but equally quickly its inadequacy - and that because not merely of a negative incompleteness but also of a positive corruption. Men have corrupted the knowledge of God; and perhaps Calvin might even subscribe the declaration of a modern writer that men's religions are their worst crimes.10 Certainly Calvin paints in dark colors the processes by which men form for themselves conceptions of God under the light of nature, or rather, in the darkness of their minds, from which the light of nature is as far as lies in their power excluded. "Their conceptions of God are formed, not according to the representations He gives of Himself, but by the invention of their own presumptuous imaginations" (I. iv. 1, med.). They set Him far off from themselves and make Him a mere idler in heaven (I. iv. 2); they invent all sorts of vague and confused notions concerning Him, until they involve themselves in such a vast accumulation of errors as almost to extinguish the light that is within them (I. iv. 4); they confuse Him with His works, until even a Plato loses himself in the round globe (I. v. 11); they even endeavor to deny His very existence (I. v. 12), and substitute demons in His place (I. v. 13). Certainly it is not surprising, then, that the Holy Spirit, speaking in Scripture, "condemns as false and lying whatever was formerly worshipped as divine among the Gentiles," nay, "rejects as false every form of worship which is of human contrivance," and "leaves no Deity but in Mount Zion" (I. v. 13). The religions of men differ, doubtless, among themselves: some are more, some less evil; but all are evil and the evil of none is trivial.

Are men to be excused for this, their corruption of the knowledge of God? Are we to listen with sympathy to the plea that light has been lacking? It is not a case of insufficient light, but of an evil heart. Excuses are vain, for this heart-darkness is criminal. If we speak of ignorance here, we must remember it is a guilty ignorance; an ignorance which rests on pride and vanity and contumacy (I. iv. 1), an ignorance which our own consciences will not excuse (I. v. 15). What! shall we plead that we lack ears to hear what even mute creatures proclaim? that we have no eyes to see what it needs no eyes to see? that we are mentally too weak to learn what mindless creatures teach? (I. v. 15). We are ignorant of what all things conspire to inform us of, only because we sinfully corrupt their message; their insufficiency has its roots in us, not in them; wherefore we are without excuse (I. iv. 1; v. 14-15). Our "folly is inexcusable, seeing that it originates not only in a vain curiosity, but in false confidence, and an immoderate desire to exceed the limits of human knowledge" (I. iv. 1, fin.). "Whatever deficiency of natural ability prevents us from attaining the pure and clear knowledge of God, yet, since that deficiency arises from our own fault, we are left without any excuse " (I. v. 15, ad init.).

The natural revelation of God failing thus to produce its legitimate effects of a sound knowledge of God, because of the corruption of men's hearts, we are thrown back for any adequate knowledge of God upon supernatural activities of God communicating His truth to men. It is accordingly in an assertion and validation of these supernatural revelatory operations of God that Calvin's discussion reaches its true center. To this extent his whole discussion of natural revelation - in its inception in the implantation in man of a sensus deitatis, in its culmination in the patefaction of God in His works and deeds, and in its failure through the sin-bred blindness of humanity - may be said to be merely introductory to and intended to prepare the way for his discussion of the supernatural operations of God by which He meets this otherwise hopeless condition of humanity sunk in its corrupt notions of God. These operations obviously must meet a twofold need. A clearer and fuller revelation of God must be brought to men than that which is afforded by nature. And the darkened minds of men must be illuminated for its reception. In other words, what is needed, is a special supernatural revelation on the one hand, and a special supernatural illumination on the other. It is to the validation of this twofold supernatural operation of God in communicating the knowledge of Himself that Calvin accordingly next addresses himself (chs. vi.-ix.).

One or two peculiarities of his treatment of them attract our notice at the outset, and seem to invite attention, before we enter into a detailed exposition of the doctrine he presents. It is noticeable that Calvin does not pretend that this supernatural provision of knowledge of God to meet men's sin-born ignorance is as universal in its reach as the natural revelation which it supplements and, so far as efficiency is concerned, supersedes. On the contrary, he draws it expressly into a narrower circle. That general revelation "presented itself to all eyes" and "is more than sufficient to deprive the ingratitude of men of every excuse, since," in it, "God, in order to involve all mankind in the same guilt, sets an exhibition of His majesty, delineated in the creatures, before them all without exception" (I. vi. 1, init.). But His supernatural revelation He grants only "to those whom He intends to unite in a more close and familiar connection with Himself" (ibid.); "to those to whom He has determined to make His instructions effectual" (I. vi. 3); in a word, to "the elect" (I. vi. 1; vii. 5 near end). In dealing with the supernatural revelation of God, therefore, Calvin is conscious of dealing with a special operation of the divine grace by means of which God is communicating to those He is choosing to be His people the saving knowledge of Himself. It is observable also that, in speaking of this supernatural revelation, he identifies it from the outset distinctly with the Scriptures (ch. vi.). This is in accordance with the practical end and engrossment which, as we have already had occasion to note, dominate his whole discussion. He was not unaware that the special revelation of God antedates the Scriptures: on occasion he speaks discriminatingly enough of this revelation in itself and the Scriptures in which it is embodied. But his mind is less on the abstract truth than on the concrete conditions which surrounded him in his work. Whatever may have been true ages gone, to-day the special revelation of God coalesces with the Scriptures, and he does not occupy himself formally with it except as it presents itself to the men of his own time. The task which he undertakes, therefore, is distinctly to show that men have in the Scriptures a special revelation of God supplementing and so far superseding the general revelation of God in nature; and that God so operates with this His special revelation of Himself as to overcome the sin-bred disabilities of man.

In this state of the case we may perhaps be justified in leaving at this point the logical development of his construction and expounding Calvin's teaching more formally under the heads of his doctrine of Holy Scripture and his doctrine of the Testimony of the Holy Spirit.

II. HOLY SCRIPTURE

First, then, what was Calvin's doctrine of Holy Scripture?

Under the designation of "Scripture" or "the Scriptures" Calvin understood that body of writings which have been transmitted to us as the divinely given rule of faith and life. In this body of writings, that is to say, in "the Canon of Scripture," he included all the books of the Old Covenant which were recognized by the Jewish Church as of divine gift, and as such handed down to the Christian Church; and all the books of the New Covenant which have been given the Church by the Apostles as its authoritative law-code. Calvin's attitude towards the canon was thus somewhat more conservative than, say, Luther's. He knew of no such distinction as that between Canonical and Deutero-Canonical Books, whether in the Old or the New Testament. The so-called "Apocryphal Books" of the Old Testament, included within the canon by the decrees of Trent, he rejected out of hand: the so-called "Antilegomena" of the New Testament he accepted without exception.11

The representations which are sometimes made, to the effect that he felt doubts of the canonicity of some of the canonical books or even was convinced of their uncanonicity,12 rest on a fundamental misconception of his attitude, and are wrecked on his express assertions. No doubt he has not left us commentaries on all the Biblical Books, and no doubt his omission to write or lecture on certain books is not to be explained merely by lack of time, but involves an act of selection on his part, which was not unaffected by his estimate of the relative importance of the several books or by his own spiritual sympathies.13 He has also occasionally employed a current expression, such as, for example, "the Canonical Epistle of John,"14 when speaking of I John, which, if strictly interpreted, might be thought to imply denial of the genuineness of certain books of the canon - such as II and III John - and not merely the momentary or habitual neglect of them; just as the common use of the term "the Apostle" of Paul might be said, if similarly strictly pressed, to imply that there was no other Apostle but he. It is also true that he expresses himself with moderation when adducing the evidence for the canonicity of this book or that, and in his modes of statement quite clearly betrays his recognition that the evidence is more copious or more weighty in some cases than in others. But he represents the evidence as sufficient in all cases and declares with confidence his conclusion in favor of the canonicity of the whole body of books which make up our Bible, and in all his writings and controversies acts firmly on this presupposition. How, for example, is it possible to contend that some grave reason connected with doubts on his part of their canonical authority underlies the failure of Calvin to comment on "the three books attributed to Solomon, particularly the Song of Songs,"15 in the face of the judgment of the ministers of Geneva with regard to Castellion, which is thus reported by Calvin himself over his signature.16 "We unanimously judged him one who might be appointed to the functions of the pastor, except for a single obstacle which opposed it. When we asked him, according to custom, whether he was in accord with us on all points of doctrine, he replied that there were two on which he could not share our views: one of them . . . being our inscribing the Song of Solomon in the number of sacred books. . . . We conjured him first of all, not to permit himself the levity of treating as of no account the constant witness of the universal Church; we reminded him that there is no book the authenticity of which is doubtful, about which some discussion has not been raised; that even those to which we now attach an undisputed authenticity were not admitted from the beginning without controversy; that precisely this one is one which has never been openly repudiated. We also exhorted him against trusting unreasonably in his own judgment, especially where nothing was toward which all the world had not been aware of before he was born. . . . All these arguments having no effect on him, we thought it necessary to consider among ourselves what we ought to do. Our unanimous opinion was that it would be dangerous and would set a bad precedent to admit him to the ministry in these circumstances. . . . We should thus condemn ourselves for the future to raise no objection to another, should one present himself and wish similarly to repudiate Ecclesiastes or Proverbs or any other book of the Bible, without being dragged into a debate as to what is and what is not worthy of the Holy Spirit."17 Not merely the firmness with which Calvin held to the canoncity of all the books of our Bible, but the importance he attached to the acceptance of the canonical Scriptures in their integrity, is made perfectly clear by such an incident; and indeed so also are the grounds on which he accepted these books as canonical.

These grounds, to speak briefly, were historico-critical. Calvin, we must bear in mind, was a Humanist before he was a Reformer,18 and was familiar with the whole process of determining the authenticity of ancient documents. If then he received the Scriptures from the hands of the Church, not indulging himself in the levity of treating the constant witness of the universal Church as of no account, he was nevertheless not disposed to take "tradition" uncritically at its face value. His acceptance of the canon of the Church was therefore not a blind but a critically mediated acceptance. Therefore he discarded the Aprocrypha: and if he accepted the Antilegomena it was because they commended themselves to his historico-critical judgment as holding of right a place in the canon. The organon of his critical investigation of the canon was in effect twofold. He inquired into the history of the books in question. He inquired into their internal characteristics. Have they come down to us from the Apostolic Church, commanding either unbrokenly or on the whole the suffrages of those best informed or best qualified to judge of their canonical claims? Are they in themselves conformable to the claims made for them of apostolic, which is as much as to say, divine origin? It was by the application of this twofold test that he excluded the Apocrypha of the Old Testament from the canon. They had in all ages been discriminated from the canonical books, and differ from them as the writing of an individual differs from an instrument which has passed under the eye of a notary and been sealed to be received of all.19 Some Fathers, it is true, deemed them canonical; even Augustine was of that way of thinking, although he had to allow that opinions differed widely upon the matter. Others, however, could admit them to no higher rank than that of "ecclesiastical books," which inight be useful to read but could not supply a foundation for doctrine; among such were Jerome and Rufinus.20 And, when we observe their contents, no sane mind will fail to pass judgment against them.21 Rome may, indeed, find her interest in defending them, for she may discover support in them for some of her false teachings. But this very fact is their condemnation. "I beg you to observe," he says of the closing words of II Maccabees, where the writer sets his hope in his own works: "I beg you to observe how far this confession falls away from the majesty of the Holy Spirit"22 - that is to say, from the constant teaching of Holy Scripture.

And it was by the application of the same two-fold test that he accredited the Antilegomena of the New Testament as integral parts of the canon. In the Preface which he has prefixed to II Peter, for example, he notes that Eusebius speaks of some who rejected it. "If it is a question," he adds, "of yielding to the simple authority of men, since he [Eusebius] does not name those who brought the matter into doubt, no necessity seems to be laid on us to credit these unknown people. And, moreover, he adds that afterwards it was generally received without contradiction. . . . It is a matter agreed upon by all, of common accord, that there is nothing in this Epistle unworthy of Saint Peter, but that, on the contrary, from one end of it to the other, there are apparent the force, vehemence and grace of the Spirit with which the Apostles were endowed. . . . Since, then, in all parts of the Epistle the majesty of the Spirit of Christ is clearly manifest, I cannot reject it entirely, although I do not recognize in it the true and natural phrase of Saint Peter."23 To meet the difficulty arising from the difference of the style from that of I Peter, he therefore supposed that the Epistle is indeed certainly Peter's, since otherwise it would be a forgery, a thing inconceivable in a book of its high character,24 but was dictated in his old age to some one of his disciples, to whom it owes its peculiarities of diction. Here we have an argument conducted on the two grounds of the external witness of the Church and the internal testimony of the contents of the book: and these are the two grounds on which he everywhere depends. Of the Epistle of Jude he says:25 "Because the reading of it is very useful, and it contains nothing that is not in accord with the purity of the Apostolic doctrine; because also it has long been held to be authentic by all the best men, for my part, I willingly place it in the number of the other epistles." In other cases the external evidence of the Church is not explicitly mentioned and the stress of the argument is laid on the Apostolic character of the writing as witnessed by its contents. He receives Hebrews among the Apostolic Epistles without difficulty, because nowhere else is the sacrifice of Christ more clearly or simply declared and other evangelical doctrines taught: surely it must have been due to the wiles of Satan that the Western Church so long doubted its canonicity.26 James seems to him to contain nothing unworthy of an Apostle of Christ, but to be on the contrary full of good teaching, valuable for all departments of Christian living.27 For the application of this argument he of course takes his start from the Homologoumena, which gave him the norm of Apostolic teaching which he used for testing the other books. It must not be supposed that he received even these books, however, without critico-historical inquiry: but only that the uniform witness of the Church to their authority weighed with him above all grounds of doubt. It was, in a word, on the ground of a purely scientific investigation that Calvin accredited to himself the canon. It had come down to him through the ages, accredited as such by the constant testimony of its proper witnesses: and it accredited itself to critical scrutiny by its contents.28

The same scientific spirit attended Calvin in his dealing with the text of Scripture. As a Humanist he was familiar with the processes employed in settling the texts of classical authors; and naturally he used the same methods in his determination of the text of the Biblical books. His practice here is marked by a combination of freedom and sobriety; and his decisions, though often wrong, as they could not but be in the state of the knowledge of the transmission of the New Testament text at the time, always manifest good sense, balance, and trained judgment. In his remarks on the pericope of the adulteress (John viii. 1-11), we meet the same circle of ideas with which we are familiar from his remarks on the Antilegomena: "because it has always been received by the Latin Churches and is found in many of the Greek copies and old writers, and contains nothing which would be unworthy of an apostolical spirit, there is no reason why we should refuse to take our profit from it."29 He accepts the three-witness passage of I John v. 7. "Since the Greek codices do not agree with themselves," he says, "I scarcely dare reach a conclusion. Yet, as the context flows most smoothly if this clause is added, and I see that it stands in the best codices and those of the most approved credit, I also willingly adopt it."30 When puzzled by difficulties, he, quite like the Humanist dealing with a classical text, feels free to suggest that there may be a "mendum in voce." This he does, for example, in Mat. xxiii. 35, where he adduces this possibility among others; and still more instructively in Mat. xxvii. 9, where he just as simply assumes "Jeremiah" to be a corrupt reading31 as his own editors assume that the "Apius" which occurs in the French version of the "Institutes" in connection with Josephus is due to a slip of his translators, not of his own - remarking: "It is evident that it cannot be Calvin who translated this passage."32 His assurance that it cannot be the Biblical writer who stumbles leads him similarly to attribute what seems to him a manifest error to the copyists. It is only, however, in such passages as these that he engages formally in textual emendation. Ordinarily he simply follows the current text, although he is, of course, not without an intelligent ground for his confidence in it.33 As we cursorily read his commentaries we feel ourselves in the hands of one who is sanely and sagely scrutinizing the text with which he is dealing from the point of view of a scholar accustomed to deal with ancient texts, whose confidence in its general integrity represents the well-grounded conclusion of a trained judgment. His occasional remarks on the text, and his rare suggestion of a corruption, are indicia of the alertness of his general scrutiny of the text and serve to assure us that his acceptance of it as a whole as sound is not merely inert acquiescence in tradition, but represents the calm judgment of an instructed intelligence.

INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE

Now, these sixty-six books of canonical Scriptures handed down to us, in the singular providence of God,34 in a sound text which meets the test of critical scrutiny, Calvin held to be the very Word of God. This assertion he intended in its simplest and most literal sense. He was far from overlooking the fact that the Scriptures were written by human hands: he expressly declares that, though we have received them from God's own mouth, we have nevertheless received them "through the ministry of men."35 But he was equally far from conceiving that the relation of their human authors to their divine author resembled in any degree that of free intermediaries, who, after receiving the divine word, could do with it what they listed.36 On the contrary, he thought of them rather as notaries (IV. viii. 9), who set down in authentic registers (I. vi. 3) what was dictated to them (Argumentum in Ev. Joh.).37 They wrote, therefore, merely as the organs of the Holy Ghost, and did not speak ex suo sensu, not humano impulsu, not sponte sua, not arbitrio suo, but set out only quae coelitus mandata fuerant.38 The diversity of the human authors thus disappears for Calvin before the unity of the Spirit, the sole responsible author of Scripture, which is to him therefore not the verba Dei, but emphatically the verbum Dei.39 It is a Deo ("Institutes," I. vii. 5); it has "come down to us from the very mouth of God " (I. vii. 5);40 it has " come down from heaven as if the living words of God themselves were heard in it" (I. vii. 1);41 and "we owe it therefore the same reverence which we owe to God Himself, since it has proceeded from Him alone, and there is nothing human mixed with it" (Com. on II Tim. iii. 16).42 According to this declaration the Scriptures are altogether divine, and in them, as he puts it energetically in another place, "it is God who speaks with us and not mortal men " (Com. on II Pet. i. 20).43 Accordingly, he cites Scripture everywhere not as the word of man but as the pure word of God. His "holy word" is "the scepter of God"; every statement in which is "a heavenly oracle" which "cannot fail" (Dedicatory Epistle to the "Institutes," Opp. ii. 12): in it God "opens His own sacred mouth" to add His direct word to the voice of His mute creatures (I. vi. 1). To say "Scripture says" and to say "the Holy Ghost says" is all one. We contradict the Holy Spirit, says Calvin - meaning the Scriptures - when we deny to Christ the name of Jehovah or anything which belongs to the majesty of Jehovah (I. xiii. 23). "The Holy Spirit pronounces," says he, . . . "Paul declares . . . the Scripture condemns . . . wherefore it is not surprising if the Holy Spirit reject" - all in one running context, meaning ever the same thing (I. v. 13): just as in another context he uses interchangeably the "commandments of Christ" and the "authority of Scripture" of the same thing (Dedicatory Letter).

It may be that Calvin has nowhere given us a detailed discussion of the mode of the divine operation in giving the Scriptures. He is sure that they owe their origin to the divine gift (I. vi. 1, 2, 3) and that God has so given them that they are emphatically His word, as truly as if we were listening to His living voice speaking from heaven (I. vii. 1): and, as we have seen, he is somewhat addicted to the use of language which, strictly taken, would imply that the mode of their gift was "dictation." The Scriptures are "public records" (I. vi. 2), their human authors have acted as "notaries" (IV. viii. 9), who have set down nothing of their own, but only what has been dictated to them, so that there appears no admixture of what is human in their product (on II Tim. iii. 16).44 It is not unfair to urge, however, that this language is figurative; and that what Calvin has in mind is not to insist that the mode of inspiration was dictation, but that the result of inspiration is as if it were by dictation, viz., the production of a pure word of God free from all human admixtures. The term "dictation" was no doubt in current use at the time to express rather the effects than the mode of inspiration.45 This being allowed, it is all the more unfair to urge that, Calvin's language being in this sense figurative, he is not to be understood as teaching that the effect of inspiration was the production of a pure word of God, free from all admixture of human error. This, on the contrary, is precisely what Calvin does teach, and that with the greatest strenuousness. He everywhere asserts that the effects of inspiration are such that God alone is the responsible author of the inspired product, that we owe the same reverence to it as to Him Himself, and should esteem the words as purely His as if we heard them proclaimed with His living voice from heaven; and that there is nothing human mixed with them. And he everywhere deals with them on that assumption. It is true that men have sought to discover in Calvin, particularly in his "Harmony of the Gospels," acknowledgments of the presence of human errors in the fabric of Scripture.46 But these attempts rest on very crass misapprehensions of Calvin's efforts precisely to show that there are no such errors in the fabric of Scripture. When he explains, for example, that the purpose "of the Evangelists"- or "of the Holy Spirit," for he significantly uses these designations as synonyms - was not to write a chronologically exact record, but to present the general essence of things, this is not to allow that the Scriptures err humanly in their record of the sequences of time, but to assert that they intend to give no sequences of time and therefore cannot err in this regard. When again he suggests that an "error" has found its way into the text of Mat. xxvii. 9 or possibly into Mat. xxiii. 35, he is not speaking of the original, but of the transmitted text;47 and it would be hard if he were not permitted to make such excursions into the region of textual criticism without laying himself open to the charge of denying his most assured conviction that nothing human is mixed with Scripture. In point of fact, Calvin not only asserts the freedom of Scripture as given by God from all error, but never in his detailed dealing with Scripture allows that such errors exist in it.48

If we ask for the ground on which he asserts this high doctrine of inspiration, we do not see that any other reply can be given than that it was on the ground of the teaching of Scripture itself. The Scriptures were understood by Calvin to claim to be in this high sense the word of God; and a critical scrutiny of their contents brought to him nothing which seemed to him to negative this claim. There were other grounds on which he might and did base a firm confidence in the divine origin of the Scriptures and the trustworthiness of their teaching as a revelation from God. But there were no other grounds on which he could or did rest his conviction that these Scriptures are so from God that there is nothing human mixed with them, and their every affirmation is to be received with the deference which is due to the living voice of God speaking from heaven. On these other grounds Calvin was led to trust the teaching of the Scriptures as a divine revelation: and he therefore naturally trusted their teaching as to their own nature and inspiration.

Such, then, are the Scriptures as conceived by Calvin: sixty-six sacred books, "dictated" by God to His "notaries" that they might, in this "public record," stand as a perpetual special revelation of Himself to His people, to supplement or to supersede in their case the general revelation which He gives of Himself in His works and deeds, but which is rendered ineffective by the sin-bred disabilities of the human soul. For this, according to Calvin, is the account to give of the origin of Scripture, and this the account to give of the function it serves in the world. It was because man in his sinful imbecility was unable to profit by the general revelation which God has spread before all eyes, so that they are all without excuse (I. vi. 1), that God in His goodness gave to "those whom He intended to unite in a more close and familiar connection with Himself," a special revelation in open speech (I. vi. 1). And it was because of the mutability of the human mind, prone to errors of all kinds, corrupting the truth, that He committed this His special revelation to writing, that it might never be inaccessible to "those to whom He determined to make His instructions effectual" (I. vi. 3). In Calvin's view, therefore, the Scriptures are a documentation of God's special revelation of Himself unto salvation (I. vi. 1, ad init.); but a documentation cared for by God Himself, so that they are, in fine, themselves the special revelation of God unto salvation in documentary form (I. vi. 2, 3). The necessity for the revelation documented in them arises from the blindness of men in their sin: the necessity for the documentation of this revelation arises from the instability of men, even when taught of God. We must conceive of special revelation, and of the Scriptures as just its documentation, therefore, as not precisely a cure, but rather an assistance to man dulled in his sight so as not to be able to perceive God in His general revelation. "For," says Calvin, "as persons who are old, or whose eyes have somehow become dim, if you show them the most beautiful book, though they perceive that something is written there, can scarcely read two words together, yet by the aid of spectacles will begin to read distinctly - so the Scripture . . ." etc. (I. vi. 1). The function of Scripture thus, as special revelation documented, is to serve as spiritual spectacles to enable those of dulled spiritual sight to see God.

Of course, the Scriptures do more than this. They not only reveal the God of Nature more brightly to the sin-darkened eye; they reveal also the God of Grace, who may not be found in nature. Calvin does not overlook this wider revelation embodied in them: he particularly adverts to it (I. vi. 1). But he turns from it for the moment as less directly germane to his present object, which is to show that without the "spectacles" of Scripture, sinful man would not be able to attain to a sound knowledge of even God the Creator. It is on this, therefore, that he now insists. It was only because God revealed Himself in this special, supernatural way to them, that our first fathers - "Adam, Noah, Abraham and the rest of the patriarchs" - were able to retain Him in their knowledge (I. vi. 1). It was only through this special revelation, whether renewed to them by God, or handed down in tradition, "by the ministry of men," that their posterity continued in the knowledge of God (I. vi. 2). "At length, that the truth might remain in the world in a continual course of instruction to all ages, God determined that the same oracles which He deposited with the patriarchs, should be committed to public records" - first the Law, then the Prophets, and then the books of the New Covenant (I. vi. 2). It is now, therefore, only through these Scriptures that man can attain to a true knowledge of God. The revelation of God in His works is not useless: it makes all men without excuse; it provides an additional though lower and less certain revelation of God to His people - to a consideration of which all should seriously apply themselves, though they should principally attend to the Word (I. vi. 2). But experience shows that without the Word the sinful human mind is too weak to reach a sound knowledge of God, and therefore without it men wander in vanity and error. Calvin seems to speak sometimes almost as if the Scriptures, that is special revelation, wholly superseded general revelation (I. v. 12, ad fin.; vi. 2, ad fin.; 4, ad fin.). More closely scrutinized, it becomes evident, however, that he means only that in the absence of Scripture, that is of special revelation, the general revelation of God is ineffective to preserve any sound knowledge of Him in the world: but in the presence of Scripture, general revelation is not set aside, but rather brought back to its proper validity. The real relation between general and special revelation, as the matter lay in Calvin's mind, thus proves to be, not that the one supersedes the other, but that special revelation supplements general revelation indeed, but in the first instance rather repeats and by repeating vivifies and vitalizes general revelation, and flows confluently in with it to the one end of both, the knowledge of God (I. vi. 2). What special revelation is, therefore - and the Scriptures as its documentation - is very precisely represented by the figure of the spectacles. It is aid to the dulled vision of sinful man, to enable it to see God.

The question forcibly presents itself, however, whether "spectacles" will serve the purpose here. Has not Calvin painted the sin-bred blindness of men too blackly to encourage us to think it can be corrected by such an aid to any remainders of natural vision which may be accredited to them? The answer must be in the affirmative. But this only opens the way to point out that Calvin does not present special revelation, or the Scriptures as special revelation documented, as the entire cure, but places by the side of it the testimonium Spiritus Sancti. Special revelation, or Scripture as its documented form, provides in point of fact, in the view of Calvin, only the objective side of the cure he finds has been provided by God. The subjective side is provided by the testimonium Spiritus Sancti. The spectacles are provided by the Scriptures: the eyes are opened that they may see even through these spectacles, only by the witness of the Spirit in the heart. We perceive, then, that in Calvin's view the figure of the spectacles is a perfectly just one. He means to intimate that special revelation alone will not produce a knowledge of God in the human soul: that something more than external aid is needed before it can see: and to leave the way open to proceed to point out what further is required that sinful man may see God. Sinful man, we say again: for the whole crux lies there. Had there been no sin, there would have been no need of even special revelation. In the light of the splendid revelation of Himself which God has displayed in the theatre of nature, man with his native endowment of instinctive knowledge of God would have bloomed out into a full and sound knowledge of Him. But with sinful man, the matter is wholly different. He needs more light and he needs something more than light - he needs the power of sight.49 That we may apprehend Calvin's thought, therefore, we must turn to the consideration of his doctrine of the Testimony of the Spirit.

III. THE TESTIMONY OF THE SPIRIT

What is Calvin's doctrine of the Testimony of the Spirit?

The particular question which Calvin addresses himself to when he turns to the consideration of what he calls the testimony of the Spirit concerns the accrediting of Scripture, not the assimilation of its revelatory contents. The reader cannot fail to experience some disappontment at this. The whole development of the discussion hitherto undoubtedly fosters the expectation, not, indeed, of an exclusive treatment of the assimilation of special revelation by sinful man - for both problems are raised by it and the two problems are at bottom one and their solution one - but certainly of some formal treatment of it, and indeed of such a treatment of the double problem that the stress should be laid on this. Calvin, however, is preoccupied with the problem of the accrediting of Scripture. This is due in part, doubtless, to its logical priority: as he himself remarks, we cannot be "established in the belief of the doctrine, till we are indubitably persuaded that God is its Author" (I. vii. 4, ad init.). But it was rendered almost inevitable by the state of the controversy with Rome, who intrenched herself in the position that the Protestant appeal to Scripture as over against the Church was inoperative, seeing that it is only by the Church that the Scriptures can be established in authority: for who but the Church can assure us that these Scriptures are from God, or indeed what books enter into the fabric of Scripture, or whether they have come down to us uncorrupted? As a practical man writing to practical men for a practical purpose, Calvin could not fail, perhaps, to give his primary attention to the aspect of the problem he had raised which was most immediately pressing. But this scarcely prepares us for the almost total neglect of its other aspect, with the effect that the construction of his general doctrine is left with a certain appearance of incompleteness. Not really incomplete; for the solution of the one problem is, as we have already suggested, the solution of the other also; and even the cursory reader - or perhaps we may say especially the cursory reader - may well be trusted to feel this as he is led on through the discussion, particularly as there are not lacking repeated suggestions of it, and the discussion closes with a direct reference to it and a formal postponement of the particular discussion of the other aspect of the double problem to a later portion of the treatise. "I pass over many things for the present," says Calvin, "because this subject will present itself for discussion in another place. Only, let it be known here that that alone is true faith which the Spirit of God seals in our hearts. And with this one reason every reader of docility and modesty will be satisfied" (I. vii. 5, near the end). That is as much as to say, This whole subject is only one application of the general doctrine of faith; and as the general doctrine of faith is fully discussed at another place in this treatise, we may content ourselves here with the somewhat incomplete remarks we have made upon this special application of that doctrine; we only need to remind the reader that there is no true faith except that which is begotten in the soul by the Holy Spirit.

We can scarcely wonder that Calvin contents himself with this simple reference of the topic now engaging his attention, as a specific case, to the generic doctrine of faith, when we pause to realize how nearly this simple reference of it, as a species to its genus, comes to a sufficient exposition of it. We shall stop now to signalize only two points which are involved in this reference, the noting of which will greatly facilitate our apprehension of Calvin's precise meaning in his doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit to the divinity of Scripture. This doctrine is no isolated doctrine with Calvin, standing out of relation with the other doctrines of his system: it is but one application of his general doctrine of faith; or to be more specific, one application of his general doctrine of the function of the Holy Spirit in the production of faith. Given Calvin's general doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit in applying salvation, and his specific doctrine of the testimonium Spiritus Sancti in the attestation of Scripture, and in the applying of its doctrine as well, was inevitable. It is but one application of the general doctrine that there is no true faith except that which the Spirit of God seals in our hearts. For Calvin in this doctrine - and this is the second point we wish to signalize - has in mind specifically "true faith." He is not asking here how the Scriptures may be proved to be from God. If that had been the question he was asking, he would not have hesitated to say that the testimony of the Church is conclusive of the fact. He does say so. "The universal judgment of the Church" (I. vii. 3, fin.) he represents as a very useful argument, "the consent of the Church" (I. viii. 12, init.) as a very important consideration, in establishing the divine origin of the Scriptures: although, of course, he does not conceive the Church as lending her authority to Scripture "when she receives and seals it with her suffrage," but rather as performing a duty of piety to herself in recognizing what is true apart from her authentication, and treating it with due veneration (I. vii. 2, ad fin.). For what is more her duty than "obediently to embrace what is from God as the sheep hear the voice of the shepherd"?50 Were it a matter of proving the Scriptures to be the Word of God, Calvin would, again, have been at no loss for rational arguments which he was ready to pronounce irresistible. He does adduce such arguments and he does pronounce them irresistible. He devotes a whole chapter "to the adduction of these arguments (ch. viii.) - such arguments as these: the dignity of the subject-matter of Scripture - the heavenliness of its doctrine and the consent of all its parts - (§ 1), the majesty of its style (§ 2), the antiquity of its teaching (§ 3), the sincerity of its narrative (§ 4), its miraculous accompaniment, circumstantially confirmed (§§ 5, 6), its predictive contents authenticated by fulfilment (§§ 7, 8), its continuous use through so many ages (§§9-12), its sealing by martyr blood (§ 13): and these arguments he is so far from considering weak and inconclusive (I. viii. 13, med.) that he represents them rather as capable of completely vindicating the Scriptures against all the subtleties of their calumniators (ibid.). Nay, he declares that the proofs of the divine origin of the Scriptures are so cogent, as "certainly to evince, if there is a God in heaven, that He is the author of the Law, and the Prophecies, and the Gospel" (I. vii. 4, near the beginning); as to extort with certainty from all who are not wholly lost to shame, the confession of the divine gift of the Scriptures (ibid.).51 "Though I am far from possessing any peculiar dexterity" in argument "or eloquence," he says, "yet were I to contend with the most subtle despisers of God, who are ambitious to display their wit and their skill in weakening the authority of Scripture, I trust I should be able without difficulty to silence their obstreperous clamor" (ibid.). But objective proofs - whether the conclusive testimony of witnesses, or the overwhelming evidence of rational considerations - be they never so cogent,52 he does not consider of themselves capable of producing "true faith." And it is "true faith," we repeat, that Calvin has in mind in his doctrine of the testimonium Spiritus Sancti. If it seemed to him a small matter that man should know that God is if he did not know what God is, it equally seemed to him a small matter that man should know what God is, in the paradigms of the intellect, if he did not really know this God in the intimacy of communion which that phrase imports. And equally it seemed to him utterly unimportant that a man should be convinced by stress of rational evidence that the Scriptures are the Word of God, unless he practically embraced these Scriptures as the Word of God and stayed his soul upon them. The knowledge of God which Calvin has in mind in this whole discussion is, thus, a vital and vitalizing knowledge of God, and the attestation of Scripture which he is seeking is not an attestation merely to the intelligence of men, compelling from them perhaps a reluctant judgment of the intellect alone (since those convinced against their will, as the proverb has it, are very apt to remain of the same opinion still), but such an attestation as takes hold of the whole man in the roots of his activities and controls all the movements of his soul.

This is so important a consideration for the exact apprehension of Calvin's doctrine that it may become us to pause and assure ourselves of the simple matter of fact from the language which Calvin employs of it in the course of the discussion. We shall recall that from the introduction of the topic of special revelation he has in mind and keeps before his readers' mind its destination for the people of God alone. The provisions for producing a knowledge of God, consequent on the inefficiency of natural revelation, Calvin is careful to explain, are not for all men, but for "the elect" (I. vi. 1), or, as they are more fully described, "those whom God intends to unite in a more close and familiar connection with Himself" (ibid.), "those to whom He determines to make His instructions effectual" (I. vi. 3). From the first provisions of His supernatural dealings, therefore, He "intends to make His instructions effectual." More pointedly still he speaks of the testimonium Spiritus Sancti as an act in which "God deigns to confer a singular power on His elect, whom He distinguishes from the rest of mankind" (I. vii. 5).53 This singular power, now, is nothing else but "saving faith," and Calvin speaks of it in all the synonymy of "saving faith." He calls it "true faith" (I. vii. 5), "sound faith" (I. vii. 4), "firm faith" (I. viii. 13), "the faith of the pious" (I. vii. 3), "the certainty of the pious" (I. vii. 3), "that assurance which is essential to true piety" (I. vii. 4), "saving knowledge" (I. viii. 13), "a solid assurance of eternal life" (I. vii. 1). It is the thing which is naturally described by this synonymy which Calvin declares is not produced in the soul except by the testimony of the Holy Spirit. This obviously is nothing more than to declare that that faith which lays hold of Christ unto eternal life is the product of the Holy Spirit in the heart, and that it is one of the exercises of this faith to lay hold of the revelation of this Christ in the Scriptures with assured confidence, so that it is only he who is led by the Spirit who embraces these Scriptures with "sound faith," that is, "with that assurance which is essential to true piety" (I. vii. 4). What Calvin has in mind, in a word, is simply an extended comment on Paul's words: "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God . . . but he that is spiritual judgeth all things" (I Cor. ii. 14, 15).54

Calvin does not leave us, however, to gather from general remarks referring it to its class or to infer from its general effects, what he means by the testimony of the Spirit of God to the divinity of Scripture, but describes for us its nature and indicates the mode of its operation and specific effects with great exactitude.55 He tells us that it is a "secret" (I. vii. 4), "internal" (I. vii. 4; viii. 13), "inward" (I. vii. 5) action of the Holy Spirit on the soul, by which the soul is "illuminated" (I. vii. 3, 4, 5), so as to perceive their true quality in the Scriptures as a divine book. We may call this "an inward teaching" of the Spirit which produces "entire acquiescence in the Scriptures," so that they are self-authenticating to the mind and heart (I. vii. 5); or we may call it a "secret testimony of the Spirit," by which our minds and hearts are convinced with a firmness superior to all reason that the Scriptures are from God (I. vii. 4). In both instances we are using figurative language. Precisely what is produced by the hidden internal operation of the Spirit on the soul is a new spiritual sense (sensus, I. vii. 5, med.), by which the divinity of Scripture is perceived as by an intuitive perception. "For the Scripture exhibits as clear evidence of its truth, as white and black things do of their color, and sweet and bitter things of their taste" (I. vii. 2, end) ; and we need only a sense to discern its divine quality to be convinced of it with the same immediacy and finality as we are convinced by their mere perception of light or darkness, of whiteness or blackness, of sweetness or bitterness (ibid.). No conclusions based on "reasoning" or "proofs" or founded on human judgment can compare in clearness or force with such a conviction, which is instinctive and immediate, and finds its ultimate ground and sanction in the Holy Spirit who has wrought in the heart this spiritual sense which so functions in recognizing the divine quality of Scripture. Illuminated by the Spirit of God, we believe, therefore, not on the ground of our own judgment, or on the ground of the judgment of others, but with a certainty above all human judgment, by a spiritual intuition.56 With the utmost explicitness Calvin so describes this instinctive conviction in a passage of great vigor: "It is, therefore," says he, "such a persuasion as requires no reasons; such a knowledge as is supported by the highest reason and in which the mind rests with greater security and constancy than in any reasons; in fine, such a sense as cannot be produced but by a revelation from heaven" (I. vii. 5).57 Here we are told that it is a persuasio, or rather a notitia, or rather a sensus. It is a persuasion which does not require reasons - that is to say, it is a state of conviction not induced by arguments, but by direct perception: it is, that is to say, a knowledge, a direct perception in accord with the highest reason, in which the mind rests, with an assurance not attainable by reasoning; or to be more explicit still, it is a sense which comes only from divine gift. As we have implanted in us by nature a sense which distinguishes between light and darkness, a sense which distinguishes between sweet and bitter, and the verdict of these senses is immediate and final; so we have planted in us by the creative action of the Holy Spirit a sense for the divine, and its verdict, too, is immediate and final: the spiritual man discerneth all things. Such, in briefest outline, is Calvin's famous doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit.

MODE OF THIS TESTIMONY

Certain further elucidations of its real meaning and bearing appear, however, to be necessary, to guard against misapprehension of it. When we speak of an internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, it is evident that we must conceive it as presenting itself in one of three ways. It may be conceived as of the nature of an immediate revelation to each man to whom it is given. It may be conceived as of the nature of a blind conviction produced in the minds of its recipients. It may be conceived as of the nature of a grounded conviction, formed in their minds by the Spirit, by an act which rather terminates immediately on the faculties, enabling and effectively persuading them to reach a conviction on grounds presented to them, than produces the conviction itself, apart from or without grounds. In which of these ways did Calvin conceive the testimony of the Spirit as presenting itself? As revelation, or as ungrounded faith, or as grounded faith?

Certainly not the first. The testimony of the Spirit was not to Calvin of the nature of a propositional "revelation" to its recipients. Of this he speaks perfectly explicitly, and indeed in his polemic against Anabaptist mysticism insistently. He does indeed connect the term "revelation" with the testimony of the Spirit, declaring it, for example, such a sense (sensus) as can be produced by nothing short of "a revelation from heaven" (I. vii. 5, med.). But his purpose in the employment of this language is not to describe it according to its nature, but to claim for it with emphasis a heavenly source: he means merely to assert that it is not earth-born, but God-wrought, while at the same time he intimates that in its nature it is not a propositional revelation, but an instinctive "sense." That he did not conceive of it as a propositional revelation is made perfectly clear by his explicit assertions at the opening of the discussion (I. vii. 1, init.), that we "are not favored with daily oracles from heaven," and that the Scriptures constitute the sole body of extant revelations from God. It is not to supersede nor yet to supplement these recorded revelations that the testimony of the Spirit is given us, he insists, but to confirm them (I. ix. 3): or, as he puts it in his polemic against the Anabaptists, "The office of the Spirit which is promised us is not to feign new and unheard-of revelations, or to coin a new system of doctrine, which would seduce us from the received doctrine of the Gospel, but to seal to our minds the same doctrine which the Gospel delivers" (I. ix. 1, fin.).

In this polemic against the Anabaptists (ch. ix.) he gives us an especially well-balanced account of the relations which in his view obtain between the revelation of God and the witness of the Spirit. If he holds that the revelation of God is ineffective without the testimony of the Spirit, he holds equally that the testimony of the Spirit is inconceivable without the revelation of God embodied in the Word. He even declares that the Spirit is no more the agent by which the Word is impressed on the heart than the Word is the means by which the illumination of the Spirit takes effect. "If apart from the Spirit of God" we "are utterly destitute of the light of truth," he says (I. ix. 3, ad fin.), equally "the Word is the instrument by which the Lord dispenses to believers the illumination of the Spirit." So far as the knowledge of the truth is concerned, we are as helpless, then, without the Word as we are without the Spirit, for the whole function of the Spirit with respect to the truth is, not to reveal to us the truth anew, much less to reveal to us new truth, but efficaciously to confirm the Word, revealed in the Scriptures, to us, and efficaciously to impress it on our hearts (I. ix. 3). This Calvin makes superabundantly plain by an illustration and a didactic statement of great clearness. The illustration (I. ix. 3) is drawn from our Lord's dealings with His two disciples with whom after His rising He walked to Emmaus. "He opened their understandings," Calvin explains, "not that rejecting the Scriptures they might be wise of themselves, but that they might understand the Scriptures." Such also, he says, is the testimony of the Spirit to-day: for what is it - and this is the didactic statement to which we have referred - but an enabling of us by the light of the Spirit to behold the divine countenance in the Scriptures that so our minds may be filled with a solid reverence for the Word (I. ix. 3)? Here we have the nature of the testimony of the Spirit, and its manner of working and its effects, announced to us in a single clause. It is an illumination of our minds, by which we are enabled to see God in the Scriptures, so that we may reverence them as from Him.

Other effect than this Calvin explicitly denies to the testimony of the Spirit, and he defends his denial from the charge of inconsistency with the stress he has previously laid upon the necessity of this testimony (I. ix. 3). It is not to deny the necessity of this work of the Spirit, he argues, to confine it to the express confirmation of the Word and of the revelation contained therein. Nor is it derogatory to the Spirit to confine His operations now to the confirmation of the revealed Word. While on the other hand to attribute to Him repeated or new revelations to each of the children of God, as the mystics do, is derogatory to the Word, which is His inspired product. To lay claim to the possession of such a Spirit as this, he declares, is to lay claim to the possession of a different Spirit from that which dwelt in Christ and the Apostles - for their Spirit honored the Word - and a different Spirit from that which was promised by Christ to His disciples - for this Spirit was "not to speak of Himself." It is to lay claim to a Spirit for whose divine mission and character, moreover, we lack all criterion - for how can we know that the Spirit that speaks in us is from God, save as He honors the Word of God (I. ix. 1 and 2)? From all which it is perfectly plain not only that Calvin did not conceive the testimony of the Spirit as taking effect in the form of propositional revelations, but that he did conceive it as an operation of God the Holy Spirit in the heart of man which is so connected with the revelation of God in His Word, that it manifests itself only in conjunction with that revelation.

Calvin's formula here is, The Word and Spirit.58 Only in the conjunction of the two can an effective revelation be made to the sin-darkened mind of man.59 The Word supplies the objective factor; the Spirit the subjective factor; and only in the union of the objective and subjective factors is the result accomplished. The whole objective revelation of God lies, thus, in the Word. But the whole subjective capacitating for the reception of this revelation lies in the will of the Spirit. Either, by itself, is wholly ineffective to the result aimed at - the production of knowledge in the human mind. But when they unite, knowledge is not only rendered possible to man: it is rendered certain. And therefore it is that Calvin represents the provision for the knowledge of God both in the objective revelation in the Word and in the subjective testimony of the Spirit as destined by God not for men at large, but specifically for His people, His elect, those "to whom He determined to make His instructions effectual" (I. vi. 3). The Calvinism of Calvin's doctrine of religious knowledge comes to clear manifestation here; and that not merely because of its implication of the doctrine of election, but also because of its implication of Calvin's specific doctrine of the means of grace. Already in his doctrine of religious knowledge, we find Calvin teaching that God is known not by those who choose to know Him, but by those by whom He chooses to be known: and this simply because the knowledge of God is God-given, and is therefore given to whom He will. Men do not wring the knowledge of God from a Deity reluctant to be known: God imparts the knowledge of Himself to men reluctant to know Him: and therefore none know Him save those to whom He efficaciously imparts, by His Word and Spirit, the knowledge of Himself. "By His Word and Spirit " - therein is expressed already the fundamental formula of the Calvinistic doctrine of the "means of grace." In that doctrine the Spirit is not, with the Lutherans, conceived as in the Word, conveyed and applied where-ever the Word goes: nor is the Word, with the mystics, conceived as in the Spirit always essentially present wherever He is present in His power as a Spirit of revelation and truth. The two are severally contemplated, as separable factors, in the one work of God in producing the knowledge of Himself which is eternal life in the souls of His people; separable factors which must both, however, be present if this knowledge of God is to be produced. For it is the function of the Word to set before the soul the object to be believed; and it is the function of the Spirit to quicken in the soul belief in this object: and neither performs the work of the other or its own work apart from the other.

It still remains, however, to inquire precisely how Calvin conceived the Spirit to operate in bringing the soul to a hearty faith in the Word as a revelation from God. Are we to understand him as teaching that the Holy Spirit by His almighty power creates, in the souls of those whom God has set upon to bring to a knowledge of Him, an entirely ungrounded faith in the divinity of the Scriptures and the truth of their contents, so that the soul embraces them and their contents with firm confidence as a revelation from God wholly apart from and in the absence of all indicia of their divinity or of the truth of their contents? So it has come to be very widely believed; and indeed it may even be said that it has become the prevalent representation that Calvin taught that believers have within themselves a witness of the Spirit by which they are assured of the divinity of Scripture and the truth of its contents quite apart from all other evidence. The very term, "the testimony of the Spirit," is adduced in support of this representation, as setting a divine witness to the divinity of Scripture over against other sources of evidence, and of course superseding them: and appeal is made along with this to Calvin's strong assertions of the uselessness and even folly of plying men with "the proofs" of the divine origin of Scripture, seeing that, it is said, in the absence of the testimony of the Spirit such "proofs" must needs be ineffective, and in the presence of that effective testimony they cannot but be adjudged unnecessary. What can he mean, then, it is asked, but that the testimony of the Holy Spirit is sufficient to assure us of the divinity of Scripture apart from all indicia, and does its work entirely independently of them?

The sufficient answer to this question is that he can mean - and in point of fact does mean - that the indicia are wholly insufficient to assure us of the divinity of Scripture apart from the testimony of the Spirit; and effect no result independently of it. This is quite a different proposition and gives rise to quite a different series of corollaries. Calvin's dealing with the indicia of the divinity of Scripture has already attracted our attention in one of its aspects, and it is quite worthy of renewed scrutiny. We have seen that he devotes a whole chapter to their exposition (chap. viii.) and strongly asserts their objective conclusiveness to the fact of the divine origin of Scripture (I. vii. 4). Nor does he doubt their usefulness whether to the believer or the unbeliever. The fulness and force of his exposition of them is the index to his sense of their value to the believer: for he adduces them distinctly as confirmations of believers in their faith in the Scriptures (I. viii. 1, 13), and betrays in every line of their treatment the high significance he attaches to them as such. And he explicitly declares that they not only maintain in the minds of the pious the native dignity and authority of Scripture, but completely vindicate it against all the subtleties of calumniators (I. viii. 13). No man of sound mind can fail to confess on their basis that it is God who speaks in Scripture and that its doctrine is divine (I. vii. 4). It is a complete misapprehension of Calvin's meaning, then, when it is suggested that he represents the indicia of the divinity of Scripture as inconclusive or even as ineffective.60 Their conclusiveness could not be asserted with more energy than he asserts it: nor indeed could their effectiveness - their effectiveness in extorting from the unbeliever the confession of the divinity of Scripture and in rendering him without excuse in refusing the homage of his mind and heart to it - in a word, will he, nill he, convincing his intellect of its divinity; their effectiveness also in confirming the believer in his faith and maintaining his confidence intact. This prevalent misapprehension of Calvin's meaning is due to neglect to observe the precise thing for which he affirms the indicia to be ineffective and the precise reason he assigns for this ineffectiveness. There is only one thing which he says they cannot do: that is to produce "sound faith" (I. vii. 4), "firm faith" (I. viii. 13) - that assurance which is essential to "true piety" (I. vii. 4). And their failure to produce "sound faith" is due solely to the subjective condition of man, which is such that a creative operation of the Holy Spirit on the soul is requisite before he can exercise "sound faith " (I. vii. 4; I. viii. 13). It is the attempt to produce this "sound faith" in the heart of man, not renewed for believing by the creative operation of the Holy Spirit, which Calvin pronounces preposterous and foolish. "It is acting a preposterous part," he says, "to endeavor to produce sound faith in the Scriptures by disputations": objections may be silenced by such disputations, "but this will not fix in men's hearts that assurance which is essential to true piety"; for religion is not a matter of mere opinion, but a fundamental change of attitude towards God (I. vii. 4). It betrays, therefore, great folly to wish to demonstrate to infidels that the Scriptures are the Word of God, he repeats in another place, obviously with no other meaning, "since this cannot be known without faith," that is, as the context shows, without the internal working of the Spirit of God (I. viii. 13, end).

That Calvin should thus teach that the indicia are incapable of producing "firm faith" in the human heart, disabled by sin, is a matter of course: and therefore it is a matter of course that he should teach that the indicia are ineffective for the production of "sound faith" apart from the internal operation of the Spirit correcting the sin-bred disabilities of man, that is to say, apart from the testimony of the Spirit. But what about the indicia in conjunction with the testimony of the Spirit? It would seem to be evident that, on Calvin's ground, they would have their full part to play here, and that we must say that, when the soul is renewed by the Holy Spirit to a sense for the divinity of Scripture, it is through the indicia of that divinity that it is brought into its proper confidence in the divinity of Scripture. In treating of the indicia, Calvin does not, however, declare this in so many words. He sometimes even appears to speak of them rather as if they lay side by side with the testimony of the Spirit than acted along with it as co-factors in the production of the supreme effect. He speaks of their ineffectiveness in producing sound faith in the unbeliever: and of their value as corroboratives to the believer: and his language would sometimes seem to suggest that therefore it were just as well not to employ them until after faith had formed itself under the testimony of the Spirit (I. viii. 1, 13). Of their part in forming faith under the operation of the testimony of the Spirit he does not appear explicitly to speak.61

Nevertheless, there are not lacking convincing hints that there was lying in his mind all the time the implicit understanding that it is through these indicia of the divinity of Scripture that the soul, under the operation of the testimony of the Spirit, reaches its sound faith in Scripture, and that he has been withheld from more explicitly stating this only by the warmth of his zeal for the necessity of the testimony of the Spirit which has led him to a constant contrasting of this divine with those human "testimonies." Thus we find him repeatedly affirming that these indicia will produce no fruit until they be confirmed by the internal testimony of the Spirit (I. vii. 4, 5; viii. 1, 13): "Our reverence may be conciliated by its internal majesty [the Scripture's], but it never seriously affects us, till it is confirmed by the Spirit in our hearts" (I. vii. 5). "Without this certainty, . . . in vain will the authority of Scripture be either defended by arguments or established by the consent of the Church, or of any other supports: since, unless the foundation be laid, it remains in perpetual suspense" (I. viii. 1). The indicia "are alone not sufficient to produce firm faith in it [the Scriptures], till the heavenly Father, discovering His own power therein, places its authority above all controversy " (I. viii. 13). It is, however, in his general teaching as to the formation of sound faith in the divinity of Scripture that we find the surest indication that he thought of the indicia as co-working with the testimony of the Spirit to this result. This is already given, indeed, in his strenuous insistence that the work of the Spirit is not of the nature of a revelation, but of a confirmation of the revelation deposited in the Scriptures, especially when this is taken in connection with his teaching that Scripture is self-authenticating. What the Spirit of God imparts to us, he says, is a sense of divinity: such a sense discovers divinity only where divinity is and only by a perception of it - a perception which of course rests on its proper indicia. It is because Scripture "exhibits the plainest evidence that it is God who speaks in it" that the newly awakened sense of divinity, quickened in the soul, recognizes it as divine (I. vii. 4). The senses do not distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter - to use Calvin's own illustration (I. vii. 2) - save by the mediation of those indicia of light and darkness, whiteness and blackness, sweetness and bitterness, by which these qualities manifest themselves to the natural senses; and by parity of reasoning we must accredit Calvin as thinking of the newly implanted spiritual sense discerning the divinity of Scripture only through the mediation of the indicia of divinity manifested in Scripture. To taste and see that the Scriptures are divine is to recognize a divinity actually present in Scripture; and of course recognition implies perception of indicia, not attribution of a divinity not recognized as inherent. Meanwhile it must be admitted that Calvin has not at this point developed this side of his subject with the fulness which might be wished, but has left it to the general implications of the argument.

OBJECT TESTIFIED TO

Closely connected with the question of the mode in which Calvin conceived the testimony of the Spirit to be delivered, is the further question of the matters for which he conceived that testimony to be available. On the face of it it would seem that he conceived it directly available solely for the divinity of the Scriptures and therefore for the revelatory character of their contents. So he seems to imply throughout the discussion, and, indeed, to assert repeatedly. Nevertheless, there is a widespread impression abroad that he appealed to it to determine the canon of Scripture too,62 and indeed also to establish the integrity of its text. This impression is generally, though not always, connected with the view that Calvin conceived the mode of delivery of the testimony of the Spirit to be the creation in the soul of a blind faith, unmotived by reasons and without rooting in grounds; and it has been much exploited of late years in the interests of a so-called "free" attitude towards Scripture, which announces itself as following Calvin when it refuses to acknowledge as authoritative Scripture any portion of or element in the traditionally transmitted Scriptures which does not spontaneously commend itself to the immediate religious judgment as divine. Undoubtedly this is to reverse the attitude of Calvin towards the traditionally transmitted Scriptures, and it is difficult to believe that two such diametrically contradictory attitudes towards the Scriptures can be outgrowths of the same principal root. In point of fact, moreover, as we have already seen, not only does Calvin not conceive the mode of the delivery of the testimony of the Spirit to be by the creation of a blind and unmotived faith, but, to come at once to the matter more particularly in hand, he does not depend on the testimony of the Spirit for the determination of canonicity or for the establishment of the integrity of the text of Scripture. So far from discarding the via rationalis here, he determines the limits of the canon and establishes the integrity of the transmission of Scripture distinctly on scientific, that is to say, historico-critical grounds. In no case of his frequent discussion of such subjects does he appeal to the testimony of the Spirit and set aside the employment of rational and historical argumentation as invalid or inconclusive; always, on the contrary, he adduces the evidence of valid tradition and apostolicity of contents as conclusive of the fact. It is hard to believe that such a consequent mind could have lived unconsciously in such an inconsistent attitude towards a question so vital to him and his cause.63

So far as support for the impression that Calvin looked to the testimony of the Spirit to determine for him the canon of Scripture and to assure him of its integrity is derived from his writings, it rests on a manifest misapprehension of a single passage in the "Institutes," and what seems to be a misassignment to him of a passage in the old French Confession of Faith.

The passage in the "Institutes" is a portion of the paragraphs which are devoted to repelling the Romish contention that "the Scriptures have only so much weight as is conceded to them by the suffrages of the Church; as though the eternal and inviolable truth of God depended on the arbitrary will of men" (I. vii. 1). "For thus," Calvin says - and this is the passage which is appealed to - "For thus, dealing with the Holy Spirit as a mere laughing stock (ludibrio), they ask, Who shall give us confidence that these [Scriptures] have come from God, - who assure us that they have reached our time safe and intact, - who persuade us that one book should be received reverently, another expunged from the number (numero) - if the Church should not prescribe a certain rule for all these things? It depends, therefore, they say, on the Church, both what reverence is due to Scripture, and what books should be inscribed (censendi sint) in its catalogue (in eius catalogo)" (I. vii. 1). This passage certainly shows that the Romish controversialists in endeavoring to prove that the authority of Scripture is dependent on the Church's suffrage, argued that it is only by the Church that we can be assured even of the contents of Scripture and of its integrity - that its very canon and text rest on the Church's determination. But how can it be inferred that Calvin's response to this argument would take the form: No, of these things we can be assured by the immediate testimony of the Spirit? In point of fact, he says nothing of the kind, and the inference does not lie in the argument. What he says is that the Romish method of arguing is as absurd as it is blasphemous, a mere cavil (I. vii. 2), as well as derogatory to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, he says, assures us that in the Scriptures God speaks to us. To bid us pause on the ground that it is only the Church who can assure us that this or that book belongs to the body of the Scriptures, that the text has been preserved to us intact and the like, is to interpose frivolous objections, and can have no other end than to glorify the Church at the expense of souls. Accordingly, he remarks that these objectors are without concern what logical difficulties they may cast themselves into: they wish only to prevent men taking their comfort out of the direct assurance by the Spirit of the divinity of the Scriptures. He repudiates, in a word, the entire Romish argument: but we can scarcely infer from this, that his response to it would be that the immediate witness of the Spirit provides us with direct answers to their carping questions. It is at least equally likely from the mere fact that he speaks of these objections as cavils (I. vii. 2) and girds at the logic of the Romish controversialists as absurd, that his response would be that the testimony of the Spirit for which he was contending had no direct concernment with questions of canon and text.

The passage in the Confession of La Rochelle, on the other hand, does certainly attribute the discrimination of the canonical books in some sense - in what sense may admit of debate - to the testimony of the Spirit. In the third article of this Confession there is given a list of the canonical books.64 The fourth article, then, runs as follows: "We recognize these books to be canonical and the very certain rule of our faith, not so much by the common accord and consent of the Church, as by the inward witness and persuasion of the Holy Spirit, who makes us distinguish them from the other ecclesiastical books, upon which, though they may be useful, no article of faith can be founded." This article, however, was not the composition of Calvin, but was among those added by the Synod of Paris to the draft submitted by Calvin.65 Calvin's own article "On the Books of Holy Scripture," which was expanded by the Synod into several, reads only: "This doctrine does not derive its authority from men, nor from angels, but from God alone; we believe, too (seeing that it is a thing surpassing all human sense to discern that it is God who speaks), that He Himself gives the certitude of it to His elect, and seals it in their hearts by His Spirit."66 In this fine statement we find the very essence of the teaching of the "Institutes" on this subject; the ideas and even the phraseology of which are reproduced.

We may learn, therefore, at most, from the Confession of La Rochelle, not that Calvin, but that some of his immediate followers attributed in some sense the discrimination of the canonical books to the witness of the Spirit. Other evidences of this fact are not lacking. The Belgian Confession, for example, much like that of La Rochelle, declares of the Scriptural books, just enumerated (Art. v.): "We receive all these books alone, as holy and canonical, for the regulation, foundation and establishment of our faith, and we fully believe all that they contain, not so much because the Church receives and approves them, but principally because the Spirit gives witness to them in our hearts that they are from God, and also because they are approved by themselves; for the very blind can perceive that the things come to pass which they predict." Perhaps, however, we may find a more instructive instance still in the words of one of the Protestant disputants in a conference held at Paris in 1566 between two Protestant ministers and two doctors of the Sorbonne.67 To the inquiry, How do you know that some books are canonical and others Apocryphal, the Protestant disputant (M. Lespine) answers: "By the Spirit of God which is a Spirit of discrimination, by whom all those to whom He is communicated are illuminated, so as to be made capable of judging and discerning spiritual things and of recognizing (cognoistre) and apprehending the truth (when it is proposed to them), by the witness and assurance which He gives to them in their hearts. And as we discriminate light and darkness by the faculty of sight which is in the eye; so, we can easily separate and recognize (recognoistre) truth from falsehood, and from all things in general which can be false, absurd, doubtful or indifferent, when we are invested with the Spirit of God and guided by the light which He lights in our hearts." M. Lespine had evidently read his Calvin; though there is a certain lack of crisp exactness in his language which may raise doubt whether he has necessarily reproduced him with precision. Clearly his idea is that the Spirit of God in His creative operation on the hearts of Christ's people has implanted in them - or quickened in them - a spiritual sense, which recognizes the stamp of divinity upon the books which God has given to the Church, and so separates them out from all others and thus constitutes the canon. This is to attribute the discrimination of the canonical books to the witness of the Spirit not directly but indirectly, namely, through the intermediation of the determination of the books which are of divine origin, which, then, being gathered together, constitute the canon, or divinely given rule of our faith and life. This conception of the movement of the mind in this matter became very common, and was given very clear expression, for example, by Jurieu, in a context which bears as evident marks of reminiscences of Calvin as do M. Lespine's remarks. "That grace which produces faith in a soul," says he,68 "does not begin . . . by persuading it that a given book is canonical. This persuasion comes only afterwards and as a consequence. It gives to the consciousness a taste for the truth: it applies this truth to the mind and heart; it proceeds from this subsequently that the believer believes that a given book is canonical, because the truths which 'find' him are found in it. In a word, we do not believe that which is contained in a book to be divine because this book is canonical. But we believe that a given book is canonical because we have perceived that what it contains is divine. And we have perceived this as we perceive the light when we look on the fire, sweetness and bitterness when we eat." Whether we are to attribute this movement of thought, however, to Calvin, is another question.69 There is no hint of it in his writings.

It is not even obvious that this precise movement of thought is the conception which lay in the mind of the authors of the additional articles in the Confession of La Rochelle and of the similar statement in the Belgian Confession. The interpretation of these articles is particularly interesting, as they both undoubtedly came under the eye of Calvin and their doctrine was never disavowed by him. It is not, however, altogether easy, because of a certain ambiguity in the use of the term "canonical." It is on account of the ambiguity which attends the use of this term that in speaking of their teaching we have guardedly said that they appear to suspend the canonicity of the Scriptural books in some sense directly on the testimony of the Spirit. This ambiguity may be brought sharply before us by placing in juxtaposition two sentences from Quenstedt in which the term "canonical" is employed, obviously, in two differing senses. "We deny," says he, "that the catalogue of canonical books is an article of faith, superadded to the others [articles of faith] contained in Scripture. Many have faith and may attain salvation who do not hold the number of canonical books. If the word 'canon' be understood of the number of the books, we concede that such a catalogue is not contained in Scripture." "These are two different questions," says he again, "whether the Gospel of Matthew is canonical, and whether it was written by Matthew. The former belongs to saving faith; the latter to historical knowledge. For if the Gospel which has come down to us under the name of Matthew had been written by Philip or Bartholomew, it would make no difference to saving faith." In the former extract the question of canonicity is removed from the category of articles of faith; in the latter it is made an integral element of saving faith. The contradiction is glaring - unless there be an undistributed middle. And this is what there really is. In the former passage, where Quenstedt is engaged in repelling the contention that there are articles of faith that must be accepted by all, which are not contained in Scripture - in defending, in a word, the Protestant doctrine of the sufficiency or perfection of Scripture - he uses the terms "canon," "canonical" in the purely technical sense of the extent of Scripture. In the latter passage, where he is insisting that the authority of Scripture as the Word of God hangs on its divine, not on its human, author, he uses the term "canonical" in the sense of "divinely given." The term "canonical" was current, then, in the two senses of "belonging to the list of authoritative Scriptures," "entering into the body of the Scriptures," and "God-given," "divine." In which of these two senses is it used in the Gallican and Belgian Confessions? If in the former, then these Confessions teach that the testimony of the Spirit is available directly for the determination of the canon: if in the latter, then they teach no such thing, but only that it is on the testimony of the Spirit that we are assured of the divine origin and character of these books.

That the Gallican Confession employs the term in the latter of these senses, seems at least possible when once attention is called to it, although regard for the last clause of the statement, "who makes us distinguish them from the other ecclesiastical books," etc., prevents the representation of this interpretation as certain. Its declaration, succeeding the catalogue of the books given in the third section, is obviously intended to affirm something that is true of them already as a definite body of books before the mind. "We recognize these books," it says, "to be canonical and the very certain rule of our faith." That is to say, to this body of books we ascribe the quality of canonicity and recognize their regulative character. What would seem, then, to be in question is a quality belonging to a list of books already determined and in the mind of the framer of the statement as a whole. The same may be said of the Belgian Confession. It, too, has already given a list of the canonical books, and now proceeds to affirm something that is true of "all of these books and them only." The thing affirmed is that they are "holy and canonical," where the collocation suggests that "canonical" expresses a quality which ranges with "holy." We cannot help, suspecting, then, that these early confessions use the term "canonical" not quantitatively but qualitatively, not extensively but intensively; and in that sense it is the equivalent of "divine."70 Even the inference back from them to Calvin that he may have supposed that the testimony of the Spirit is available to determine the canon becomes therefore doubtful: and no other reason exists why we should attribute this view to him. We cannot affirm that the movement of his thought was never from the divinity of Scripture, assured to us by the testimony of the Spirit, to the determination of the limits of the canon: but we have no reason to ascribe this movement of thought to him except that it was adopted by some of his successors.

On the other hand, Calvin constantly speaks as if the only thing which the testimony of the Spirit assures us of in the case of the Scriptures is the divinity of their origin and contents: and he always treats Scripture when so speaking of it as a definite entity, held before his mind as a whole.71 In these circumstances his own practice in dealing with the question of canonicity and text, makes it sufficiently clear that he held their settlement to depend on scientific investigation, and appealed to the testimony of the Spirit only to accredit the divine origin of the concrete volume thus put into his hands. The movement of his thought was therefore along this course: first, the ascertainment, on scientific grounds, of the body of books handed down from the Apostles as the rule of faith and practice; secondly, the vindication, on the same class of grounds, of the integrity of their transmission; thirdly, the accrediting of them as divine on the testimony of the Spirit. It is not involved in this that he is to be considered to have supposed that a man must be a scholar before he can be a Christian. He supposed we become Christians not by scholarship but by the testimony of the Spirit in the heart, and he had no inclination to demand scholarship as the basis of our Christianity. It is only involved in the position we ascribe to him that he must be credited with recognizing that questions of scholarship are for scholars and questions of religion only for Christians as such. He would have said - he does say - that he in whose heart the Spirit bears His testimony will recognize the Scriptures whenever presented to his contemplation as divine, will depend on them with sound trust and will embrace with true faith all that they propound to him. He would doubtless have said that this act of faith logically implicates the determination of the "canon." But he would also have said - he does in effect say - that this determination of the canon is a separable act and is to be prosecuted on its own appropriate grounds of scientific evidence. It involves indeed a fundamental misapprehension of Calvin's whole attitude to attribute to him the view that the testimony of the Spirit determines immediately such scientific questions as those of the canon and text of Scripture. The testimony of the Spirit was to him emphatically an operation of the Spirit of God on the heart, which produced distinctively a spiritual effect: it was directed to making men Christians,72 not to making them theologians. The testimony of the Spirit was, in effect, in his view, just what we in modern times have learned to call "regeneration" considered in its noetic effects. That "regeneration" has noetic effects he is explicit and iterative in affirming: but that these noetic effects of "regeneration" could supersede the necessity of scientific investigation in questions which rest for their determination on matters of fact - Calvin would be the last to imagine. He who recognized that the conviction of the divinity of Scripture wrought by the testimony of the Spirit rests as its ground on the indicia of the divinity of Scripture spiritually discerned in their true weight, could not imagine that the determination of the canon of Scripture or the establishment of its text could be wholly separated from their proper basis in evidence and grounded solely in a blind testimony of the Spirit alone: which indeed in that case would be fundamentally indistinguishable from that "revelation" which he rebuked the Anabaptists for claiming to be the recipients of.

THE TESTIMONY AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE

When we clearly apprehend the essence of Calvin's doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit to the divinity of Scripture to be the noetic effects of "regeneration" we shall know what estimate to place upon the criticism which is sometimes passed upon him that he has insufficiently correlated his doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit with the inner73 religious life of the Christian, has given too separate a place to the Spirit's witness to Scripture, and thus has overestimated the formal principle of Protestantism in comparison with the material principle,74 with the effect of giving a hard, dry, and legalistic aspect to Christianity as expounded by him. With Luther, it is said, everything is made of Justification and the liberty of the Christian man fills the horizon of thought; and this is because his mind is set on the "faith" out of which all good things flow and by which everything - Scripture itself - is dominated. With Calvin, on the other hand, with his primary emphasis on the authority of Scripture, accredited to us by a distinct act of the Holy Spirit, the watchword becomes obedience; and the horizon of thought is filled with a sense of obligation and legalistic anxiety as to conduct.

How Calvin could have failed to correlate sufficiently closely the testimony of the Spirit with the inner Christian life, or could have emphasized the formal principle of Protestantism at the expense of the material, when he conceived of the witness of the Spirit as just one of the effects of "regeneration," it is difficult to see. So to conceive the testimony of the Spirit is on the contrary to make the formal principle of Protestantism just an outgrowth of the material. It is only because our spirits have been renewed by the Holy Spirit that we see with convincing clearness the indicia of God in Scripture, that is, have the Scriptures sealed to us by the Spirit as divine. It is quite possible that Calvin may have particularly emphasized the obligations which grow out of our renewal by the Holy Spirit and the implantation in us of the Spirit of Adoption whereby we become the sons of God - obligations to comport ourselves as the sons of God and to govern ourselves by the law of God's house as given us in His Word; while Luther may have emphasized more the liberty of the Christian man who is emancipated from the law as a condition of salvation and is ushered into the freedom of life which belongs to the children of God. And it is quite possible that in this difference we may find a fundamental distinction between the two types of Protestantism - Lutheran and Reformed - by virtue of which the Reformed have always been characterized by a strong ethical tendency - in thought and in practice. But it is misleading to represent this as due to an insufficient correlation on Calvin's part of the testimony of the Spirit to the divinity of Scripture with the inner Christian life. It would be more exact to say that Calvin in this correlation thinks especially of what in our modern nomenclature we call "regeneration," while the mind of his Lutheran critics is set more upon justification and that "faith" which is connected with justification. With Calvin, at all events, the recognition of the Scriptures as divine and the hearty adoption of them as the divine rule of our faith and life is just one of the effects of the gracious operation of the Spirit of God on the heart, renewing it into spiritual life, or, what comes to the same thing, one of the gracious activities into which the newly implanted spiritual life effloresces.

Whether we should say also that it was with him the first effect of the creative operation of the Spirit on the heart, the first act of the newly renewed soul, requires some discrimination. If we mean logically first, there is a sense in which we should probably answer this question also in the affirmative. Calvin would doubtless have said that it is in the Scriptures that Christ is proposed to our faith, or, to put it more broadly, that Christ is the very substance of the special revelation documented in the Scriptures, and that the laying hold of Christ by faith presupposes therefore confidence in the revelation the substance of which He is - which is as much as to say the embracing of the Scriptures in firm faith as a revelation from God. If the Word is the vehicle through which the knowledge of Christ is brought to the soul, it follows of itself that it is only when our minds are filled with a solid reverence for the Word, when by the light of the Spirit we are enabled and prevalently led to see Christ therein, that we can embrace Christ with a sound faith: so that it may truly be said that no man can have the least true and sound knowledge of Christ without learning from Scripture (cf. I. ix. 3; I. vi. 2). In this sense Calvin would certainly have said that our faith in Christ presupposes faith in the Scriptures, rather than that we believe in the Scriptures for Christ's sake. But if our minds are set on chronological sequences, the response to the question which is raised is more doubtful. Faith in the revelation the substance of which is Christ and faith in Christ the substance of this revelation are logical implicates which involve one another: and we should probably be nearest to Calvin's thought if, without raising questions of chronological succession, we should recognize them as arising together in the soul. The real difference between Calvin's and the ordinary Lutheran conception at this point lies in the greater profundity of Calvin's insight and the greater exactness of his analysis. The Lutheran is prone to begin with faith, which is naturally conceived at its apex, as faith in Jesus Christ our Redeemer; and to make everything else flow from this faith as its ultimate root. For what comes before faith, out of which faith itself flows, he has little impulse accurately to inquire. Calvin penetrates behind faith to the creative action of the Holy Spirit on the heart and the new creature which results therefrom, whose act faith is; and is therefore compelled by an impulse derived from the matter itself to consider the relations in which the several activities of this new creature stand to one another and to analyse the faith itself which holds the primacy among them (for trust is the essence of religion, chap. ii.), into its several movements. The effect of this is that "efficacious grace" - what we call in modern speech "regeneration" - takes the place of fundamental principle in Calvin's soteriology and he becomes preeminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit. In point of fact it is from him accordingly that the effective study of the work of the Holy Spirit takes its rise, and it is only in the channels cut by him and at the hands of thinkers taught by him that the theology of the Holy Spirit has been richly developed.75

It is his profound sense of the supernatural origin of all that is good in the manifestations of human life which constitutes the characteristic mark of Calvin's thinking: and it is this which lies at the bottom of and determines his doctrine of the witness of the Holy Spirit. He did not doubt that the act of faith by which the child of God embraces the Scriptures as a revelation of God is his own act and the expression of his innermost consciousness. But neither did he doubt that this consciousness is itself the expression of a creative act of the Spirit of God. And it was on this account that he represented to himself the act of faith performed as resting ultimately on "the testimony of the Spirit." Its supernatural origin was to him the most certain thing about it. That language very much resembling his own might be employed in a naturalistic sense was, no doubt, made startlingly plain in his own day by the teaching of Castellion. Out of his pantheising rationalism Castellion found it possible to speak almost in Calvin's words. "It is evident," says he, "that the intention and secret counsels of God, hidden in the Scriptures, are revealed only to believers, the humble, the pious, who fear God and have the Spirit of God." If the wicked have sometimes spoken like prophets, they have nevertheless not really understood what they said, but are like magpies in a cage going through the forms of speech without inner apprehension of its meaning.76 But Castellion meant by this nothing more than that sympathy is requisite to understanding. Since his day multitudes more have employed Calvin's language to express little more than this; and have even represented Calvin's own meaning as nothing more than that the human consciousness acquires by association with God in Christ the power of discriminating the truth of God from falsehood. Nothing could more fundamentally subvert Calvin's whole teaching. The very nerve of his thought is, that the confidence of the Christian in the divine origin and authority of Scripture and the revelatory nature of its contents is of distinctively supernatural origin, is God-wrought. The testimony of the Spirit may be delivered through the forms of our consciousness, but it remains distinctively the testimony of God the Holy Spirit and is not to be confused with the testimony of our consciousness.77 Resting on the language of Rom. viii. 16, from which the term "testimony of the Spirit" was derived, he conceived it as a co-witness along with the witness of our spirit indeed, but on that very account distinguishable from the witness of our spirit. This particular point is nowhere discussed by him at large, but Calvin's general sense is perfectly plain. That there is a double testimony he is entirely sure - the testimony of our own spirit and that of the Holy Spirit: that these are though distinguishable yet inseparable, he is equally clear: his conception is therefore that this double testimony runs confluently together into one. This is only as much as to say afresh that the testimony of the Holy Spirit is not delivered to us in a propositional revelation, nor by the creating in us of a blind conviction, but along the lines of our own consciousness. In its essence, the act of the Spirit in delivering His testimony, terminates on our nature, or faculties, quickening them so that we feel, judge, and act differently from what we otherwise should. In this sense, the testimony of the Spirit coalesces with our consciousness. We cannot separate it out as a factor in our conclusions, judgments; feelings, actions, consciously experienced as coming from without. But we function differently from before: we recognize God where before we did not perceive Him; we trust and love Him where before we feared and hated Him; we firmly embrace Him in His Word where before we turned indifferently away. This change needs accounting for. We account for it by the action of the Holy Spirit on our hearts; and we call this His "testimony." But we cannot separate His action from our recognition of God, our turning in trust and love to Him and the like. For this is the very form in which the testimony of the Spirit takes effect, into which it flows, by which it is recognized. We are profoundly conscious that of ourselves we never would have seen thus, and that our seeing thus can never find its account in anything in us by nature. We are sure, therefore, that there has come upon us a revolutionary influence from without; and we are sure that this is the act of God. Calvin would certainly have cried as one of his most eloquent disciples cries to-day: "The Holy Spirit is God, and not we ourselves. What we are speaking of is a Spirit which illuminates our spirit, which purifies our spirit, which strives against our spirit, which triumphs over our spirit. And you say this Spirit is nothing but our spirit? By no means. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God - this is God coming into us, not coming from us."78 It is with equal energy that Calvin declares the supernaturalness of the testimony of the Spirit and repels every attempt to confound it with the human consciousness through which it works. To him this testimony is just God Himself in His intimate working in the human heart, opening it to the light of the truth, that by this illumination it may see things as they really are and so recognize God in the Scriptures with the same directness and surety as men recognize sweetness in what is sweet and brightness in what is bright. Here indeed lies the very hinge of his doctrine.79

It has seemed desirable to enter into some detail with respect to Calvin's doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit, not only because of its intrinsic interest, but also because of its importance for understanding Calvin's doctrine of the knowledge of God and indeed his whole system of truth, and for a proper estimate of his place in the history of thought. His doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit is the keystone of his doctrine of the knowledge of God. Men endowed by nature with an ineradicable sensus deitatis, which is quickened into action and informed by a rich revelation of God spread upon His works and embodied in His deeds, are yet held back from attaining a sound knowledge of God by the corruption of their hearts, which dulls their instinctive sense of God and blinds them to His revelation in works and deeds. That His people may know Him, therefore, God lovingly intervenes by an objective revelation of Himself in His Word, and a subjective correction of their sin-bred dullness of apprehension of Him through the operation of His Spirit in their hearts, which Calvin calls the Testimony of the Holy Spirit. Obviously it is only through this testimony of the Holy Spirit that the revelation of God, whether in works or Word, is given efficacy: it is God, then, who, through His Spirit, reveals Himself to His people, and they know Him only as taught by Himself. But also on this very account the knowledge they have of Him is trustworthy in its character and complete for its purpose; being God-given, it is safeguarded to us by the dreadful sanction of deity itself. This being made clear, Calvin has laid a foundation for the theological structure - the scientific statement and elaboration of the knowledge of God - than which nothing could be conceived more firm. There remained nothing more for him to do before proceeding at once to draw out the elements of the knowledge of God as they lie in the revelation so assured to us, except to elucidate the indicia by which the Christian under the influence of the testimony of the Spirit is strengthened in his confidence that the Scriptures are the very Word of God, and to repudiate the tendency to neglect these Scriptures so authenticated to us in favor of fancied continuous revelations of the Spirit. The former he does in a chapter (chap. viii.) of considerable length and great eloquence, which constitutes one of the fullest and most powerful expositions of the evidence for the divine origin of the Scriptures which have come down to us from the Reformation age. The latter he does in a briefer chapter (chap. ix.), of crisp polemic quality, the upshot of which is to leave it strongly impressed on the reader's mind that the whole knowledge of God available to us, as the whole knowledge of God needful for us, lies objectively displayed in the pages of Scripture, which, therefore, becomes the sole source of a sound exposition of the knowledge of God.

This strong statement is not intended, however, to imply that the Spirit-led man can learn nothing from the more general revelation of God in His works and deeds. Calvin is so far from denying the possibility of a "Natural Theology," in this sense of the word, that he devotes a whole chapter (chap. v.) to vindicating the rich revelation of God made in His works and deeds: though, of course, he does deny that any theology worthy of the name can be derived from this natural revelation by the "natural man," that is, by the man the eyes of whose mind and heart are not opened by the Spirit of God - who is not under the influence of the testimony of the Spirit; and in this sense he denies the possibility of a "Natural Theology." What the strong statement in question is intended to convey is that there is nothing to be derived from natural revelation which is not also to be found in Scripture, whether as necessary presupposition, involved implication or clear statement; and that beside that documented in Scripture there is no supernatural revelation accessible to men. The work of the Spirit of God is not to supplement the revelation made in Scripture, far less to supersede it, but distinctively to authenticate it. It remains true, then, that the whole matter of a sound theology lies objectively revealed to us in the pages of Scripture; and this is the main result to which his whole discussion tends. But side by side with it requires to be placed as a result of his discussion secondary only to this, this further conclusion, directly given in his doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit - that only a Christian man can profitably theologize. It is in the union of these two great principles that we find Calvin's view of the bases of a true theology. This he conceives as the product of the systematic investigation and logical elaboration of the contents of Scripture by a mind quickened to the apprehension of these contents through the inward operations of the Spirit of God. It is on this basis and in this spirit that Calvin undertakes his task as a theologian; and what he professes to give us in his "Institutes" is thus, to put it simply, just a Christian man's reading of the Scriptures of God.

The Protestantism of this conception of the task of the theologian is apparent on the face of it. It is probably, however, still worth while to point out that its Protestantism does not lie solely or chiefly in the postulate that the Scriptures are the sole authoritative source of the knowledge of God - "formal principle" of the Reformation though that postulate be, and true, therefore, as Chillingworth's famous declaration that "the Bible and the Bible only is the religion of Protestants" would be, if only Chillingworth had kept it to this sense. It lies more fundamentally still in the postulate that these Scriptures are accredited to us as the revelation of God solely by the testimony of the Holy Spirit - that without this testimony they lie before us inert and without effect on our hearts and minds, while with it they become not merely the power of God unto salvation, but also the vitalizing source of all our knowledge of God. There is embodied in this the true Protestant principle, superior to both the so-called formal and the so-called material principles - both of which are in point of fact but corollaries of it. For it takes the soul completely and forcibly out of the hands of the Church and from under its domination, and casts it wholly upon the grace of God. In its formulation Calvin gave to Protestantism for the first time, accordingly, logical stability and an inward sense of security. Men were no more puzzled by the polemics of Rome when they were asked, You rest on Scripture alone, you say: but on what does your Scripture rest? Calvin's development of the doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit provided them with their sufficient answer: "On the testimony of the Spirit of God in the heart." Here we see the historical importance of Calvin's formulation of this doctrine. And here we see the explanation of the two great facts which reveal its historical importance, the facts, to wit, that Calvin had no predecessors in the formulation of the doctrine, and that at once upon his formulation of it it became the common doctrine of universal Protestantism.

IV. HISTORICAL RELATIONS

The search for anticipations of the doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit among the Fathers and Scholastics80 reveals only such sporadic assertions of the dependence of man on the inward teaching of the Holy Spirit for the knowledge or the saving knowledge of God as could not fail in the speech of a series of Christian men who had read their Bibles. A sentence of this kind from Justin Martyr,81 another from Chrysostom,82 two or three from Hilary of Poitiers,83 almost exhaust what the first age yields. It is different with Augustine. With his profound sense of dependence on God and his vital conviction of the necessity of grace for all that is good in man, in the whole circle of his activities, he could not fail to work out a general doctrine of the knowledge of God in all essentials the same as Calvin's. In point of fact, as we have already pointed out, he did so. There remain, however, some very interesting and some very significant differences between the two.84 It is interesting to note, for instance, that where Calvin speaks of an innate sensus deitatis in man, as lying at the root of all his knowledge of God, Augustine, with a more profound ontology of this knowledge, as at least made explicit in the statement, speaks of a continuous reflection of a knowledge of Himself by God in the human mind.85 There is here, however, probably only a difference in fulness of statement, or at most only of emphasized aspect. On the other hand, it is highly significant that, instead of Calvin's doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit, Augustine, in conformity with the stress he laid upon the "Church" and the "means of grace" in the conference of grace, speaks of the knowledge of God as attainable only "in the Church."86 Accordingly, in him also and his successors there are to be found only such anticipations specifically of the doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit as are afforded by the increased frequency of their references to the dependence of man for all knowledge of God and divine things on grace and the inward teaching of the heavenly Instructor. The voice of men may assail our ears, says Augustine, for instance, but those remain untaught "to whom that inward unction does not speak, whom the Holy Spirit does not inwardly teach": for "He who teaches the heart has His seat in heaven."87 Moses himself, yea, even if he spoke to us not in Hebrew but in our own tongue, could convey to us only the knowledge of what he said: of the truth of what he said, only the Truth Himself, speaking within us, in the secret chamber of our thought, can assure us though He speaks neither in Hebrew nor in Greek nor in Latin, nor yet in any tongue of the barbarians, but without organs of voice or tongue and with no least syllabic sound.88 Further than this men did not get before the Reformation:89 nor did the first Reformers themselves get further. No doubt they discerned the voice of the Spirit in the Scriptures, as the Fathers did before them; and in a single sentence, written, however, after the "Institutes" of 1539 (viz., in 1555), Melanchthon notes with the Fathers that the mind is "aided in giving its assent" to divine things "by the Holy Spirit."90 Zwingli here stands on the same plane with his brethren. He strongly repels the Romish establishment of confidence in the Scriptures on the ipse dixit of the Church, indeed: and asserts that those who sincerely search the Scriptures are taught by God, and even that none acquire faith in the Word except as drawn by the Father, admonished by the Spirit, taught by the unction - as, says he, all pious men have found.91 But such occasional remarks as this could not fail wherever the Augustinian conception of grace was vitally felt; and show only that the doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit was always implicit in that doctrine.92

The same remark applies to the first edition of Calvin's "Institutes" (1536) also, though with a difference. This difference - that, if we cannot say that the doctrine of the internal testimony of the Spirit to the divinity of the Scriptures is found there already in germ93 any more than we can say the same of the Augustinian Fathers, and the criticism passed94 on the adduction of Melanchthon's single sentence in this reference to the effect that he speaks rather "of the action of the Holy Spirit with reference to the object of faith, that is to say, to the contents of the Word of God" than "with reference to the divinity of the Scriptures themselves," is valid also for Calvin's first edition; yet it is certainly true that the general doctrine of the internal testimony of the Spirit comes much more prominently forward in even the first edition of the "Institutes" than in any preceding treatise of the sort - that much more is made in it than in any of its predecessors of the poverty of the human spirit and the need and actuality of the prevalent influence of the Spirit of God that man may have - whether in knowledge or act - any good thing. We shall have to go back to Augustine to find anything comparable to the conviction and insight with which even in this his earliest work Calvin urges these things. Calvin's whole thought is already dominated by the conception of the powerlessness of the human soul in its sin in all that belongs to the knowledge of God which is salvation, and its entire dependence on the sovereign operations of the Holy Spirit: and in this sense it may be said that the chapters in the new "Institutes" of 1539 in which he develops this doctrine of the noetic effects of sin and their cure by objective revelation, documented in Scripture, and subjective illumination wrought by the Holy Spirit, lay implicitly in his doctrine of man's need and its cure by the indwelling Spirit which pervades the "Institutes" of 1536. There he already teaches that the written law was required by the decay of our consciousness of the law written on the heart; that to know God and His will we have need to surpass ourselves; that it is the Spirit dwelling in us that is the source of all our right knowledge of God; and that it is due to the power of the Spirit alone" that we hear the word of the Holy Gospel, that we accept it by faith, and that we abide in this faith " (p. 137, or Opp. i. 72). With eminent directness and simplicity he already there tells us that "our Lord first teaches and instructs us by His Word; secondarily confirms us by His Sacraments; and thirdly by the light of His Holy Spirit illuminates our understandings and gives entrance into our hearts both to the Word and to the Sacraments, which otherwise would only beat upon our ears and stand before our eyes, without penetrating or operating beneath them" (p. 206, or Opp. i. 104). There is, in other words, very rich teaching in the "Institutes" of 1536 of the entire dependence of sinful man on the Spirit of God for every sound religious movement of the soul: but there is no development of the precise doctrine of the testimony of the Holy Spirit to the divinity of the Scriptures. It is not merely that the term testimonium Spiritus Sancti does not occur in this early draft, or occurs only once, and then not in this sense:95 it is that the thing is not explicated and is present only as implicated in the general doctrine of grace, which is very purely conceived.

It was left, then, to the edition of 1539 to create the whole doctrine at, as it were, a single stroke.96 For, as we have already had occasion to note, Calvin's whole exposition of the doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit to the divinity of Scripture appears all at once in its completeness in the second edition of the "Institutes," the first edition which he issued as a textbook on theology, that of 1539. This exposition was reproduced without curtailment or alteration in all subsequent editions, and is thereby given the great endorsement of Calvin's permanent approval: while the additions which are made to it in the progressive expansion of the treatise, while large in amount, are devoted to guarding it from the misapprehension that the necessity it asserted for the testimony of the Spirit in any way detracted from the objective value of the indicia of the divinity of Scripture, rather than to modifying the positive doctrine expounded. The additions within the limits of chapter vii. consist essentially of the insertion of the discussion of Augustine's doctrine in § 3 and of the caveat with reference to the underestimation of the indicia in § 4, while practically the whole of chapter viii. - all except the opening sentence - is of later origin. If we will omit the first sentence of chapter vii., the whole of §§ 3 and 4, with the exception of the sentence near the beginning of the latter, which begins: "Now if we wish to consult the true intent of our conscience" - and the beginning and end of § 5, retaining only the central passage beginning: "For though it conciliate our reverence . . ." down to the words: "Superior to the power of any human will or knowledge," and also the two striking sentences, beginning with: "It is such a persuasion" and ending with "a just explication of the subject" - we shall have substantially the text of the edition of 1539, needing only to add the two opening sentences of chapter viii. and the major part of chapter ix. It will at once be seen that the edition of 1539 contains the entire positive exposition of the doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit as retained by Calvin to the end.

The formulation of this principle of the testimony of the Spirit by Calvin in 1539 had an extraordinary effect both immediate and permanent.97 Universal Protestantism perceived in it at sight the pure expression of the Protestant principle and the sheet-anchor of its position. The Lutherans as well as the Reformed adopted it at once and made it the basis not only of their reasoned defence of Protestantism, but also of their structure of Christian doctrine and of their confidence in Christian living.98 To it they both continued to cling so long and so far as they continued faithful to the Protestant principle itself. It has given way only as the structure of Protestantism has itself given way in reaction to the Romish position, or, more widely, as the structure of Christian thought has given way in rationalizing disintegration. No doubt it has undergone at the hands of its various expounders, from time to time, more or less modification, and in its journeyings to the ends of the earth, has suffered now and again some sea-change - sometimes through sheer misapprehension, sometimes through sheer misrepresentation, sometimes through more or less admixture of both. A spurious revival of the doctrine was, for example, set on foot by Schleiermacher in his strong revulsion from the cold rationalism which had so long reigned in Germany to a more vital religious faith; and sentences may be quoted from his writings which, when removed out of the context of his system of thought, almost give expression to it.99 But after all, his revival of it was rather the revival of subjectivity in religion than of the doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit as the basis of all faith: and it has borne bitter fruit in a widespread subjectivism, the mark of which is that it discards (as "external") the authority of those very Scriptures to which the testimony of the Spirit is borne. Not in such circles is the continued influence of the doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit to be sought or its continued advocacy to be found. If we would see it in its purity in the modern Church we must look for it in the hands of true successors of Calvin - in the writings, to name only men of our own time, of William Cunningham100 and Charles Hodge101 and Abraham Kuyper102 and Herman Bavinck.103

As we have already had occasion to note, the principle of the testimony of the Spirit as the true basis of our confidence in the Scriptures as the Word of God was almost from the hands of Calvin himself incorporated into the Reformed Creeds. We have already pointed out the sharpness and strength of its expression in the Gallican (1557-1571) and Belgian (1501-1571) Confessions, and it finds at least the expression of suggestion in the Second Helvetic Confession (1562). It was not, however, merely into the Confessions of the Reformation age that it was incorporated. It is given an expression as clear as it is prudent, as decided as it is comprehensive, in that confession of their faith which the persecuted Waldenses issued after the massacres of 1655;104 and it is incorporated into the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) in perhaps the best and most balanced statement it has ever received - the phraseology of which is obviously derived in large part from Calvin, either directly or through the intermediation of George Gillespie,105 but the substance of which was but the expression of the firmly held faith of the whole body of the framers of that culminating Confession of the Reformed Churches.

"We recognize the divinity of these sacred books," says the Waldensian Confession (chap. iv.), "not only through the testimony of the Church, but principally through the eternal and indubitable truth of the doctrine which is contained in them, through the excellence, sublimity, and majesty of the pure divinity (du tout divine) which are apparent in them, and through the operation of the Holy Spirit which makes us receive with deference the testimony which the Church gives to them, which opens our eyes to receive the rays of the celestial light which shines in the Scriptures, and so corrects our taste that we discern this food by the divine savor which it possesses." The dependence of this fine statement on Calvin's exposition is evident; but what is most striking about it is the clarity with which it conceives and the fulness with which it expounds the exact mode of working of the testimony of the Spirit and its relation to the indicia of divinity in Scripture, through which, and not apart from or in opposition to which, it performs its work. So far from supposing that the witness of the Spirit is of the nature of a new and independent revelation from heaven or works only a blind faith in us, setting thus aside all evidences of the divinity of Scripture, external and internal alike, this careful statement particularly explains that our faith in the divinity of Scripture rests, under the testimony of the Spirit, on these evidences as its ground, but not on these evidences by themselves, but on them as apprehended by a Spirit-led mind and heart - the work of the Spirit consisting in so dealing with our spirit that these evidences are, under His influence, perceived and felt in their real bearing and full strength.

An even more notable statement of the whole doctrine is that incorporated into the Westminster Confession (i. 4, 5), and in a more compressed form into the Larger Catechism (Q. 4). "The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed," says the Confession, "dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God. We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to a high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture; and the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God; yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our heart." In the Larger Catechism this is reduced to the form: "The Scriptures manifest themselves to be the Word of God, by their majesty and purity; by the consent of all the parts, and the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God; by their light and power to convince and convert sinners, to comfort and build up believers unto salvation; but the Spirit of God bearing witness by and with the Scriptures in the heart of man, is alone able fully to persuade it that they are the very Word of God." The fundamental excellence of this remarkable statement (for the full understanding of which what is said of "faith" in chapter xiv. of the Confession and Question 72 of the Catechism should be compared with it - just as Calvin referred his readers to his later discussion of "faith" for further information on the topic of the testimony of the Spirit) is the care with which the several grounds on which we recognize the Scriptures to be from God are noted and their value appraised, and that yet the supreme importance of the witness of the Spirit is safe-guarded.106 The external testimony of the Church is noted and its value pointed out: it moves and induces us to a high and reverent esteem for Scripture. The internal testimony of the characteristics of the Scriptures themselves is noted and its higher value pointed out: they "abundantly evidence" or "manifest" the Scriptures "to be the Word of God." The need and place of the testimony of the Spirit is then pointed out in the presence of this "abundant evidencing" or "manifesting": it is not to add new evidence - which is not needed - but to secure deeper conviction - which is needed; and not independently of the Word with its evidencing characteristics, but "by and with the Word" or "the Scriptures." What this evidence of the Spirit does is "fully to persuade us" that "the Scriptures are the very Word of God," - to work in us "full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority" of the Word of God. It is a matter of completeness of conviction, not of grounds of conviction; and the testimony of the Spirit works, therefore, not by adding additional grounds of conviction, but by an inward work on the heart, enabling it to react upon the already "abundant evidence" with a really "full persuasion and assurance." Here we have the very essence of Calvin's doctrine, almost in his own words, and with even more than his own eloquence and precision of statement.

What Calvin has given to the Reformed Churches, therefore, in his formulation of the doctrine of the Testimony of the Spirit is a fundamental doctrine, which has been as such expounded by the whole body of their theologians, and incorporated into the fabric of their public Confessions, so that it has been made and continues to be until to-day the officially declared faith of the Reformed Churches in France and Holland, Switzerland, Italy, Scotland, and America, wherever the fundamental Reformed Creeds are still professed.

Endnotes:

From The Princeton Theological Review, vii. 1909, pp. 219-325.

Article on "Calvin's Institutio, nach Form und Inhalt, in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwickelung," printed in the Theologische Studien und Kritiken for 1868, p. 39. Köstlin's whole account of the origin of these sections in the edition of 1539 is worth reading (pp. 38-39).

"Institutes," I. iii. 1: Quemdam inesse humanae menti, et quidem naturali instinctu, divinitatis sensum, extra controversiam ponimus; iii. 3, ad init.: "This indeed with all rightly judging men will always be assured, that there is engraved on the minds of men divinitatis sensum, qui delera numquam potest"; iii. 3, med.: vigere tamen ac subinde emergere quem maxime extinctum cuperent, deitatis sensum; iv. 4, ad fin.: naturaliter insculptum esae deitatis sensum humanis cordibus; iv. 4, ad fin.: manet tamen semen illud quod revelli a radice nullo modo potest, aliquam esse divinitatem. The phraseology by which Calvin designates this "natural instinct" (naturalis instanctus; iii. 1, ad init.) varies from sensus divinitatis or sensus deitatis to such synonyms as: numinis intelligentia, dei notio, dei notitia. It is the basis on the one hand of whatever cognitio dei man attains to and on the other of whatever religio he reaches; whence it is called the semen religionis.

That the knowledge of God is innate was the common property of the Reformed teachers. Peter Martyr, "Loci Communes," 1576, praef., declares that Dei cognitio omnium animis naturaliter innata [est]. It was thrown into great prominence in the Socinian debate, as the Socinians contended that the human mind is natively a tabula rasa and all knowledge is acquired. But in defending the innate knowledge of God, the Reformed doctors were very careful that it should not be exaggerated. Thus Leonh. Riissen, "F. Turretini Compendium ... auctum et illustratum," 1695, i. 8, remarks: "Some recent writers explain the natural sense of deity (numinis) as an idea of God impressed on our minds. If this idea is understood as an innate faculty for knowing God after some fashion, it should not be denied; but if it expresses an actual and adequate representation of God from our birth, it is to be entirely rejected." (Heppe, "Die Dogmatik der evangelischrcformirten Kirche," 1861, p. 4.)

En quid sit pura germanaque religio, nempe fides, cum serio Dei timore coniuncta; ut timor et voluntariam reverentiam in se contineat, et secum trahat ligitimum cultum, qualis in Lege praescribitur.

The significance and relations of "the Puritan principle" of absolute dependence on the Word of God as the source of knowledge of His will, and exclusive limitation to its prescriptions of doctrine, life, and even form of Church government and worship, are suggested by J. A. Dorner, "Hist. of Protest. Theol.," 1871, i. p. 390, who criticizes it sharply from his "freer" Lutheran standpoint. But even Luther knew how, on occasion, to invoke "the Puritan principle." Writing to Bartime von Sternberg, Sept. 1, 1523, he says: "For a Christian must do nothing that God has not commanded, and there is no command as to such masses and vigils, but it is solely their own invention, which brings in money, without helping either living or dead" ("The Letters of Martin Luther" (selected and translated) by Margaret A. Currie, 1908, p. 115).

Cf. P. J. Muller, "De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn," 1883, p. 8: "If Zwingli follows more the a priori, Calvin follows the a posteriori method"; and E. Rabaud, "Hist. de la doctrine de l'inspiration, etc.," 1883, p. 58: "his lucid and, above everything, practical genius."

It is this distribution of Calvin's interest which leads to the impression that he lays little stress on "the theistic proofs." On the contrary, he asserts their validity most strenuously: only he does not believe that any proofs can work true faith apart from "the testimony of the Spirit," and he is more interested in their value for developing the knowledge of God than for merely establishing His existence. Hence P. J. Muller is wrong when he denies the one to affirm the other, as, e.g., in his "De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn," 1883, p. 11: "Neither by Zwingli nor by Calvin are proofs offered for the existence of God, although some passages in their writings seem to contain suggestions of them. The proposition, 'God exists,' needed no proof either for themselves, or for their coreligionists, or even against Rome. The so-called cosmological argument has no doubt been found by some in Zwingli (Zeller, Das theolog. Syst. Zwingli's extracted from the Theol. Jahrbücher, Tübingen, 1853, p. 33; [or p. 126 in the Th. Jahrb.] ), and the physico-theological in Calvin (Lipsius, Lehrbuch der ev. Prot. Dogmatik, ed. 2, 1879, p. 213) ; but it would not be difficult to show that we have to do in neither case with a philosophical deduction, but only with a means for attaining the complete knowledge of God." Though Calvin (also Zwingli) makes use of the theistic proofs to develop the knowledge of God, it does not follow that he (or Zwingli) did not value them as proofs of the existence of God. And we do not think Muller is successful (pp. 12 sq.) in explaining away the implication of the latter in Zwingli's use of these theistic arguments, or in Calvin's (p. 16). Schweizer, "Glaubenslehre der ev.-ref. Kirche," 1844, i. p. 250, finds in Calvin's citation of Cicero's declaration that there is no nation so barbarous, no tribe so degraded, that it is not persuaded that a God exists, an appeal to the so-called historical argument for the divine existence (cf. the use of it by Zwingli, "Opera," Schuler und Schultess ed., 1832, iii. p. 156): but Calvin's real attitude to the theistic argument is rather to be sought in the implications of the notably eloquent ch. v.

P. J. Muller, "De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn," 1883, pp. 18 sq., does not seem to bear this in mind, although he had clearly stated it in his "De Godsleer van Calvijn," 1881, pp. 13-25.

Cf. F. C. Baur, "Die christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit, etc.," iii. 1843, p. 41: "From this point of view" - he is expounding Calvin's doctrine - "the several manifestations in the history of religions are conceived not as stages in the gradually advancing evolution of the religious consciousness, but as inexcusable, sinful aberrations, as wilful perversions and defacements of the inborn idea of God."

Cf. J. Cramer, Nieuwe Bijdragen op het gebied van Godgeleerdheid en Wijsbegeerte, iii. 1881, p. 102: "By the Scripture or the Scriptures he [Calvin] understood the books of the Old and New Testaments which have been transmitted to us by the Church as canonical, as the rule of faith and life. The Apocrypha of the O. T. as they were determined by the Council of Trent, he excludes. They are to him indeed libri ecclesiastici, in many respects good and useful to be read; but they are not libri canonici 'ad fidem dogmatum faciendam' (Acta Synodi Tridentinae, cum antidoto, 1547)." In a later article, "De Roomsch-Katholieke en de Oud-protestantsche Schriftbeschouwing," 1883, p. 36, Cramer declares that by the Scriptures, Calvin means "nothing else than the canon, established by the Synods of Hippo and Carthage, and transmitted by the Catholic Church, with the exception of the so-called Apocrypha of the O. T.," etc. Cf. Leipoldt, "Geschichte des N. T. Kanons," ii. 1908, p. 149: "We obtain the impression that it is only for form's sake that Calvin undertakes to test whether the disputed books are canonical or not. In reality it is already a settled matter with him that they are. Calvin feels himself therefore in the matter of the N. T. canon bound to the mediæval tradition." Cf. also Otto Ritschl, "Dogmengeschichte des Protestantismus," i. 1908, pp. 70, 71, to the same effect.

Cf. e.g. J. Pannier, "Le témoignage du Saint-Esprit," 1893, pp. 112 sq.: "One fact strikes us at first sight: not only did Calvin not comment on the Aprochryphal books, for which he wrote a very short preface, which was ever more and more abridged in the successive editions, but he did not comment on all the Canonical books. And if lack of time may explain the passing over of some of the less important historical books of the Old Testament, it was undoubtedly for a graver reason that he left to one side the three books attributed to Solomon, notably the Song of Songs. 'In the New Testament there is ordinarily mentioned only the Apocalypse, neglected by Calvin undoubtedly for critical or theological motives analogous to those which determined the most of his contemporaries, but it is necessary to note that the two lesser epistles of John are also lacking, and that in speaking of the large epistle Calvin always expresses himself as if it were the only existing one' (Reuss, Revue de Theologie de Strasbourg, vi. 1853, p. 229). In effect, at the very time when he was defending particularly the authority of the Scriptures against the Council of Trent, when he was dedicating to Edward VI, the King of England, his Commentaries on the 'Epistles which are accustomed to be called Canonical' (1551), he included in the Canon only the First Epistle of Peter, the First Epistle of John, James and, at the very end, the Second Epistle of Peter and Jude." - Reuss, however, in his "History of the Canon of the Holy Scriptures in the Christian Church" (1863, E. T. 1884), greatly modifies the opinion here quoted from him: "Some have believed it possible to affirm that he [Calvin] rejected the Apocalypse because it was the only book of the N. T., except the two short Epistles of John, on which he wrote no commentary. But that conclusion is too hasty. In the Institutes, the Apocalypse is sometimes quoted like the other Apostolic writings, and even under John's name. If there was no commentary, it was simply that the illustrious exegete, wiser in this respect than several of his contemporaries and many of his successors, understood that his vocation called him elsewhere" (p. 318). He adds, indeed, of II and III John: "It might be said with more probability that Calvin did not acknowledge the canonicity of these two writings. He never quotes them, and he quotes the First Epistle of John in a way to exclude them: Joannes in sua canonica, Instit. iii. 2. 21; 3. 23 (Opp. ii. 415, 453)." But this opinion requires revision, just as that on the Apocalypse did, as we shall see below. Cf. further, in the meantime: Reuss, "Hist. of the Sacred Scriptures of the N. T.," 1884, ii. p. 347, and S. Berger, "La Bible au seizieme siecle," 1879, p. 120, who expresses himself most positively: "Calvin expresses no judgment on the lesser Epistles of St. John. But we remark that he never cites them and that he mentions the First in these terms: 'As John says in his canonical.' This word excludes, in the thought of the author, the two other Epistles attributed to this Apostle."

This may have been the case with the Apocalypse, which not only Reuss, as we have seen, but Scaliger thought him wise not to have entered upon; and which he is - perhaps credibly - reported to have said in conversation he did not understand (cf. Leipoldt's "Geschichte des N. T. Kanons," ii. 1908, p. 148, note). But how impossible it is to imagine that this implies any doubt of the canonicity or authority of the book will be quickly evident to anyone who will note his frequent citation of it in the same fashion with other Scripture and alongside of other Scripture (e.g. Opp. i. 736 = ii. 500; i. 953 - ii. 957; i. 1033 = ii. 1063; i. 1148; ii. 88, 859; v. 191, 196, 532; vi. 176; vii. 29, 118, 333; xxxi. 650, sometimes mentioning it by name (vii. 469; i. 733 = ii. 497), sometimes by the name of John (i. 715 = ii. 492, viii. 338 [along with I John] ), sometimes by the name of both "John" and "the Apocalypse" (ii. 124, vii. 116, xxx. 651, xlviii. 122), and always with reverence and confidence as a Scriptural book. He even expressly cites it under the name of Scripture and explicitly as the dictation of the Spirit: vii. 559, "Fear, not, says the Scripture (Eccles. xviii. 22).... Again (Rev. xxii. 11) . . . and (John xv. 2)"; i. 624: "Elsewhere also the Spirit testifies . . ." (along with Daniel and Paul). Cf. also such passages as ii. 734, "Nor does the Apocalypse which they quote afford them any support . . "; xlviii. 238: "I should like to ask the Papists if they think John was so stupid that . . . etc. (Rev. xxii. 8)"; also vi. 369; v. 198.

We use the simple expression "the Epistle of John"; the apparently, but only apparently, stronger and more exclusive, "the Canonical Epistle of John," which Calvin employs, although it would be misleading in our associations, is its exact synonym. Those somewhat numerous writers who have quoted the form "the Canonical Epistle of John " as if its use implied the denial of the canonicity of the other epistles of John forget that this was the ordinary designation in the West of the Catholic Epistles - "the Seven Canonical Epistles" - and that they are all currently cited by this title by Western writers. The matter has been set right by A. Lang: "Die Bekehrung Johannis Calvins" (II. i. of Bonwetsch and Seeberg's "Studien zür Geschichte der Theologie und der Kirche," 1897, pp. 2Cr29). On the title "Canonical Epistles" for the Catholic Epistles, see Lücke, SK. 1836, iii. pp. 643-650; Bleek, "Introd. to the N. T.," § 202 at end (vol. ii. 1874, p. 135); Hilgenfeld, "Einleitung in d. N. T.," 1875, p. 153; Westcott, "Epp. of St. John," 1883, p. xxix.; Salmond, Hastings' BD. i. 1898, p. 360. In 1551, Calvin published his "Commentarii in Epistolas Canonicas" - that is on the Catholic Epistles; also his "Commentaire sur l'Épistre Canonique de St. Jean," i.e. on "the Epistle of John"; also his "Commentaire sur l'Épistre Canonique de St. Jude." Calvin does not seem ever to have happened to quote from II and III John. The reference given in the Index printed in Opp. xxii., viz., 3Jn 1:9, Opp. xb. 81, occurs in a letter, not by Calvin but by Christof Libertetus to Farel. Cf. J. Leipoldt, "Geschichte des N. T. Kanons" (2nd Part, Leipzig, 1908), p. 148, note 1: "The smaller Johannine Epistles Calvin seems never to have cited. He cites I John in Inst. III. ii. 21 by the formula: dicit Johannes in sua canonica. Nevertheless it is very questionable whether inferences can be drawn from this formula as to Calvin's attitude to II and III John." He adds a reference to Lang as above.

Pannier, as cited, p. 113.

Opera, xi. 674-676: cf. Buisson, "Castellion," 1892, i, pp. 198-199. Buisson discusses the whole incident and quotes from the minutes of the Council before which Castellion brought the matter: the point of dispute is there briefly expressed thus: "Mossr Calvin recognizes as holy, and the said Bastian repudiates" (p. 197) the book in question.

Calvin employs all these "three books attributed to Solomon" freely as Scripture and deals with them precisely as he does with other Scriptures. As was to be expected, he cites Proverbs most frequently, Canticles least: but he cites them all as Solomon's and as authoritative Scripture. "'I have washed my feet' says the believing soul in Solomon . . " is the way he cites Canticles (Opp. i. 778, ii. 589). "They make a buckler of a sentence of Solomon's, which is as contrary to them as is no other that is in the Scriptures" (vii. 130) is the way he cites Ecclesiastes. He indeed expressly contrasts Ecclesiastes as genuine Scripture with the Apocryphal books: "As the soul has an origin apart, it has also another preeminence, and this is what Solomon means when he says that at death the body returns to the earth from which it was taken and the soul returns to God who gave it (Eccl. xii. 7). For this reason it is said in the Book of Wisdom (ii. 23) that man is immortal, seeing that he was created in the image of God. This is not an authentic book of Holy Scripture, but it is not improper to avail ourselves of its testimony as of an ancient teacher (Docteur ancien)- although the single reason ought to be enough for us that the image of God, as it has been placed in man, can reside only in an immortal soul, etc." (vii. 112, written in 1544).

Cf. A. Bossert, "Calvin," 1906, p. 6: "Humanist himself as well as profound theologian . . ."; Charles Borgeaud, "Histoire de l'Universite de Geneve," 1900, p. 21: "Before he was a theologian, Calvin was a Humanist..."

Cf. the Preface he prefixed to the Apocryphal Books (for the history of which, see Opera, ix. 827, note) : "These books which are called Apocryphal have in all ages been discriminated from those which are without difficulty shown to be of the Sacred Scriptures. For the ancients, wishing to anticipate the danger that any profane books should be mixed with those which certainly proceeded from the Holy Spirit, made a roll of these latter which they called 'Canon'; meaning by this word that all that was comprehended under it was the assured rule to which we should attach ourselves. Upon the others they imposed the name of Apocrypha; denoting that they were to be held as private writings and not authenticated, like public documents. Accordingly the difference between the former and latter is the same as that between an instrument, passed before a notary, and sealed to be received by all, and the writing of some particular man. It is true they are not to be despised, seeing that they contain good and useful doctrine. Nevertheless it is only right that what we have been given by the Holy Spirit should have preëminence above all that has come from men." Cf., in his earliest theological treatise, the "Psychopannychia" of 1534-1542 (Opp. v. 182), where, after quoting Ecclus. xvii. 1 and Wisd. ii. 23 as "two sacred writers," he adds: "I would not urge the authority of these writers strongly on our adversaries, did they not oppose them to us. They may be allowed, however, some weight, if not as canonical, yet certainly as ancient, as pious, and as received by the suffrages of many. But let us omit them and let us retain . . ." etc. In the "Psychopannychia" his dealing with Baruch on the other hand is more wavering. On one occasion (p. 205) it is quoted with the formula, "sic enim loquitur propheta," and on another (p. 227), "in prophetia Baruch" corrected in 1542. In the "Institutes" of 1536 he quotes it as Scripture: "alter vero propheta scribit" (Opp. i. 82) - referring back to Daniel. This is already corrected in 1539 (i. 906; cf. ii. 632). In 1534-1536, then, he considered Baruch canonical: afterwards not so. His dealing with it in v. 271 (1537), vi. 560 (1545), vi. 638 (1546) is ad hominem.

"Acta Synodi Tridentinae, cum antidoto " (1547), Opp. vii. 365-506.

"Vera ecclesiae reformandae ratio," Opp. vii. 613: quae divinitus non esse prodita, sani omnes, saltem ubi moniti fuerint, iudicabunt.

"Acta Synodi Tridentinae, cum antidoto," Opp. vii. 413: Quantum, obsecro, a Spiritus Sancti maiestati aliena est haec confessio!

This is translated from the French version, ed. Meyrueis, iv. 1855, p. 743. The Latin is the same, though somewhat more concise: nihil habet Petro indignum, ut vim spiritus apostolici et gratiam ubique exprimat ... eam prorsus repudiare mihi religio est.

Haec sutem fictio indigna esset ministro Christi, obtendere alienam personam.

Ed. Meyrueis, iv. p. 780.

Ibid., iv. p. 362.

Ibid., iv. p. 694. Latin: mihi ad epistolam hanc recipiendam satis est, quod nihil continet Christi apostolo indignum.

Cf. J. Cramer, as cited, p. 126: "It was thus, in the first place, as the result of scientific investigations that Calvin fixed the limits of the canon . . . not a priori, but a posteriori, that he came to the recognition of the canonicity of the Biblical books." But especially see the excellently conceived passage on pp. 155-6, to the following effect: "What great importance Calvin attaches to the question whether a Biblical book is apostolic! If it is not apostolic, he does not recognize it as canonical. To determine its apostolicity, he appeals not merely to the ecclesiastical tradition of its origin, but also and principally to its contents. This is what he does in the case of all the antilegomena. The touchstone for this is found in the homologoumena. That he undertakes no investigation of the apostolic origin of these latter is a matter of course. This, for him and for all his contemporaries, stood irreversibly settled. The touchstone employed by Calvin is a scientific one. The testimonium Spiritus Sancti no doubt made its influence felt. But without the help of the scientific investigation, this internal testimony would not have the power to elevate the book into a canonical book. That Calvin was treading here in the footprints of the ancient Church will be understood. The complaint sometimes brought against the Christians of the earliest centuries is unfounded, that they held all writings canonical in which they found their own dogmatics. No doubt they attached in their criticism great weight to this. But not less to the question whether the origin of the books was traceable back to the apostolical age, and their contents accorded with apostolic doctrine, as it might be learned from the indubitably apostolic writings. So far as science had been developed in their day, they employed it in the formation of the canon. . . ." In a later article Cramer says: "In the determination of the compass of Scripture, he [Calvin], like Luther, took his start from the writings which more than the others communicated the knowledge of Christ in His kingdom and had been recognized always by the Church as genuine and trustworthy. Even if the results of his criticism were more in harmony than was the case with those of the German reformer with the ecclesiastical tradition, he yet walked in the self-same critical pathway. He took over the canon of the Church just as little as its version and its exegesis without scrutiny" ("De Roomsch-Katholieke en de Oud-protestansche Schriftbeschouwing," 1883, pp. 31-32). Cramer considers this critical procedure on Calvin's part inconsistent with his doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit, but (p. 38) he recognizes that we cannot speak of it as the nodding of Homer: "It is not here and there, but throughout; not in his exegetical writings alone, but in his dogmatic ones, too, that he walks in this critical path. We never find the faintest trace of hesitation."

Comment on John viii. 1 (Meyrueis' ed. of the Commentaries, ii. 1854, p. 169).

Comment on I John v. 7 (Meyrueis' ed. of the Commentaries, iv. 1855, p. 682).

Quomodo Jeremiae nomen obrepserit, me nescire fateor, nee anxie laboro; certe Jeremiae nomen errore positum esse pro Zacharia rea ipsa ostendit; quia nihil tale apud Jeremiam legitur (Opera, xlv. 749).

Opera, iii. 100, note 3.

Cf. J. Cramer, as cited, pp. l1f-117: "Calvin does not largely busy himself with textual criticism. He follows the text which was generally received in his day. It deserves notice only that he exercises a free and independent judgment and recognizes the rights of science." Cramer adduces his treatment of I John v. 7 and proceeds: "He comes forward on scientific grounds against the Vulgate. The decree of Trent that this version must be followed as 'authentical,' he finds silly; and reverence for it as if it had fallen down from heaven, ludicrous. 'How can anyone dispute the right to appeal to the original text? And what a bad version this is! There are scarcely three verses in any page well rendered' (Acta Synod. Trident., etc., pp. 414-116)."

"Institutes," I. viii. 10. Cf. I. vi. 2-3.

I. vii. 5, ad init.: " We have received it from God's own mouth by the ministry of men"

It is quite common to represent Calvin as without a theory, at least an expressed theory, of the relation of the divine and human authors of Scripture. Thus J. Cramer, as cited, p. 103, says: "How we are to understand the relation of the divine and human activities through which the Scriptures were produced is not exactly defined by Calvin. A precise theory of inspiration such as we meet with in the later dogmaticians is not found in him." Cramer is only sure that Calvin did not hold to the theory which later Protestants upheld: "It is true that Calvin gave the impulse [from which the later dogmatic view of Scripture grew up], more than any other of the Reformers. But we must not forget that here we can speak of nothing more than the impulse. We nowhere find in Calvin such a magical conception of the Bible as we find in the later dogmaticians. It is true he used the term 'dictare' and other expressions which he employs under the influence of the terminology of his day, but on the other hand - in how many respects does he recognize the human factor in the Scriptures!" (p. 142). Similarly Pannier, as cited, p. 200: "In any case Calvin has not written a single word which can be appealed to in favor of literal inspiration. What is divine for him, if there is anything specifically divine beyond the contents, the brightness of which is reflected upon the container, is the sense of each book, or at most of each phrase, - never the employment of each word. Calvin would have deplored the petty dogmatics of the Consensus Helveticus, which declares the vowel points of the Hebrew text inspired, and the exaggerations of the theopneusty of the nineteenth century." Yet nothing is more certain than that Calvin held both to "verbal inspiration" and to "the inerrancy of Scripture," however he may have conceived the action of God which secured these things.

Cf. Otto Ritschl, "Dogmengeschichte des Protestantismus," 1908, i. p. 63: "If we may still entertain doubts whether Bullinger really defended the stricter doctrine of inspiration, it certainly is found in Calvin after 1543. He may have merely taken over from Butzer the expression Spiritus Sancti amanuenses; but it is peculiar to him that he conceives both the books of the Old Testament inclusively as contained in the historical enumerations, and those of the New Testament, as arising out of a verbal dictation of the Holy Spirit."

These phrases are brought together by J. Cramer (as cited, pp. 102-3) from the Comments on II Tim. iii. 16 and II Pet. i. 20.

Cf. Pannier, as cited, p. 203: "The Word of God is for him one, verbum Dei, and not verba Dei. The diversity of authors disappears before the unity of the Spirit."

Ab ipsissimo Dei ore ad nos fluxisse.

E coelo fluxisse acsi vivae ipsae Dei voces illic exaudirentur.

Hoc prius est membrum, eandem scripturae reverentiam deberi quam Deo deferimus, quia ad eo solo manavit, nee quidquam humani habet admistum.

Justa reverentia inde nascitur, quum statuimus, Deum nobiscum loqui, non homines mortales.

The account of Calvin's doctrine of inspiration given by E. Rabaud, "Histoire de la doctrine de l'inspiration . . . dans les pays de langue française," 1883, pp. 52 sq., is worth comparing. Calvin's thought on this subject, he tells us, was more precise and compact than that of the other Reformers, although even his conception of inspiration was far from possessing perfectly firm contours or supplying the elements of a really systematic view (p. 52). He was the first, nevertheless, to give the subject of Sacred Scripture a fundamental, theoretic treatment, led thereto not by the pressure of controversy, but by the logic of his systematic thought: for his doctrine of inspiration (not yet distinguished from revelation) is one of the essential bases, if not the very point of departure of his dogmatics (p. 55). To him "the Bible is manifestly the word of God, in which He reveals Himself to men," and as such "proceeds from God." "But " (pp. 56 sq.) "the action of God does not, in Calvin's view, transform the sacred authors into machines. Jewish verbalism, Scriptural materialism, may be present in germ in the ideas of the Institutes - and the cold intellects of certain doctors of the Protestant scholasticism of the next century developed them - but they are very remote from the thought of the Reformer. Chosen and ordained by God, the Biblical writers were subject to a higher impulse; they received a divine illumination which increased the energy of their natural faculties; they understood the Revelation better and transmitted it more faithfully. It was scarcely requisite for this, however, that they should be passive instruments, simple secretaries, pens moved by the Holy Spirit. Appointed but intelligent organs of the divine thought, far from being subject to a dictation, in complete obedience to the immediate will of God, they acted under the impulsion of a personal faith which God communicated to them. 'Now, whether God was manifested to men by visions or oracles, what is called celestial witnesses, or ordained men as His ministers who taught their successors by tradition, it is in every case certain that He impressed on their hearts such a certitude of the doctrine, that they were persuaded and convinced that what had been revealed and preached to them proceeded from the true God: for He always ratified His word so as to secure for it a credit above all human opinion. Finally, that the truth might uninterruptedly remain continually in vigor from age to age, and be known in the world, He willed that the revelations which He had committed to the hands of the Fathers as a deposit, should be put on record: and it was with this design that He had the Law published, to which He afterwards added the Prophets as its expositors' (Institutes, I. vi. 2). These few lines resume in summary form the very substance of Calvin's doctrine of inspiration. We may conclude from it that he did not give himself to the elaboration of this dogma, with the tenacity and logical rigor which his clear and above all practical genius employed in the study and systematization of other points of the new doctrine. We shall seek in vain a precise declaration on the mode of revelation, on the extent and intensity of inspiration, on the relation of the book and the doctrine. None of these questions, as we have already had occasion to remark, had as yet been raised: the doctors gave themselves to what was urgent and did not undertake to prove or discuss what was not yet either under discussion or attacked. The principle which was laid down sufficed them. God had spoken - this was the faith which every consciousness of the time received without repugnance, and against which no mind raised an objection. To search out how He did it was wholly useless: to undertake to prove it, no less so" (p. 58). There is evident in this passage a desire to minimize Calvin's view of the divinity of Scripture; the use of the passage from I. vi. 2 as the basis of an exposition of his doctrine of inspiration is indicative of this - whereas it obviously is a very admirable account of how God has made known His will to man and preserved the knowledge of it through time. The double currents of desire to be true to Calvin's own exposition of his doctrine and yet to withhold his imprimatur from what the author believes to be an overstrained doctrine, produces some strange confusion in his further exposition.

Cf. J. Cramer, as cited, p. 114: "How Calvin conceives of this dictare by the Holy Ghost it is difficult to say. He borrowed it from the current ecclesiastical usage, which employed it of the auctor primarius of Scripture, as indeed also of tradition. Thus the Council of Trent uses the expression dictante Spiritu Sancto of the unwritten tradition inspired by the Holy Spirit." Otto Ritschl, "Dogmengeschichte des Protestantismus," i. 1908, p. 59, argues for taking the term strictly in Calvin. It is employed, it is true, in contemporary usage in the figurative sense, of the deliverances of the natural conscience, for example; and some Reformed writers use it of the internal testimony of the Spirit. Calvin also himself speaks as if he employed it of Scripture only figuratively - e.g. Opp. i. 632: verba quodammodo dictante Christi Spiritu. Nevertheless, on the whole Ritachl thinks he meant it in the literal sense.

Cf., e.g., J. Cramer, as cited, pp. 114-116, whose instances are followed in the remarks which succeed. Cf. also p. 125. How widespread this effort to discover in Calvin some acknowledgment of errors in Scripture has become may be seen by consulting the citations made by Dunlop Moore, The Presbyterian and Reformed Review, 1893, p. 60: he cites Cremer, van Oosterzee, Farrar. Cf. even A. H. Strong, "Syst. Theol.," ed. 1907, vol. i. p. 217, whose list of "theological writers who admit the errancy of Scripture writers as to some matters unessential to their moral and spiritual teaching" requires drastic revision. Leipoldt ("Geschichte des N. T. Kanons," ii. 1908, p. 149) says: "Fundamentally Calvin holds fast to the old doctrine of verbal inspiration. His sound historical sense leads him, here and there, it is true, to break through the bonds of this doctrine. In his harmony of the Gospels (Commentarii in harmoniam ex Mat., Mk., et Lk. compositam, 1555), e.g., Calvin shows that the letters are not sacred to him; he moves much more freely here than Martin Chemnitz. But in other cases again Calvin draws strict consequences from the doctrine of verbal inspiration. He ascribes, e.g., to all four Gospels precisely similar authority, although he (with Luther and Zwingli) considers John's Gospel the most beautiful of them all."

This is solidly shown, e.g., by Dunlop Moore, as cited, pp. 61-62: also for Acts vii. 16.

Despite his tendency to lower Calvin's doctrine of inspiration with respect to its effects, J. Cramer in the following passage (as cited, pp. 120-121) gives in general a very fair statement of it: "we have seen that Calvin, although he has not given us a completed theory of inspiration, yet firmly believed in the inspiration of the entirety of Scripture. It is true we do not find in him the crass expressions of the later Reformed, as well as Lutheran, theologians. But the foundation on which they subsequently built - though somewhat onesidedly - is here. We cannot infer much from such expressions as 'from God,' 'came from God,' 'flowed from God.' Just as in Zwingli, these expressions were sometimes in Calvin synonyms of 'true.' Thus, at Titus ii. 12, he says he cannot understand why so many are unwilling to draw upon profane writers, - 'for, since all truth is from God (a Deo), if anything has been said well and truly by profane men, it ought not to be rejected, for it has come from God (a Deo est profectum).' More significant are such expressions as, 'nothing human is mixed with Scripture,' 'we owe to them the same reverence as to God,' God 'is the author of Scripture' and as such has 'dictated' (dictavit) all that the Apostles and Prophets have written, so that we 'must not depart from the word of God in even the smallest particular,' etc. All this applies not only to the Scriptures as a whole, not merely to their fundamental ideas and chief contents, but to all the sixty-six books severally. In contra-distinction from the Apocrypha, they have been given by the Holy Spirit (Préface mise en tête des livres apocryphes de l'Ancien Test.: Opp. ix. 827). The book of Acts 'beyond question is the product of the Holy Spirit Himself,' Mark 'wrote nothing but what the Holy Spirit gave him to write,' etc. To think here merely of a providential direction by God, in the sense that God took care that His people should lack nothing of a Scriptural record of His revelation - is impossible. For, however often Calvin may have directed attention to such a 'singularis providentiae cura' (Inst., I. vi. 2, cf. I. viii. 10; Argumentum in Ev. Joh.) with respect to Scripture, he yet saw something over and above this in the production of the sacred books. He looked upon them as the writings of God Himself, who, through an extraordinary operation of His Spirit, guarded His amanuenses from all error as well when they transmitted histories as when they propounded the doctrine of Christ. Thus to him Scripture (naturally in its original text) was a complete work of God, to which nothing could be added and from which nothing could be taken away."

In I. v. 14 Calvin says that the Apostle in Heb. xi. 3, "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God" wishes to intimate that "the invisible divinity was represented indeed by such displays of His power, but that we have no eyes to perceive it unless they are illuminated through faith by the inner revelation of God" (Invisibilem divinitatem repraesentari quidem talibua spectaculis, sed ad illam perspiciendam non esse nobis oculos, nisi interiore Dei revelatione per fidem illuminentur). Here he distinguishes between the external, objective representation, and the internal, subjective preparation to perceive this representation. God is objectively revealed in His works: man in his sins is blind to this revelation: the interior operation of God is an opening of man's eyes: man then sees. The operation of God is therefore a palingenesis. This passage is already in ed. 1539 (i. 291); the last clause (nisi ... ) is not, however, reproduced in the French versions of either 1541 or 1560 (iii. 60).

In his response to the Augsburg Interim ("Vera Ecclesiae reformandae ratio," 1549, Opp. vii. 591-674) he allows it to be the proprium ecclesiae officium to scripturas veras a suppositiis discernere; but only that obedienter amplectitur, quicquid Dei est, as the sheep hear the voice of the shepherd. It is nevertheless sacrilega impietas ecclesiae judicio submittere sacrosancta Dei oracula. See J. Cramer, as cited, p. 104, note 3. Cramer remarks in expounding Calvin's view: "By the approbation she gives to them" - the books of Scripture - "the Church does not make them authentic, but only yields her homage to the truth of God."

It would require that we should be wholly hardened (nisi ad perditam impudentiam obduruerint) that we should not perceive that the doctrine of Scripture is heavenly, that we should not have the confession wrung from us that there are manifest signs in Scripture that it is God who speaks in and through it (extorquebitur illia haec confessio, manifests, signa loquentia Dei conspici in Scriptura ex quibus pateat coelestem esse eius doctrinam) - I. vii. 4.

The exact relations of the "proofs" to the divinity of Scripture, which Calvin teaches, was sufficiently clear to be caught by his successors. It is admirably stated in the Westminster Confession of Faith, i. 5. And we may add that the same conception is stated also very precisely by Quenstedt: "These motives, as well internal as external, by which we are led to the knowledge of the authority of Scripture, make the theopneusty of Sacred Scripture probable, and produce a certitude which is not merely conjectural but moral ... they do not make the divinity of Scripture infallible and altogether indubitable." ("Theologia didactico-polemica, sive Systema theologicum," Lipsiae, 1715, Pars prima, pp. 141-2.) That is to say, they are not of the nature of demonstration, but nevertheless give moral certitude: the testimony of the Spirit is equivalent to demonstration - as is the deliverance of any simply acting sense.

Cf. Pannier, as cited, pp. 207-8: "we see that this understanding of the Scriptures, this capacity to receive the testimony of the Spirit, is not, according to Calvin, possible for all; and that, less and less . . . He continually emphasises more and more the incapacity of man to persuade another of it, without the aid of God; but he emphasises still more progressively the impossibility of obtaining this aid if God does not accord it first. 1550 (I. viii. at end): 'Those who wish to prove to unbelievers by arguments that the Scriptures are from God are inconsiderate; for this is known only to faith.' 1559 (I. vii. in fine): The mysteries of God are not understood, except by those to whom it is given.... It is quite certain that the witness of the Spirit does not make itself felt except to believers, and is not in itself an apologetic means with respect to unbelievers. . . . The natural man receiveth not spiritual things."

Cf. Pannier, as cited, pp. 195-6: "First let us recall this, - for Calvin this testimony of the Holy Spirit is only one act of the great drama which is enacted in the entire soul of the religious man, and in which the Holy Spirit holds always the principal role. While the later dogmatists make the Holy Spirit, so to speak, function mechanically, at a given moment, in the pen of the prophets or in the brain of the readers, Calvin sees the Holy Spirit constantly active in the man whom He wishes to sanctify, and the fact that He leads him to recognize the divinity and the canonicity of the sacred books is only one manifestation, - a very important one, no doubt, but only a particular one, - of His general work." It is only, of course, the Lutheran and Rationalizing dogmatists who, constructively, subject the action of the Spirit to the direction of man - whether by making it rest on the application of the "means of grace" or on the action of the human will. Calvin and his followers - the Reformed - make the act of man depend on the free and sovereign action of the Spirit.

J. Cramer, as cited, pp. 122-3, somewhat understates this, but in the main catches Calvin's meaning: "Calvin does not, it is true, tell us in so many words precisely what this testimonium Sp. S. is, but it is easy to gather it from the whole discussion. He is thinking of the Holy Spirit, who, as the spirit of our adoption as children, leads us to say Amen to the Word which the Father speaks in the Holy Scriptures to His children. He even says expressly in Inst. I. vii. 4: 'As if the Spirit was not called "seal" and "earnest" just because He confers faith on the pious.' But more plainly still, and indeed so that no doubt can remain, we find it in Beza, the most beloved and talented pupil of Calvin, who assuredly also in his conception of Scripture was the most thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his teacher. In his reply to Castellion, Beza says: 'The testimony of the Spirit of adoption does not lie properly in this, that we believe to be true what the Scriptures testify (for this is known also to the devils and to many of the lost), but rather in this, that each applies to himself the promise of salvation in Christ of which Paul speaks in Rom. viii. 15, 16.' Accordingly a few lines further down he speaks of a 'testimony of adoption and free justification in Christ.' In the essence of the matter Calvin will have meant just this by his testimony of the Holy Spirit. . . ." Beza's words are in his "Ad defensiones et reprehensiones Seb. Castellionis" ("Th. Bezae Vezelii Opera," i. Geneva, 1582, p. 503): Testimonium Spiritus adoptionis non in eo proprie positum est ut credamus verum esse quod Scriptura testatur (nam hoc ipsum quoque sciunt diaboli et reprobi multi), sed in eo potius ut quisque sibi salutis in Christo promissionem applicet, de qua re agit Paulus, Rom. viii. 15, 16.... That it was generally understood in the first age that this was the precise nature of the witness of the Spirit is shown by its definition in this sense not only by the Reformed, but by the Lutherans. For example, Hollaz defines thus: "The testimony of the Holy Spirit is the supernatural act (actus supernaturalis) of the Holy Spirit by means of the Word of God attentively read or heard (His own divine power having been communicated to the Scriptures) by which the heart of man is moved, opened, illuminated, turned to the obedience of faith, so that the illuminated man out of these internal spiritual movements truly perceives the Word which is propounded to him to have proceeded from God, and gives it therefore his unwavering assent." ("Examinis theologici acroamatici univers. theologiam thet. polem.," Holmiae et Lipsiae, 1741, p. 125.) The Lutheranism of this definition resides in the clauses: "By means of the Word of God" . . . "His own divine power having been communicated to the Scriptures" . . . which make the action of the Holy Spirit to be from out of the Word, in which He dwells intrinsicus. But the nature of the testimony of the Spirit is purely conceived as an act of the Holy Spirit by which the heart of man is renewed to spiritual perception, in the employment of which he perceives the divine quality of Scripture.

Supra humanum iudicium, certo certius constituimus (non secus ac si ipsius Dei numen illic intueremur) hominum ministerio, ab ipsissimo Dei ore ad noa fluxisse (I. vii. 5).

Talis ergo est persuasio quse rationes non requirat; talis notitia, cui optima ratio constet: nempe in qua securius constantiusque mens quiescit quam in ullis rationibus; talis denique sensus, qui nisi ex coelesti revelatione nasci nequeat (I. vii. 5).

Köstlin, as cited, pp. 412-13, especially 413, note a, adverts to this with a reference to Dorner, "Gesch. d. protest. Theologie," p. 377, who makes it characteristic of Calvin in distinction from Zwingli to draw the outer and inner Word more closely together. The justice of Dorner's view, which would seem to assign to Calvin in his doctrine of the Word as a means of grace a position somewhere between Zwingli and Luther, may well be doubted. According to Dorner, Calvin "modified the looser connection between the outward and inward Word held by Zwingli and connected the two sides more closely together." "In reference, therefore, to the principle of the Reformation," he continues, "with its two aides, Calvin is still more than Zwingli, of one mind and spirit with the German Lutheran Reformation" (E. T. i. 1871, p. 387). Again (i. p. 390): "The double form of the Verbum Dei externum and internum, held by Zwingli, gives place indeed in Calvin to a more inward connecting of the two sides; the Scriptures are according to him not merely the sign of an absent thing, but have in themselves divine matter and breath, which makes itself actively felt." We do not find that Calvin and Zwingli differ in this matter appreciably.

Cf. his response to Sadolet (1539), Opp. v. 393: tuo igitur experimento disce non minus importunum esse spiritum iactare sine verbo, quam futurum sit insulsum, sine spiritu verbum ipsum obtendere.

There is a certain misapprehension involved, also, in speaking of Calvin subordinating the indicia to the witness of the Spirit, as if he conceived them on the same plane, but occupying relatively lower and higher positions on this plane. The witness of the Spirit and the indicia move in different orbits. We find Köstlin, as cited, p. 413, accordingly speaking not quite to the point, when he says: "He subordinated to the power of this one, immediate, divine testimony, all those several criteria by the pious and thoughtful consideration of which our faith in the Scriptures and their contents may and should be further mediated. Even miracles, as Niedner has rightly remarked (Philosophie-und Theologiegeschichte, p. 341, note 2), take among the evidences for the divinity of the Biblical revelation, 'nothing more than a coordinate' place: we add in passing that Calvin introduces them here only in the edition of 1550, and then enlarges the section which treats of them in the edition of 1559. He does not, however, put a low estimate on such criteria; he would trust himself - as he says in an addition made in the edition of 1559 (xxx. 59) - to silence with them even stiff-necked opponents; but this certainty which faith should have, can never be attained, says he, by disputation, but can be wrought only by the testimony of the Spirit." The question between the testimony of the Spirit and the indicia is not a question of which gives the strongest evidence; it is a question of what each is fitted to do. The indicia are supreme in their sphere; they and they alone give objective evidence. But objective evidence is inoperative when the subjective condition is such that it cannot penetrate and affect the mind. All objective evidence is in this sense subordinate to the subjective change wrought by the Spirit: but considered as objective evidence it is supreme in its own sphere. The term "subordinate" is accordingly misleading here. For the rest, it is true that Calvin places the miracles by which the giving of Scripture was accompanied rather among the objective evidences of their divinity than at their apex: but this is due not to an underestimation of the value of miracles as evidence, but to the very high estimate he placed on the internal criteria of divinity, by which the Scriptures evidence themselves to be divine. And above all we must not be misled into supposing that he places miracles below the testimony of the Spirit in importance. Such a comparison is outside his argument: miracles are part of the objective evidence of the deity of Scripture; the testimony of the Spirit is the subjective preparation of the heart to receive the objective evidence in a sympathetic embrace. He would have said, of course - he does say - that no miracle, and no body of miracles, could or can produce "true faith": the internal creative operation of the Spirit is necessary for that. And in that sense the evidence of miracles is subordinated to the testimony of the Spirit. But this is not because of any depreciation of the evidential value of miracles; but because of the full appreciation of the deadness of the human soul in sin. The evidential value of miracles, and their place in the objective evidences of the divine origin of the Scriptures, are wholly unaffected by the doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit; and the strongest assertions of their valuelessness in the production of faith, apart from the testimony of the Spirit, do not in the least affect the estimate we put on them, as objective evidences.

Cf. Köstlin, as cited, pp. 413-415: "We find in Calvin the aforementioned several criteria set alongside of this witness of the Spirit, and indeed especially those which are internal to the Scriptures themselves, such as their elevation above all merely human products, which cannot fail to impress every reader, etc. It would certainly be desirable to trace an inner connection between this impression made by the character, by the style of speech, by the contents of Scripture, and that supreme immediate testimony of the Spirit for it. Assuredly God Himself, the Author of Scripture, works upon us also in such impressions, which we analyse in our reflecting human consideration, and in our debates strive to set before opponents; and we feel, on the other side, a need to analyse, as far as is possible for us, even the supreme witness of the Spirit, in spite of its immediacy, and to relate it with our other experiences and observations with respect to Scripture, so as to become conscious of the course by which God passes from one to the other. Calvin, however, does not enter into this; he sets the two side by side and over against one another: 'Although (Scripture) conciliates reverence to itself by its own supreme majesty, it does not seriously affect us, until it is sealed to our hearts by the Spirit' (XXIX. 295; XXX. 60; ed. 3, I. vii. 5): he does not show the inner relation of one to the other. He does not do this even in the edition of 1559, where he with great eloquence speaks more fully of the power with which the Word of the New Testament witnesses manifests its divine majesty. The witness of the Spirit comes forward with Calvin thus somewhat abruptly. By means of it the Spirit works true faith, which the Scripture, even through its internal criteria, cannot establish in divine certainty; and indeed He does not work it in the case of all those - and has no intention of working it in the case of all those - to whom the Scripture is conveyed with its criteria, but, as the section on Predestination further shows, only in the case of those who have been elected thereto from all eternity. Here we are already passing over into the relation of the Calvinistic conception of the Formal Principle or the Authority of Scripture, to its conception of the means of grace. In this matter the Lutheran doctrine stands in conflict with it. But with reference to what we have been discussing, we do not find that the Lutheran dogmaticians, when they come to occupy themselves more particularly with the testimonium Spiritus Sancti to the Scriptures, dealt more vitally with its relation to the operation of these criteria on the human spirit. No doubt, in Luther's own conception this was more the case: but he gave no scientific elaboration of it."

Cf. Köstlin, as cited, p. 417: "The certainty that the Scriptures really possess such authority, rests for us not on the authority of the Church, but just on this testimony of the Spirit. Calvin's reference here is even to the several books of Scripture: he is aware that the opponents ask how, without a decree of the Church, we are to be convinced what book should be received with reverence, what should be excluded from the canon; he himself adduces in opposition to this, even here, nothing else except the testimonium Spiritus: the entirety of Scripture seems to him to be equally, so to say, en bloc, divinely legitimated by this." So also Pannier, as cited, p. 202: "The question of canonicity never presented itself to the thought of Calvin, except in the second place as a corollary of the problem of the divinity (I. vii. 1). If the Holy Spirit attests to us that a given book is divine, He in that very act attests that it forms a part of the rule of faith, that it is canonical. Nowhere has Calvin permitted, as his successors have done, a primary place to be taken by a theological doctrine which became less capable of resisting the assaults of adversaries when isolated from the practical question. Perhaps, moreover, he did not render as exact an account as we are able to render after the lapse of two centuries, of the wholly new situation in which the Reformation found itself with respect to the canon, or of the new way in which he personally resolved the question." Accordingly, at an earlier point Pannier says: "It is true that the faculty of recognizing the Word of God under the human forms included for Calvin, and especially according to the Confession of Faith of 1559, the faculty of determining the canonicity of the books. This is a consequence secondary but natural, and so long as they maintained the principle, the Reformed doctors placed themselves in a false position when they showed themselves disposed to abandon the consequences to the criticisms of their opponents" (p. 164). Cf. J. Cramer, Nieuwe Bijdragen, iii. p. 140: "But you must not think . . . of an immediate witness of the Spirit to the particular parts of the Holy Scriptures. The old theologians did not think of that. They conceived the matter thus: The testimonium Spiritus Sancti gives witness directly to the religio-moral contents of Scripture only. Since, however, the religio-moral contents must necessarily have a particular form, and the dogmatic content is closely bound up with the historical, neither the chronological nor the topographical element can be separated out, etc. - therefore the testimonium Spiritus Sancti gives to the total content of Scripture witness that it is from God." This, after all, then, is not to appeal to the testimonium Spiritus Sancti, directly to authenticate the canon; but to construct a canon on the basis of a testimony of the Spirit given solely to the divinity of Scripture, the movement of thought being this: All Scripture given by inspiration of God is profitable; this Scripture is given by inspiration of God; accordingly this Scripture belongs to the category of profitable Scripture, that is to the canon.

Reuss, in the sixteenth chapter of his "History of the Canon of the Holy Scriptures," E. T. 1884, expounds Calvin, with his usual learning and persuasiveness, as basing the determination of the canon solely on the testimony of the Spirit. But the exposition falls into two confusions: a confusion of the authority of Scripture with its canonicity, and a confusion of the divine with the apostolic origin of Scripture. Of course, Calvin repelled the Romish conception that the authority of Scripture rests on its authentication by the Church and its tradition (p. 294), but that did not deter him from seeking by a historical investigation to discover what especial books had been committed by the apostles to the Church as authoritative. Of course, he founded the sure conviction of the divine origin of the Scriptures on the witness of the Spirit of God by and with them in the heart, but that did not prevent his appealing to history to determine what these Scriptures which were so witnessed were in their compass. Accordingly even Reuss has to admit that it is exceedingly difficult to carry through his theory of Calvin's theoretical procedure consistently with Calvin's observed practice. In point of fact, the Reformers, and Calvin among them, did not separate the Apocrypha from the Old Testament on the sole basis of the testimony of the Spirit: they appealed to the evidence of the Jewish Church (p. 312). Nor did they determine the question of the New Testament antilegomena on this principle: this, too, was with them "a simple question of historical criticism" (p. 316) - although Reuss here (p. 318) confuses Calvin's appeal to the internal evidence of apostolicity with appeal to "religious intuition." In a word, Reuss's exposition of Calvin's procedure in determining the canon rests on a fundamental misconception of that procedure.

"All this Holy Scripture is comprised in the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments, the number (le nombre) of which is as follows" ... the list ensuing. See Opp. ix. 741.

Opp. ix., prolg., pp. lvii.-lx.: cf. Dieterlen, "Le Synode general de Paris," 1873, pp. 77, 89; Pannier, as cited, pp. 126-7; and for a brief précis, Müller, "Bekenntnisschriften der reform. Kirche," 1903, p. xxxiii.

Opp. ix. 741.

"Actes de la dispute et conference tenue à Paris ès mois de juillet et aoust 1566" (Strasbourg, 1566), printed in the Biblioth. de la Soc. de l'Hist. du Prot. franc. We draw from the account of it in Pannier, as cited, pp. 141 sq.

"Le vray systeme de l'Eglise et la veritable analyse de la foy," 1686, III. ii. 453. Pannier, as cited, quotes this, pp. 167-168.

As we have seen, it is attributed to Calvin by both Pannier and Cramer. Pannier (p. 203) remarks that "if Calvin was not able to appreciate in all its purity" the new situation with regard to the canon into which the Reformation brought men, "it was even less incumbent on him to render account of the personal attitude which he himself took up with reference to it." "It is his successors only who, in adopting his conclusions (except that they apply them more or less), have asked themselves how they reached them, and have reconstructed the reasoning which no doubt Calvin himself had unconsciously followed." Is not this a confession that after all the view in question was not Calvin's own view? At least not consciously to himself? But Pannier would say, no doubt, either this was Calvin's view or he appealed to the testimony of the Spirit directly to authenticate the canon.

The following is the account of the treatment of the question of the canon in these creeds, given by J. Cramer ("De Roomsch-Katholieke en de Oud-protestantache Schriftbeschouwing," 1883, pp. 48 sq.) : "And on what now, does that authority rest? This question, too, is amply discussed in the Reformed Confessions, and that, as concerns the principal matter, wholly in the spirit of Calvin. Only, more value is ascribed to the testimony of the Church. No doubt the authority of the Scriptures is not made to rest on it; but it is permitted an important voice in the question of the canon. When it is said that 'all that is said in the Holy Scriptures is to be believed not so much because the Church receives them and holds them as canonical, but especially because the Holy Spirit bears witness to them in our heart that they are from God,' a certain weight is attributed to the judgment of the Church. This appears particularly from the way in which the canonical books are spoken of in distinction from the Apocryphal books. In enumerating the Bible books, the Belgian Confession prefixes the words: 'Against which nothing can be said' (Art. iv.). By this apparently is meant, that against the canonicity of these books, from a historical standpoint, with the eye on the witness of the Church, nothing can be alleged (a thing not to be said of the Apocrypha). In the same spirit the Anglican Articles, when speaking of the books of the Old and New Testaments, says that 'Of their authority there has never been any doubt in the Church.' I will not raise the question here how that can be affirmed with the eye on the Antilegomena. It shows, however, certainly that much importance is attached to the ecclesiastical tradition. The fundamental ground, however, why the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are to be held to be the Word of God is sought in the Scriptures themselves, and, assuredly, in the testimony which the Holy Spirit bears to their divinity in the hearts of believers. Like Calvin, the Confessions suppose that thus they have given an immovable foundation to the divine authority of the Scriptures, and have taken an impregnable position over against Rome, which appealed to the witness of the Catholic Church. . . ." Calvin, however, allowed as much to the testimony of the Church - external evidence - as is here allowed, and the very adduction of its testimony shows that sole dependence was not placed on the testimony of the Spirit for the canonicity of a book: what it is appealed to for is the divinity of the canonical books.

So even Köstlin perceives, as cited, p. 417: "The entirety of Scripture appeared to him divinely legitimated by the testimonium Spiritus, altogether, so to say, en bloc. . . . The declarations of Calvin as to the Word spoken by the prophets and apostles, which they rightly asserted to be God's Word, pass without hesitation over into declarations as to the Holy Scriptures, as such, and that in their entirety; with the proposition 'the Law and the Prophets and the Gospel have emanated from God' is interchanged the proposition 'the Scripture is from God,' - and the witness of the Spirit assures us of it." So also Pannier (pp. 203-204): "Everything goes back to his considering things not in detail but en bloc. The Word of God is for him one, verbum Dei, not verba Dei. The diversity of the authors disappears before the unity of the Spirit. The same reasoning applies to each single book as to the whole collection. All the verses hold together; and if one introduces us to the knowledge of salvation we may conclude that the book is canonical. Given the collection, it is enough in practice, since all the parts are of a sort, to establish the value of one of them to guarantee the value of all the others. It is certain that the critical theologian and the simple believer even yet proceed somewhat differently in this matter; the simplest and surest method is that of the humble saint, and Calvin was very right not to range himself among the theologians at this point. 'The just shall live by faith.' This affirmation seemed to him a revealed truth: he concluded from it that the whole epistle to the Romans is inspired; some remarks of this kind in other passages of the Epistles, of the Gospels, and the canonicity of the New Testament is established. The same for the Old Testament. The Second Epistle of Peter and the Song of Songs thus go with the rest. The human testimonies, internal and external criteria, useful for confirming the other parts of a book of which a passage has been recognized as inspired, are insufficient to expel from the canon a book which the witness of the Spirit has not recognized as opposed to the doctrine of salvation." We quote the whole passage to give Pannier's whole thought: but what we adduce it for is at present merely to signalize the admission it contains that Calvin dealt with the Scriptures in the matter of the testimony of the Spirit, so to speak, "in the lump" - as a whole. Pannier cites apparently as similar to Calvin's view, Gaussen, "Canon," ii. p. 10: "This testimony, which every Christian has recognized when he has read his Bible with vital efficacy, may be recognized by him only in a single page; but this page is enough to spread over the book which contains it an incomparable brightness." That is, Calvin, like the simple believer, has a definite book - the Bible - in his hands and treats it as all of a piece - of course, in Calvin's case, not without reasonable grounds for treating it as all of a piece: in other words, the canon was already determined for him before he appealed to the testimony of the Spirit to attest its divinity. Cf. Cramer (p. 140) as quoted above. Cramer is quite right so far, therefore, when he says (pp. 156-157): "Although we determine securely by means of the historical-critical method what must be carried back to the apostolical age and what accords with the apostolical doctrine, we have not yet proved the divine authority of these writings. This hangs on this, - whether the Holy Spirit gives us His witness to them. On this witness alone rests our assurance of faith, not on the force of a historical-critical demonstration." This, so far as appears, was Calvin's method.

Calvin would certainly have subscribed to these words of Pannier, as cited, p. 164: The most of the Catholics "have always strangely misapprehended the illumination which, according to the Reformed, the least of believers is capable of receiving and of applying to the reading of the Bible. It is a question, not as they suppose, of becoming theologians, but of becoming believers, of having not the plenitude of knowledge, but the certitude of faith."

Cf. Köstlin, as cited, pp. 415-416. After raising the question of the relation of the witness of the Spirit to the inner experience of the Christian, and the relative priority of the two - and remarking that in case the vital process is conceived as preceding the witness of the Spirit to the divinity of the Scriptures, it will be hard not to allow to the Christianized heart the right and duty of criticism of the Scriptures (where the fault in reasoning lies in the term process), Köstlin continues: "We touch here on the relation between the formal and material sides of the fundamental evangelical principle. And we think at once of the relation in which they stood to one another in Luther's representation, by which his well-known critical attitude, with respect, say, to the Epistle of James, was rendered possible. Calvin, too, now has no wish to speak of a witness of the Spirit merely with reference to the Scriptures, and is far from desiring to isolate that witness of the Spirit for the Scriptures. He comes back to it subsequently, when speaking of faith in the saving content of the Gospel, declaring that the Spirit seals the contents of the Word in our hearts (1539, XXIX. 456 sq., 468 sq.; further in 1559, III. 2 [In Köstlin's pagination, given here, XXIX. refers to the "Corpus Ref." as a whole; III. 2 stands for "Institutes," Book III. chap. ii., or XXX. 397 sq.]). He also inserted in the section on the Holy Scriptures and the witness of the Spirit to them, in 1550, an additional special sentence, in which he expressly refers to his intention to speak further on such a witness of the Spirit in a later portion of the treatise, and declares of faith in general, that there belongs to it a sealing of the divine Spirit (XXIX. 296 [1559, I. vii. 5, near end]). In any event he must have recurred to such a Spiritual testimony for the assurance of individual Christians of their personal election. But in the first instance - and this again is precisely what is characteristic for Calvin - he nevertheless treats of the doctrine of the divine origin and the divine authority of the Scriptures, and of the witness of the Spirit for them, wholly apart. The presentation proceeds with him in such a manner, that the Spirit first of all fully produces faith in this character of the Scriptures, and only then the Bible-believing Christian has to receive from the Scriptures its contents, in all its several parts, as divinely true, - though, no doubt, this reception and this faith in the several elements of the truth are by no means matters of human thought, but are rather to be performed under the progressive illumination and the progressive sealing of these contents in the heart by the Holy Spirit. Even though he, meanwhile, calls that the 'truth' of the Scriptures, which we come to feel in the power of the Spirit, he means by this in the section before us, an absolute truth-character, which must from the start be attributed to the Scriptures as a whole, and will be experienced in and with the divinity of the Scriptures in general. So the matter already stands in the edition of 1539 ... (XXIX. 292 sq.)." Accordingly Calvin teaches that the Scriptures in all their parts are of indefectible authority, and should be met in all their prescriptions with unlimited obedience (p. 418), because it is just God who speaks in them. Then: "With Dorner (Geschichte der protest. Theologie, p. 380) - and even more decisively than he does it - we must remark on all this: 'The formal aide of the protestant principle remains with Calvin an over-emphasis, in comparison with the material, and with this is connected that he sees in the Holy Scriptures above all else the revelation of the will of God which he has dictated to man through the sacred writers.' And this tendency came ever more strongly forward with him in the successive revisions of the Institutes. His conception of the formal principle thus left no room for such a criticism as Luther employed on the several parts of the canon." Later Lutheranism, however, Köstlin concludes by saying, adopted Calvin's point of view here and even exaggerated it.

"The formal side of the Protestant principle retains with Calvin the ascendency over the material; and with this is connected the fact that he sees in the Holy Scriptures chiefly the revelation of the will of God, which he has prescribed to men through the sacred writers." - Dorner, "Hist. of Protest. Theology," i. 1871, p. 390. Cf. p. 387: "The formal principle is, according to him, the norm and source of dogma, whilst he does not treat faith, in the same way as Luther, as a source of knowledge for the dogmatical structure, that is to say, as the mediative principle of knowledge." Hence Dorner complains (p. 390) of the more restricted freedom which Calvin left "for the free productions of the faith of the Church in legislation and dogma," and instances his treatment of "the Apostolic Age as normative for all times, even for questions of Church constitution," and the little room he left for destructive Biblical criticism. Cf. what is said above of Calvin's adoption of "the Puritan principle" (pp. 38 sq.).

Cf. the Introduction to the English Translation of Kuyper's "The Work of the Holy Spirit," 1900, especially pp. xxxiii.-iv. Cf. what Pannier, pp. 102-104, says of Calvin's general doctrine of the work of the Spirit and the relation borne to it by his particular doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit to Scripture. "If we pass beyond the two particular chapters whose contents we have been analysing and seek in the Institutes from 1536 to 1560 for other passages relating to the Holy Spirit, we shall see Calvin insisting ever more and more and on all occasions - as in the Commentaries - upon these diverse manifestations of the Holy Spirit, and presenting them all more or less as testimonies. He constantly recurs to the natural incapacity of man and the necessity of divine illumination in his mind, and especially in his heart, for the act of faith. It is from this point of view that he brings together the ideas of the Spirit and the Word of God in the definition of faith: 'It is a firm and certain knowledge of the good will of God towards us: which, being grounded in the free promise given in Jesus Christ, is revealed to our heart by the Holy Spirit.' He introduces the same ideas in his introductory remarks on the Apostles' Creed, and they lie at the basis of the explication he gives of the Third Article in all its forms, . . . e.g., in the ed. of 1580: 'In sum, He is set before us as the sole fountain from which all the celestial riches flow down to us.... For it is by His inspiration that we are regenerated into celestial life, so as no longer to govern or guide ourselves, but to be ruled by His movement and operation; so that if there is any good in us, it is only the fruit of His grace. . . . But since faith is His prime master-piece, the most of what we read in the Scriptures of His virtue and operation relates itself to this faith, by which He brings us to the brightness of the Gospel, in a manner which justifies calling Him the King by whom the treasures of the kingdom of heaven are offered to us, and His illumination may be called the longing of our souls.' From these quotations it is made plain that the witness of the Holy Spirit which at the opening of the Institutes in 1539 appeared as the means of knowledge, was thenceforward nevertheless considered, in the progress of the work, as the means of grace, and that taking his start from this point of view, Calvin discovered ever more widely extending horizons, so as at the end to speak particularly of the Holy Spirit in at least four different connections, but always - even in the first - in direct and constant relation to faith, with respect to its origin, and with respect to its consequences; and by no means almost exclusively with respect to assurance of the authority of the Scriptures." The progress which Pannier supposes he traces in Calvin's doctrine of the work of the Spirit seems illusory: the general doctrine of the work of the Spirit is already pretty fully outlined in 1536. But the relating of the testimony of the Spirit to Scripture to Calvin's general doctrine of faith as the product of the Spirit is exact and important for the understanding of his teaching. From beginning to end, Calvin conceived the confidence of the Christian in Scripture, wrought by the Holy Spirit, as one of the exercises of saving faith. Calvin is ever insistent that all that is good in man comes from the Spirit - whether in the sphere of thought, feeling, or act. "It is a notion of the natural man," he says on John xiv. 17 (1553: xlvii. 329-330), "to despise all that the Sacred Scriptures say of the Holy Spirit, depending rather on his own reason, and to reject the celestial illumination. . . . For ourselves, feeling our penury, we know that all we have of sound knowledge comes from no other fountain. Nevertheless the words of the Lord Jesus show clearly that nothing can be known of what concerns the Holy Spirit by human sense, but He is known only by the experience of faith." "No one," says he again ("Institutes" of 1543, i. 330), "should hesitate to confess that he attains the knowledge of the mysteries of God only so far as he has been illuminated by God's grace. He that attributes more knowledge to himself is only the more blind that he does not recognize his blindness."

Opp. xiv. 727-733 (Pannier, as cited, p. 120).

The classical instance of this confusion is supplied by the teaching of Claude Pajon (1626-1685), who, in accordance with his general doctrine that "without any other grace than that of the Word, God changes the whole man, from his intellect to his passions," explained the "testimony of the Spirit" as nothing else than the effect of the indicia of divinity in Scripture on the mind. The effect of these "marks" is a divine effect, because it is wrought in prearranged circumstances prepared for this effect: facit per alium facit per se. The conception is essentially deistic. It is no small testimony to the cardinal place which the doctrine of "the testimony of the Spirit" held in the Reformed system of the seventeenth century that Pajon still taught it; and it is no small testimony to its current conception as just "regeneration" that Pajon too identified it with regeneration, explained, of course, in accordance with his fundamental principle that all that God works He works through means. See on the whole matter Jurieu, "Traitté de la Nature et de la Grace," 1688, pp. 25, 26, who quotes alike from Pajon and his followers.

Doumergue, "Le probleme protestant," 1892, p. 46 (Pannier, as cited, p. 192).

Pannier, as cited, pp. 188 sq., is quite right in insisting on this. After quoting D. H. Meyer ("De la place et du rôle de l'apologetique dana la théologie protestante," in the Revue de théologie et des quest. relig., Jan., 1893, p. 1) to the effect that "the witness of the Holy Spirit in the heart of Christians is not a subjective phenomenon . . . it is an objective thing and comes from God," - he continues: "Now this objective character of the witness of the Holy Spirit is precisely what appears to make it 'incomprehensible' to our modern theologians (so A. E. Martin, La Polemique de R. Simon et de J. Le Clerc, 1880, p. 29: 'This intervention of the Holy Spirit distinct from the individual consciousness appears to us incomprehensible'). We are not speaking of those who venture to pretend that Calvin identifies the witness of the Holy Spirit with 'the intimate feeling' of each Christian. When one takes his place by the side of Castellion he may lawfully say, For me as for him 'the inspiration of the Holy Ghost confounds itself with consciousness; these revelations made to the humble are nothing more than the intuitions of a moral and religious sense fortified by meditation' (Buiason, Castellion, i. p. 304, cf. p. 201: 'Castellion placed above the tradition of the universal Church his own sense, his own reason, or rather, let us say it all at once, for it is the foundation of the debate, his consciousness'). But when one invokes the real fathers of the real Reformation, ah, please do not take for theirs the very opinions they combat. To make of the testimony of the Holy Spirit the equivalent of the testimony of the human spirit, of the individual consciousness, is to deny the real existence and the distinct role of the Holy Spirit, is to show that we have nothing in common with the faith expounded by Calvin so clearly, and defended through a century against the attacks of the Catholics as one of the essential bases of the Reformed theology and piety." Again, Pannier is quite right in his declaration (p. 214): "What we deny is that our reason - moral consciousness, religious consciousness, the term is of no importance - can, of itself, make us see the divinity of the Scriptures. It is this which sees it; but it is the Holy Spirit which makes us see it. He is not the inner eye for seeing the truth which is outside of us, but the supernatural hand which comes to open the eye of our consciousness - an eye which is, no doubt, divine in the sense that it too was created by God, but which has been blinded by the consequences of sin."

See especially P. Du Moulin, "Du Iuge dea controverses traitté," 1838, pp. 294 sq., and cf. Pannier, as cited, pp. 64-88.

"Dialogue with Trypho," vii. ("Opera," ed. Otto. I. ii. 32) : ouv ga.r sunopta. ouvde. sunnohta. pa/sin evstin( eiv mh, tw| qeo.j do|/ sunie,nai( kai. o` Cristo.j autou/: "these things cannot be perceived or understood by all, but only by the man to whom God and His Christ have given it to understand them."

"In Cap. v. et vi. Genes. homil. xxi." (Migne, liii. 175): Dia,toi tou/to prosh,kei h`ma/j u`po. th/j a;nwqen ca,ritoj o`dhgoume>nouj( kai. th.n para. tou/ a`gi,ou Pneu,matoj e;llamyin dexame,nouj ou;twj evpie,nai ta. qei/a lo,gia) Ouvde. ga.r sofi,aj avnqrwpi,nhj dei/tai h` qei,a Grafh. pro.j th.n katano,hsin tw/n gegramme,nwn( avlla. th/j tou/ Pneu,matoj avpokalu,yewj . . . . "For we must be led by the grace from above, and must receive the illumination of the Holy Spirit, to approach the divine oracles; for it is not human wisdom but the revelation of the Holy Spirit that is needed for understanding the Holy Scriptures." It will be perceived that it is more distinctly the understanding of the Scriptures than the reception of them as from God which is in question with both Justin and Chrysostom.

"De Trinitate," ii. 34: Animus humanus, nisi per fidem donum Spiritus hauserit, habebit quidem naturam Deum intelligendi, sed lumen acientiae non habebit; iii. 24: non enim concipiunt imperfecta perfectum, neque quod ex alio subsistit, absolute vel auctoris sui potest intelligentiam obtinere, vel propriam; v. 21: neque enim nobis ea natura est, ut se in coelestem cognitionem suis viribus efferat. A Deo discendum est quid de Deo intelligendum sit; quia non nisi se auctore cognoscitur. . . . Loquendum ergo non aliter de Deo est, quam ut ipse ad intelligentiam nostram de se locutus est. (For these citations see Migne, "Patro. Lat.," x. 74-75; x. 92; x. 143.) Hilary certainly teaches that for such creatures as men there can be no knowledge of God except it be God-taught: but it is not so clear that he teaches that for sinful creatures there must be a special illapse of the Spirit that such as they may know God-may perceive Him in His Word and so recognize that Word as from Him and derive a true knowledge of Him from it. It is this soteriological doctrine which is Calvin's doctrine of the Holy Spirit's testimony: not that ontological one.

Cf. article: "Augustine's Doctrine of Knowledge and Authority," in The Princeton Theological Review for July and October, 1907.

Ibid., pp. 360 sq.

Ibid., pp. 571 sq.

"Tract. iii. in Ep. Joan. ad Parthos," ii. 13 (Migne, xxxv. 2004). Again: "There is, then, I say, a Master within that teacheth: Christ teacheth; His inspiration teacheth. Where His inspiration and His unction are not, in vain do words make a noise from without."

"Confessions," xi. 3 (Migne, xxxii. 811). Cf. vi. 5 (Migne, xxxii. 723).

Pannier, loc. cit., says: "The whole of the testimony of the Holy Spirit is not yet here. Only once is the Holy Spirit Himself named [in these passages from Augustine] in a formal way. But Augustine has the intuition of a mysterious work wrought in the soul of the Christian, of an understanding of the Bible which comes not from man but from a power exterior and superior to him; and he sets forth the role which this direct correspondence between the book and the reader may play in the foundation of Christian certitude. In this, as in so many other points, Augustine was the precursor of the Reformation, and a precursor without immediate followers: for except a couple of very vague and isolated hints in Salvianus (De Provid., iii. 1) and Gregory the Great († 604, Homil. in Ezek., I. x.), nothing further is found on this subject through ten centuries: it comes into view again at the approach of the new age, when thought aspired to free itself from the Scholastic ruts, with Biel († 1495, Lib. iii. Sent. dist. 25, dub. 3) and Cajetan († 1534, Opera, II. i. 1)."

"Loci," ed. 1555 ("Corpus Ref.," xxi. 605).

"De vera et falsa religione": Cum constet verbo nusquam fidem haberi quam ubi Pater traxit, Spiritus monuit, unctio docuit ... hanc rem solae piae mentea norunt. Neque enim ab hominum disceptatione pendet, sed in animis hominum tenacissime sedet. Experientia est, nam pii omnes eam experti sunt. "Articles of 1523" (Niemeyer, "Collectio confessionum in eccles. ref. publ.," 1840, p. 5): Art. xiii. Verbo Dei quum auscultant homines pure et sinceriter voluntatem Dei discunt. Deinde per Spiritum Dei in Deum trahuntur et veluti transformantur. "Von Klarheit und Gewusse des Worts Gottes" ("Werke," Schuler und Schulthess, 1828, i. 81; or "Werke" in "Corp. Ref.," i. 382): "The Scriptures . . . came from God, not from man; ... and the God who has shined into them will Himself give you to understand that their speech comes from God." Cf. the interesting biographical account of how he came to depend on the Scriptures only, on p. 79 (or " Corp. Ref.," i. 379).

E. Rabaud, "Hist. de la doctr. de l'inspiration," etc., 1883, pp. 32-33, 42-43, 47 sq., 50, expounds the earlier Reformers as in principle standing on the doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit. With respect to the interpretation of Scripture he remarks: "The hermeneutical principle of the witness of the Holy Spirit (if we may speak of it as a principle) is common to all the Reformers. Luther only, without being ignorant of it, makes no use of it. Besides responding to the polemic needs, it responded to the aspirations of the faith and of the piety of simple men, better than rational demonstrations" (p. 50, note 4). "In a general way," he remarks, pp. 32-33, "Luther considered the Bible as the sole incontestable and absolute authority. Here is the solid foundation of the edifice, the impregnable citadel in which he shut himself in order to repel victoriously all attacks. It is for him, in truth, a religious axiom, a postulate of faith, and not a dogma or a theory; it is revealed to his believing soul independently of all intellectual activity. Thus Luther, trusting in the action of the Holy Spirit, operating through the Scriptures, does not pause to prove its authority, nor to establish it dialectically: it imposes itself; a systematic treatment is not needed. More and more as circumstances demanded it, he gave reasons for his faith and his submission. Poor arguments to modern thinking, but in his times, and commended by his vibrant eloquence and powerful personality, possessing a power of persuasion very impressive. . . . It seemed idle to Luther, we may say, to enter into an argument to establish what was evident to him. He did not attempt, therefore, to prove the authority of the Bible - he asserted it repeatedly in warm words, . . . in passionate declarations, but rarely if ever proceeds by a formal demonstration." Raising the question of Zwingli's doctrine of the mode and extent of inspiration (p. 47), he remarks: "No more than the others does Zwingli respond to these questions, which had not yet been raised. God has spoken: the Bible contains His word: that is enough. The divinity of the Bible is once more a fact, an axiom, so much so that he does not dream of establishing it dialectically or of defending it."

So Pannier, as cited, p. 83: "Like all the other essential parts of the Reformed Dogmatics, the doctrine of the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit is found in germ in the first edition of the Institutes, although still with out any development. It is almost possible to deny that it exists there, as has been done with predestination. Nevertheless, if the doctrine is not yet scientifically formulated, it may yet be perceived to preexist necessarily as an essential member of the complete body of doctrine which is slowly to grow up." When Pannier comes, however (pp. 72-77), to expound in detail the germs of the doctrine as they lie in the edition of 1536, it turns out that there is not only no full development of the doctrine in that edition, but also no explicit mention of it, as it is applied to the conviction which the Christian has of the divinity of Scripture; so that it preexists in this edition only as implicit in its general doctrine of the Spirit and His work.

By Pannier, p. 69.

Pannier, as cited, p. 77, notes that "the words: testimonio Spiritus Sancti occur only a single time, at the end, and in the old sense of - 'by the divinely inspired Scriptures."' He refers to the ed. of 1536, p. 470, that is, Opp. i. 228: and notes that this passage was dropped in the edition of 1559 (Opp. iv. 796, note 5). The passage runs: "Thus Hezekiah is praised by the testimony of the Holy Spirit" - that is, obviously, "by the inspired Scriptures" - "for having broken up the brazen serpent which Moses had made by Divine command."

Köstlin, as cited, p. 411, strongly states these facts. The whole of the discussion on the sources and norms of religious truth "is altogether lacking in the original form" of the "Institutes": "Calvin worked out this section for the first time for the edition of 1539": but it is found here already thoroughly done, "in all its fundamental traits already complete and mature." He adds that the Lutheran dogmatists (as well as the Reformed) at once, however, took up the construction of Calvin and made it their own.

The history of the doctrine among the Reformed is touched on by A. Schweiser, "Glaubenslehre," i. § 32; among the old Lutherans by Klaiber, "Die Lehre der altprotestantischen Dogmatiker von dem test. Sp. Sancti" in the Jahrbucher für d. Theologie, 1857, pp. 1-54. Its history among French theologians is traced by Pannier, as cited, Part iii. pp. 139-181, cf. 188-193: his notes on the history outside of France (pp. 181-185) are very slight. On pp. 161-163 Pannier essays to gather together, chiefly, as it appears, from the scattered citations in the Protestant controversialists of the seventeenth century (p. 162, note 2), the hints which appear in the Romish writers, mainly Jesuits of the early seventeenth century, of recognition of the internal work of the Holy Spirit illuminating the soul. These bear more or less resemblance to the Protestant doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit. Some of the passages he cites are quite striking, but do not go beyond the common boundaries of universal Christian supernaturalism.

In his brief remarks on the subject in his "Dogmengeschichte des Protestantismus," i. 1908, pp. 178 sq., Otto Ritschl seeks to discriminate between the Reformed and Lutherans in their conception of the testimony of the Spirit; but his discrimination touches rather the application than the essence of the matter.

Some of them are cited, e.g., by Schweizer, op. cit., followed, e.g., by Pannier, as cited (p. 186, note 1) - such as: "Faith is already presupposed when a peculiar authority is conceded to Scripture," - "The recognition of what is canonical comes into existence only gradually and progressively, since the sense for the truly Apostolic is a gracious gift which grows up only gradually in the Church," - "Faith cannot be established in unbelievers by the Scriptures, so that their divine authority is in the first instance proved from merely rational considerations." - There is much that is true and well said in such remarks, and they enrich the writings of Schleiermacher and his followers with a truly spiritual element. But at bottom the central position occupied is vitiated by the use of "faith" as an "undistributed middle," and the remarks of writers of this type do not so much tend to exalt the place of saving faith as to depress the authority of Scripture, by practically denying the existence or validity of fides humana. That attitude towards the Scriptures which gladly and heartily recognizes them as the Word of the Living God, and with all delight in them as such, seeks to subject all thought and feeling and action to their direction, certainly is, if not exactly a product of "true faith," yet (as the Westminster Confession defines it) an exercise of true faith, and a product of that inward creative operation of the Holy Spirit from which all true faith comes: that keen taste for the divine which is the outgrowth of the spiritual gift of discrimination - the "distinguishing of things that differ" which Paul gives a place among Christian graces - is assuredly a "gift of grace" which may grow more and more strong as the Christian life effloresces; and such a taste for the divine cannot be awakened in unbelievers by the natural action of the Scriptures or any rational arguments whatever, but requires for its production the work of the Spirit of God ab extra accidens. But it is a totally different question whether the peculiarity of Scripture as a divine revelation can call out no intellectual recognition in the minds of inquiring men, but must remain wholly hidden and produce no mental reaction conformable to its nature, until true faith has already been born in the heart: whether there are no valid tests of what is apostolical except a spiritual sense for the truly apostolical which can only gradually grow up in the Church; whether the unbeliever may not be given a well-grounded intellectual conviction of the apostolic origin, the canonical authority, and the divine character of Scripture by the presentation to him of rational evidence which, however unwillingly on his part, will compel his assent. The question here is not whether this fides humana is of any great use in the spiritual life: the question is whether it is possible and actual. We may argue, if we will, that it is not worth while to awake it - though opinions may differ there: but how can we argue that it is a thing inherently impossible? To say this is not merely to say that reason cannot save, which is what Calvin said and all his followers: it is to say that salvation is intrinsically unreasonable - which neither Calvin nor any of his true followers could for a moment allow. Sin may harden the heart so that it will not admit, weigh, or yield to evidence: but sin, which affects only the heart subjectively, and not the process of reasoning objectively, cannot alter the relations of evidence to conclusions. Sin does not in the least degree affect the cogency of any rightly constructed syllogism. No man, no doubt, was ever reasoned into the kingdom of heaven: it is the Holy Spirit alone who can translate us into the kingdom of God's dear Son. But there are excellent reasons why every man should enter the kingdom of heaven; and these reasons are valid in the forum of every rational mind, and their validity can and should be made manifest to all.

"Theological Lectures," etc., New York, 1878, pp. 317, 320 sq.

"The Way of Life," 1841; also "Systematic Theology," as per Index.

"Encyclopædie, etc.," ii. 1894, pp. 505 sqq.

"Gereformeerde Dogmatiek," ed. 1, i. pp. 142-145, 420-422, 490-491.

Written, no doubt, by Léger, moderator at the time of "the Table," and preserved for us in his "Histoire générale des églises évangéliques des vallées de Piédmont," 1669, i. p. 112 (cf. p. 92). See Pannier, as cited, p. 133.

Dr. A. F. Mitchell ("The Westminster Assembly, its History and Standards," the Baird Lecture for 1882, ed. 2, 1897, p. 441, note), following Prof. J. S. Candlish (Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., 1877, p. 173), is "very sure" that Gilleapie has here "left his mark on the Confession." The "Miscellany Questions," in the xxi. of which occurs the passage from Gillespie from which the Confession is supposed to have drawn, was a posthumous work, published in 1649; but a number of the papers of which it is made up have the appearance of being briefs drawn up by Gillespie for his own satisfaction, or as preparations for speeches, or possibly even as papers handed in to committees, during the discussions of the Westminster Assembly. The language in question, however, whether in Gillespie or in the Confession, is so strongly reminiscent of Calvin, that the possibility seems to remain open that the resemblance between Gillespie and the Confession is due to their common relation to Calvin. Here is the passage in Gillespie ("Presbyterian Armoury" ed., vol. ii. pp. 105-106): "The Scripture is known to be indeed the Word of God by the beams of divine authority it hath in itself, and by certain distinguishing characters, which do infallibly prove it to be the Word of God; such as the heavenliness of the matter; the majesty of the style; the irresistible power over the conscience; the general scope, to abase man and to exalt God; nothing driven at but God's glory and man's salvation; the extraordinary holiness of the penmen of the Holy Ghost, without respect to any particular interests of their own, or of others of their nearest relations (which is manifest by their writings); the supernatural mysteries revealed therein, which could never have entered into the reason of men; the marvellous consent of all parts and passages (though written by divers and several penmen), even where there is some appearance of difference; the fulfilling of prophecies; the miracles wrought by Christ, by the prophets and apostles; the conservation of the Scriptures against the malice of Satan and fury of persecutors; - these and the like are characters and marks which evidence the Scriptures to be the Word of God; yet all these cannot beget in the soul a full persuasion of faith that the Scriptures are the Word of God; this persuasion is from the Holy Ghost in our hearts. And it hath been the common resolution of sound Protestant writers (though now called in question by the sceptics of this age [the allusion being to "Mr. J. Godwin in his Hagiomastix"]) that these arguments and infallible characters in the Scripture itself, which most certainly prove it to be the Word of God, cannot produce a certainty of persuasion in our hearts, but this is done by the Spirit of God within us, according to these Scriptures, I Cor. ii. 10-15; I Thes. i. 5; I John ii. 27; v. 6-8, 10; John vi. 45." - Whatever may be the immediate source of the Confessional statement, Calvin is clearly the real source of Gillespie's statement. - For the essence of the matter Gillespie's discussion is notably clear and exact, particularly with reference to the relation of the indicia to the testimony of the Spirit, a matter which he strangely declares had not to his knowledge been discussed before. The clarity of his determinations here is doubtless due to the specific topic which he is in this Question investigating, viz., the validity of the argument from marks and fruits of sanctification to our interest in Christ: a parallel question in the broader soteriological sphere to the place of indicia in our conviction of the divinity of Scripture, which he therefore uses illustratively for his main problem. "It may be asked," he remarks, "and it is a question worthy to be looked into (though I must confess I have not read it, nor heard it, handled before), How doth this assurance by marks agree with or differ from assurance by the testimony of the Holy Spirit? May the soul have assurance either way, or must there be a concurrence of both (for I suppose they are not one and the same thing) to make up the assurance?" (p. 105). He proves that they are "not one and the same thing"; and then shows solidly that for assurance there "must be a concurrence of both." "To make no trial by marks," he says, "and to trust an inward testimony, under the notion of the Holy Ghost's testimony, when it is without the least evidence of any true gracious marks, this way (of its own nature, and intrinsically, or in itself) is a deluding and ensnaring of the conscience" (p. 105). That is to say, a blind confidence and conviction, without cognizable grounds in evidence cannot be trusted. Again and very clearly: "So that, in the business of assurance and full persuasion, the evidences of graces and the testimony of the Spirit, are two concurrent causes or helps, both of them necessary. Without the evidence of graces, it is not a safe nor a wellgrounded assurance" (p. 106). It remains only to add that while arguing this out in the wider soteriological sphere, Gillespie appears to take it as a matter of course in the accrediting of the Scriptures as divine-giving that case, in the course of his argument, as an illustration to aid in determining his conclusion.

For the meaning of the Confession's statement, supported by illustrative excerpts from its authors, see The Presbyterian and Reformed Review, iv. 1893, pp. 624-32; and cf. W. Cunningham, "Theological Lectures," New York, 1878, pp. 320 sq., and The Presbyterian Quarterly, January, 1894, pp. 19 sq.

÷ 03 Calvin's Doctrine of God1

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

Having expounded in the opening chapters of the "Institutes" the sources and means of the knowledge of God, Calvin naturally proceeds in the next series of chapters (I. x. xi. xii. xiii.) to set forth the nature of the God who, by the revelation of Himself in His Word and by the prevalent internal operation of His Spirit, frames the knowledge of Himself in the hearts of His people. He who expects to find in these chapters, however, an orderly discussion of the several topics which make up the locus de Deo in our formal dogmatics, will meet with disappointment. Calvin is not writing out of an abstract scientific impulse, but with the needs of souls, and, indeed, also with the special demands of the day in mind. And as his purpose is distinctively religious, so his method is literary rather than scholastic. In the freedom of his literary manner, he had permitted himself in the preceding chapters repeated excursions into regions which, in an exact arrangement of the material, might well have been reserved for exploration at this later point. To take up these topics again, now, for fuller and more orderly exposition, would involve much repetition without substantially advancing the practical purpose for which the "Institutes" were written. Calvin was not a man to confound formal correctness of arrangement with substantial completeness of treatment; nor was he at a loss for new topics of pressing importance for discussion. He skillfully interposes at this point, therefore, a short chapter (chap. x.) in which under the form of pointing out the complete harmony with the revelation of God in nature of the revelation of God in the Scriptures - the divine authority of which in the communication of the knowledge of God he had just demonstrated - he reminds his readers of all that he had formerly said of the nature and attributes of God on the basis of natural revelation, and takes occasion to say what it remained necessary to say of the same topics on the basis of supernatural revelation. Thus he briefly but effectively brings together under the reader's eye the whole body of his exposition of these topics and frees his hands to give himself, under the guidance of his practical bent and purpose, to the two topics falling under the rubric of the doctrine of God which were at the moment of the most pressing importance. His actual formal treatment of the doctrine of God thus divides itself into two parts, the former of which (chaps. xi. xii.), in strong Anti-Romish polemic is devoted to the uprooting of every refuge of idolatry, while the latter (chap. xiii.), in equally strong polemic against the Anti-trinitarianism of the day, develops with theological acumen and vital faith the doctrine of Trinity in Unity.

It is quite true, then, as has often been remarked, that the "Institutes" contain no systematic discussion of the existence, the nature, and the attributes of God.2 And the lack of formal, systematic discussion of these fundamental topics, may, no doubt, be accounted a flaw, if we are to conceive the "Institutes" as a formal treatise in systematic theology. But it is not at all true that the "Institutes" contain no sufficient indication of Calvin's conceptions on these subjects: nor is it possible to refer the absence of formal discussion of them either to indifference to them on Calvin's part or to any peculiarity of his dogmatic standpoint,3 or even of his theological method.4 The omission belongs rather to the peculiarity of this treatise as a literary product. Calvin does not pass over all systematic discussion of the existence, nature, and attributes of God because from his theological standpoint there was nothing to say upon these topics, nor because, in his theological method, they were insignificant for his system; but simply because he had been led already to say informally about them all that was necessary for the religious, practical purpose he had in view in writing this treatise. For here as elsewhere the key to the understanding of the "Institutes" lies in recognizing their fundamental purpose to have been religious, and their whole, not coloring merely, but substance, to be profoundly religious - in this only reflecting indeed the most determinative trait of Calvin's character.

It is important to emphasize this, for there seems to be still an impression abroad that Calvin's nature was at bottom cold and hard and dry, and his life-manifestation but a piece of incarnated logic: while the "Institutes" themselves are frequently represented, or rather misrepresented - it is difficult to believe that those who so speak of them can have read them - as a body of purely formal reasoning by which intolerable conclusions are remorselessly deduced from a set of metaphysical assumptions.5 Perhaps M. Ferdinand Brunetière may be looked upon as a not unfair representative of the class of writers who are wont so to speak of the "Institutes."6 According to him, Calvin has "intellectualized" religion and reduced it to a form which can appeal only to the "reasonable," or rather to the "reasoning" man. "In that oratorical work which he called The Institutes," M. Brunetière says, "if there is any movement . . . it is not one which comes from the heart . . . and - I am speaking here only of the writer or the religious theorizer, not of the man - the insensibility of Calvin is equalled only by the rigor of his reasoning. . . ." The religion Calvin sets forth is "a religion which consists essentially, almost exclusively, in the adhesion of the intellect to truths all but demonstrated," and commends itself by nothing "except by the literalness of its agreement with a text - which is a matter of pure philology - and by the solidity of its logical edifice - which is nothing but a matter of pure reasoning." To Calvin, he adds, "religious truth attests itself in no other manner and by no other means than mathematical truth. As he would reason on the properties of a triangle, or of a sphere, so Calvin reasons on the attributes of God. All that will not adjust itself to the exigencies of his dialectic, he contests or he rejects . . . Cartesian before Descartes, rational evidence, logical incontradiction are for him the test or the proof of truth. He would not believe if faith did not stay itself on a formal syllogism. . . . From a 'matter of the heart,' if I may so say, Calvin transformed religion into an 'affair of the intellect.' "

We must not fail to observe, in passing, that even M. Brunetière refrains from attributing to Calvin's person the hard insensibility which he represents as the characteristic of his religious writings - a tribute, we may suppose, to the religious impression which is made by Calvin's personality upon all who come into his presence, and which led even M. Ernest Renan, who otherwise shares very largely M. Brunetiere's estimate of him, to declare him "the most Christian man of his age."7 Nor can we help suspecting that the violence of the invectives launched against the remorseless logic of the "Institutes" and of Calvin's religious reasoning in general, is but the index of the difficulty felt by M. Brunetière and those who share his point of view, in sustaining themselves against the force of Calvin's argumentative presentation of his religious conceptions. It is surely no discredit to a religious reasoner that his presentation commends his system irresistibly to all "reasonable," or let us even say "reasoning" men. A religious system which cannot sustain itself in the presence of "reasonable" or "reasoning" men, is not likely to remain permanently in existence, or at least in power among reasonable or reasoning men; and one would think that the logical irresistibility of a system of religious truth would be distinctly a count in its favor. The bite of M. Brunetière's assault is found, therefore, purely in its negative side. He would condemn Calvin's system of religion as nothing but a system of logic; and the "Institutes," the most systematic presentation of it, as in essence nothing but a congeries of syllogisms, issuing in nothing but a set of logical propositions, with no religious quality or uplift in them. In this, however, he worst of all misses the mark; and we must add he was peculiarly unfortunate in fixing, in illustration of his meaning, on the two matters of the "attributes of God" as the point of departure for Calvin's dialectic and of the intellectualizing of "faith" as the height of his offending.

In Calvin's treatment of faith there is nothing more striking than his determination to make it clear that it is a matter not of the understanding but of the heart; and he reproaches the Romish conception of faith precisely because it magnifies the intellectual side to the neglect of the fiducial. "We must not suppose," it is said in the Confession of Faith drawn up for the Genevan Church,8 either by himself or by his colleagues under his eye, "that Christian faith is a naked and mere knowledge of God or understanding of the Scriptures, which floats in the brain without touching the heart. . . . It is a firm and solid confidence of the heart." Or, as he repeats this elsewhere,9 "It is an error to suppose that faith is a naked and cold knowledge.10 . . . Faith is not a naked knowledge,11 which floats in the brain, but draws with it a living affection of the heart."12 "True Christian faith," he expounds in the second edition of the "Institutes,"13 . . . "is not content with a simple historical knowledge, but takes its seat in the heart of man." "It does not suffice that the understanding should be illuminated by the Spirit of God if the heart be not strengthened by His power. In this matter the theologians of the Sorbonne very grossly err, - thinking that faith is a simple consent to the Word of God, which consists in understanding, and leaving out the confidence and assurance of the heart." "What the understanding has received must be planted in the heart. For if the Word of God floats in the head only, it has not yet been received by faith; it has its true reception only when it has taken root in the depths of the heart." Again, to cite a couple of passages in which the less pungent statement of the earlier editions has been given new point and force in the final edition of the "Institutes": "It must here be again observed," says he,14 "that we are invited to the knowledge of God - not a knowledge which, content with empty speculation, floats only in the brain, but one which shall be solid and fruitful, if rightly received by us, and rooted in the heart." "The assent we give to God," he says again,15 " as I have already indicated and shall show more largely later - is rather of the heart than of the brain, and rather of the affections than of the understanding."16 It is quite clear, then, that Calvin did not consciously address himself merely to the securing of an intellectual assent to his teaching, but sought to move men's hearts. His whole conception of religion turned, indeed, on this: religion, he explained, to be pleasing to God, must be a matter of the heart,17 and God requires in His worshippers precisely heart and affection.18 All the arguments in the world, he insists, if unaccompanied by the work of the Holy Spirit on the heart, will fail to produce the faith which piety requires."

This scarcely sounds like a man to whom religion was simply a matter of logical proof.

And so far is he from making the attributes of God, metaphysically determined, the starting-point of a body of teaching deduced from them by quasi-mathematical reasoning - as one would deduce the properties of a triangle from its nature as a triangle - that it has been made his reproach that he has so little to say of the divine nature and attributes, and in this little confines himself so strictly to the manifest indicia of God in His works and the direct teaching of Scripture, refusing utterly to follow "the high priori" road either in determining the divine attributes or from them determining the divine activities. Thus, his doctrine of God is, it is said, no doubt notably sober and restrained, but also, when compared with Zwingli's, for example - equally notably unimportant.20 It is confessed, however, that it is at least thoroughly religious; and in this is found, indeed, its fundamental characteristic. Precisely where Calvin's doctrine differs from Zwingli's markedly is that he constantly contemplated God religiously, while Zwingli contemplated him philosophically - that to him God was above and before all things the object of religious reverence, while to Zwingli he was predominatingly the First Cause, from whom all things proceed.21 "It is not with the doctrine of God," says the historian whose representations we have been summarizing, "but with the worship of God that Calvin's first concern was engaged. Even in his doctrine of God - as we may perceive from his remarks upon it - religion stands ever in the foreground (I. ii. 1). Before everything else Calvin is a religious personality. The Reformation confronts Catholicism with a zeal to live for God. With striking justice Calvin remarked that 'all alike engaged in the worship of God, but few really reverenced Him, - that there was everywhere great ostentation in ceremonies but sincerity of heart was rare' (I. ii. 2). Reverence for God was the great thing for Calvin. If we lose sight of this a personality like Calvin cannot be understood; and it is only by recognizing the religious principle by which he was governed, that a just judgment can be formed of his work as a dogmatician. . . ."22 Again, Calvin "considers the knowledge of the nature and of the attributes of God more a matter of the heart than of the understanding; and such a knowledge, he says, must not only arouse us to 'the service of God, but must also awake in us the hope of a future life' (I. v. 10). In his extreme practicality - as the last remark shows us - Calvin rejected the philosophical treatment of the question. The Scriptures, for him the source of the knowledge of God, he takes as his guide in his remarks on the attributes. . . ."23 Still again, "Already more than once have we had occasion to note that when Calvin treats of God, he does this as a believer, for whom the existence of God stands as a fixed fact; and what he says of God, he draws from the Scriptures as his fundamental source, finding his pride in remaining a Biblical theologian, and whenever he can, taking the field against the philosophico more interpretari of the Scriptural texts (see e.g. I. xvi. 3). His doctrine of God has the practical end of serving the needs of his fellow-believers. It is also noteworthy that he closes every stage of the consideration with an exhortation to the adoration of God or to the surrender of the heart to Him. Of the doctrine of the Trinity he declares that he will hold himself ever truly to the Scriptures, because he desires to do nothing more than to make what the Scriptures teach accessible to our conceptions planioribus verbis, and this will apply equally to the whole of his doctrine of God."24 In a word, nothing can be clearer than that in his specific doctrine of God as well as in his general attitude to religious truth Calvin is as far as possible from being satisfied with a merely logical effect. When we listen to him on these high themes we are listening less to the play of his dialectic than to the throbbing of his heart.

It was due to this his controlling religious purpose, and to his dominating religious interest, that Calvin was able to leave the great topics of the existence, the nature, and the attributes of God, without formal and detailed discussion in his "Institutes." It is only a matter, we must reiterate, of the omission of formal and detailed discussion; for it involves not merely a gross exaggeration but a grave misapprehension to represent him as leaving these topics wholly to one side, and much more to seek to account for this assumed fact from some equally assumed peculiarity of Calvin's theological point of view or method. Under the impulse of his governing religious interest, he was able to content himself with such an exposition of the nature and attributes of God, in matter and form, as served his ends of religious impression, and was under no compulsion to expand this into such details and order it into such a methodical mode of presentation as would satisfy the demands of scholastic treatment. But to omit what would be for his purpose adequate treatment of these fundamental elements of a complete doctrine of God would have been impossible, we do not say merely to a thinker of his systematic genius, but to a religious teacher of his earnestness of spirit. In point of fact, we do not find lacking to the "Institutes" such a fundamental treatment of these great topics as would be appropriate in such a treatise. We only find their formal and separate treatment lacking. All that it is needful for the Christian man to know on these great themes is here present. Only, it is present so to speak in solution, rather than in precipitate: distributed through the general discussion of the knowledge of God rather than gathered together into one place and apportioned to formal rubrics. It is communicated moreover in a literary and concrete rather than in an abstract and scholastic manner.

It will repay us to gather out from their matrix in the flowing discourse the elements of Calvin's doctrine of God, that we may form some fair estimate of the precise nature and amount of actual instruction he gives regarding it. We shall attempt this by considering in turn Calvin's doctrine of the existence, knowableness, nature, and attributes of God.

We do not read far into the "Institutes" before we find Calvin presenting proofs of the existence of God. It is quite true that this book, being written by a Christian for Christians, rather assumes the divine existence than undertakes to prove it, and concerns itself with the so-called proofs of the divine existence as means through which we rather obtain knowledge of what God is, than merely attain to knowledge that God is. But this only renders it the more significant of Calvin's attitude towards these so-called proofs that he repeatedly lapses in his discussion from their use for the former into their use for the latter and logically prior purpose. That he thus actually presents these proofs as evidences specifically of the existence of God can admit of no doubt.25

If, for example, he adduces that sensus deitatis with which all men, he asserts, are natively endowed, primarily as the germ which may be developed into a profound knowledge of God, he yet does not fail explicitly to appeal to it also as the source of an ineradicable conviction, embedded in the very structure of human nature and therefore present in all men alike, of the existence of God. He tells us expressly that because of this sensus divinitatis, present in the human mind by natural instinct, all men without exception (ad unum omnes) know (intelligant, perceive, understand) "that God exists" (Deum esse), and are therefore without excuse if they do not worship Him and willingly consecrate their lives to Him (I. iii. 1). It is to buttress this assertion that he cites with approval Cicero's declaration26 that "there is no nation so barbarous, no tribe so savage, that there is not stamped on it the conviction that there is a God."27 Thus he adduces the argument of the consensus gentium - the so-called "historical" argument - with exact appreciation of its true bearing, not directly as a proof of the existence of God, but directly as a proof that the conviction of the divine existence is a native endowment of human nature, and only through that indirectly as a proof of the existence of God. This position is developed in the succeeding paragraph into a distinct anti-atheistic argument. The existence of religion, he says, presupposes, and cannot be accounted for except by, the presence in man of this "constant persuasion of God" from which as a seed the propensity to religion proceeds: men may deny "that God exists,"28 "but will they, nill they, what they wish not to know they continually are aware of."29 It is a persuasion ingenerated naturally into all, that "some God exists"30 (I. iii. 3), and therefore this does not need to be inculcated in the schools, but every man is from the womb his own master in this learning, and cannot by any means forget it. It is therefore mere detestable madness to deny that "God exists" (I. iv. 2).31 In all these passages Calvin is dealing explicitly, not with the knowledge of what God is, but with the knowledge that God is. It is quite incontrovertible, therefore, that he grounds an argument - or rather the argument - for the existence of God in the very constitution of man. The existence of God is, in other words, with him an "intuition," and he makes this quite as plain as if he had devoted a separate section to its exposition.

Similarly, although he writes at the head of the chapter in which he expounds the revelation which God makes of Himself in His works and deeds: "That the knowledge of God is manifested in the making of the world and its continuous government" (chap. v.), he is not able to carry through his exposition without occasional lapses into an appeal to the patefaction of God in His works as a proof of His existence, rather than as a revelation of His nature. The most notable of these lapses occurs in the course of his development of the manifestation of God made by the nature of man himself (I. v. 4), where once more he gives us an express anti-atheistic argument. "Yea," he cries, "the earth is supporting to-day many monstrous beings, who without hesitation employ the very seed of divinity which has been sown in human nature for eclipsing of the name of God. How detestable, I protest, is this insanity, that a man, discovering God a hundred times in his body and soul, should on this very pretext of excellence deny that God exists!32 They will not say that it is by chance that they are different from brute beasts; they only draw over God the veil of 'nature,' which they declare the maker of all things, and thus abolish (subducunt) Him. They perceive the most exquisite workmanship in all their members, from their countenances and eyes to their very finger nails. Here, too, they substitute 'nature' in the place of God. But above all how agile are the movements of the soul, how noble its faculties, how rare its gifts, discovering a divinity which does not easily permit itself to be concealed: unless the Epicureans, from this eminence, should like the Cyclops audaciously make war against God. Is it true that all the treasures of heavenly wisdom concur for the government of a worm five feet long, and the universe lacks this prerogative? To establish the existence of a kind of machinery in the soul, correspondent to each several part of the body, makes so little to the obscuring of the glory of God that it rather illustrates it. Let Epicurus tell what concourse of atoms in the preparation of food and drink distributes part to the excrements, part to the blood, and brings it about that the several members perform their offices with as much diligence as if so many souls by common consent were governing one body." "The manifold agility of the soul," he eloquently adds (I. v. 5, med.), "by which it surveys the heavens and the earth, joins the past to the future, retains in memory what it once has heard, figures to itself whatever it chooses; its ingenuity, too, by which it excogitates incredible things and which is the mother of so many wonderful arts; are certain insignia in man of divinity. . . . Now what reason exists that man should be of divine origin and not acknowledge the Creator? Shall we, forsooth, discriminate between right and wrong by a judgment which has been given to us, and yet there be no Judge in heaven? . . . Shall we be thought the inventors of so many useful arts, that we may defraud God of His praise - although experience sufficiently teaches us that all that we have is distributed to us severally from elsewhere? . . ." Calvin, of course, knows that he is digressing in a passage like this - that "his present business is not with that sty of swine," as he calls the Epicureans. But digression or not, the passage is distinctly an employment of the so-called physico-theological proof for the existence of God, and advises us that Calvin held that argument sound and would certainly employ it whenever it became his business to develop the arguments for the existence of God.

The proofs for the existence of God on which we perceive Calvin thus to rely had been traditional in the Church from its first age. It was precisely upon these two lines of argument that the earliest Fathers rested. "He who knows himself," says Clement of Alexandria, quite in Calvin's manner, "will know God."33 "The knowledge of God," exclaims Tertullian, "is the dowry of the soul."34 " If you say, 'Show me thy God,"' Theophilus retorts to the heathen challenge, "I reply, 'Show me your man and I will show you my God."'35 The God who cannot be seen by human eyes, declares Theophilus,36 "is beheld and perceived through His providence and works": we can no more surely infer a pilot for the ship we see making straight for the harbor, than we can infer a divine governor for the universe tending straight on its course. "Those who deny that this furniture of the whole world was perfected by the divine reason," argues the Octavius of Minucius Felix,37 "and assert that it was heaped together by certain fragments casually adhering to each other, seem to me to have neither mind, nor sense, nor, in fact, even sight itself."

"Whence comes it," asks Dionysius of Alexandria, criticizing the atomic theory quite in Calvin's manner,38 that the starry hosts - "this multitude of fellow-travellers, all unmarshalled by any captain, all ungifted with any determination of will, and all unendowed with any knowledge of each other, have nevertheless held their course in perfect harmony?" Like these early Fathers, Calvin adduces only these two lines of evidence: the existence of God is already given in our knowledge of self, and it is solidly attested by His works and deeds. Whether, had we from him a professed instead of a merely incidental treatment of the topic, the metaphysical arguments would have remained lacking in his case as in theirs,39 we can only conjecture; but it seems very possible that as foreign to his a posteriori method (cf. I. v. 9) they lay outside of his scheme of proofs. Meanwhile, he has in point of fact adverted, in the course of this discussion, only to the two arguments on which the Church teachers at large had depended from the beginning of Christianity. He states these with his accustomed clearness and force, and he illuminates them with his genius for exposition and illustration; but he gives them only incidental treatment after all. In richness as well as in fulness of presentation he is surpassed here by Zwingli,40 and it is to Melanchthon that we shall have to go to find among the Reformers a formal enumeration of the proofs for the divine existence.41

That this God, the conviction of whose existence is part of the very constitution of the human mind and is justified by abundant manifestations of Himself in His works and deeds, is knowable by man, lies on the face of Calvin's entire discussion. The whole argument of the opening chapters of the "Institutes" is directed precisely to the establishment of this knowledge of God on an irrefragable basis: and the emphasis with which the reality and trustworthiness of our knowledge of God is asserted is equalled only by the skill with which the development of our native instinct to know God into an actual knowledge of Him is traced (in chap. i.), and the richness with which His revelation of Himself in His works and deeds is illustrated by well-chosen and strikingly elaborated instances (in chap. v.). Of course, Calvin does not teach that sinful man can of himself attain to the knowledge of God. The noetic effects of sin he takes very seriously, and he teaches without ambiguity that all men have grossly degenerated from the true knowledge of God (chap. iv.). But this is not a doctrine of the unknowableness of God, but rather of the incapacitating effects of sin. Accordingly he teaches that the inadequateness of the knowledge of God to which alone sinners can attain is itself a sin. Men's natures prepare them to serve God, God's revelations of Himself display Him before men's eyes: if men do not know God they are without excuse and cannot plead their inculpating sinfulness as exculpation. God remains, then, knowable to normal man: it is natural to man to know Him. And if in point of fact He cannot be known save by a supernatural action of the Holy Spirit on the heart, this is because man is not in his normal state and it requires this supernatural action of the Spirit on his heart to restore him to his proper natural powers as man. The "testimony of the Holy Spirit in the heart" does not communicate to man any new powers, powers alien to him as man: it is restorative in its nature and in principle merely recovers his powers from their deadness induced by sin. The knowledge of God to which man attains through the testimony of the Spirit is therefore the knowledge which belongs to him as normal man: although now secured by him only in a supernatural manner, it is in kind, and, so far as it is the product of his innate sensus deitatis and the revelation of God in His works and deeds, it is in mode also, natural knowledge of God. Calvin's doctrine of the noetic effects of sin and their removal by the "testimony of the Spirit," that is to say, by what we call "regeneration," must not then be taken as a doctrine of the unknowableness of God. On the contrary it is a doctrine of the knowableness of God, and supplies only an account of why men in their present condition fail to know Him, and an exposition of how and in what conditions the knowableness of God may manifest itself in man as now constituted in an actually known God. When the Spirit of God enters the heart with recreative power, he says, then even sinful man, his blurred eyes opened, may see God, not merely that there is a God, but what kind of being this God is (I. i. 1; ii. 1; v. 1).

Of course, Calvin does not mean that God can be known to perfection, whether by renewed man, or by sinless man with all his native powers uninjured by sin. In the depths of His being God is to him past finding out; the human intelligence has no plumbet to sound those profound deeps. "His essence" (essentia), he says, "is incomprehensible (incomprehensibilis); so that His divinity (numen) wholly escapes all human senses" (I. v. 1, cf. I. xi. 3); and though His works and the signs by which He manifests Himself may "admonish men of His incomprehensible essence" (I. xi. 3), yet, being men, we are not capax Dei; as Augustine says somewhere, we stand disheartened before His greatness and are unable to take Him in (I. v. 9).42 We can know then only God's glory (I. v. 1), that is to say, His manifested perfections (I. v. 9), by which what He is to us is revealed to us (I. x. 2). What He is in Himself, we cannot know, and all attempts to penetrate into His essence are but cold and frigid speculations which can lead to no useful knowledge. "They are merely toying with frigid speculations," he says (I. ii. 2), "whose mind is set on the question of what God is (quid sit Deus), when what it really concerns us to know is rather what kind of a person He is (qualis sit) and what is appropriate to His nature (natura)" (I. ii. 2).43 We are to seek God, therefore, "not with audacious inquisitiveness by attempting to search into His essence (essentia), which is rather to be adored than curiously investigated; but by contemplating Him in His works, in which He brings Himself near to us and makes Himself familiar and in some measure communicates Himself to us" (I. v. 9). For if we seek to know what He is in Himself (quis sit apud se) rather than what kind of a person He is to us (qualis erga nos) - which is revealed to us in His attributes (virtutes) - we simply lose ourselves in empty and meteoric speculation (I. x. 2).

The distinction which Calvin is here drawing between the knowledge of the quid and the knowledge of the qualis of God; the knowledge of what He is in Himself and the knowledge of what He is to us, is the ordinary scholastic one and fairly repeats what Thomas Aquinas contends for ("Summa Theol.," i. qu. 12, art. 12), when he tells us that there is no knowledge of God per essentiam, no knowledge of His nature, of His quidditas per speciem propriam; but we know only habitudinem ipsius ad creaturas. There is no implication of nominalism here; nothing, for example, similar to Occam's declaration that we can know neither the divine essence, nor the divine quiddity, nor anything intrinsic to God, nor anything that God is realiter. When Calvin says that the Divine attributes describe not what God is apud se, but what kind of a person He is erga nos,44 he is not intending to deny that His attributes are true determinations of the divine nature and truly reveal to us the kind of a person He is; he is only refusing to speculate on what God is apart from His attributes by which He reveals Himself to us, and insisting that it is only in these attributes that we know Him at all. He is refusing all a priori methods of determining the nature of God and requiring of us to form our knowledge of Him a posteriori from the revelation He gives us of Himself in His activities. This He insists is the only knowledge we can have of God, and this the only way we can attain to any knowledge of Him at all. Of what value is it to us, he asks (I. v. 9), to imagine a God of whose working we have had no experience? Such a knowledge only floats in the brain as an empty speculation. It is by His attributes (virtutes) that God is manifested; it is only through them that we can acquire a solid and fruitful knowledge of Him. The only right way and suitable method of seeking Him, accordingly, is through His works, in which He draws near to us and familiarizes Himself to us and in some degree communicates Himself to us. Here is not an assertion that we learn nothing of God through His attributes, which represent only determinations of our own. On the contrary, here is an assertion that we obtain through the attributes a solid and fruitful knowledge of God. Only it is not pretended that the attributes of God as revealed in His activities tell us all that God is, or anything that He is in Himself: they only tell us, in the nature of the case, what He is to us. Fortunately, says Calvin, this is what we need to know concerning God, and we may well eschew all speculation concerning His intrinsic nature and content ourselves with knowing what He is in His relation to His creatures. His object is, not to deny that God is what He seems - that His attributes revealed in His dealings with His creatures represent true determination of His nature. His object is to affirm that these determinations of His nature, revealed in His dealings with His creatures, constitute the sum of our real knowledge of God; and that apart from them speculation will lead to no solid results. He is calling us back, not from a fancied knowledge of God through His activities to the recognition that we know nothing of Him, that what we call His attributes are only effects in us: but from an a priori construction of an imaginary deity to an a posteriori knowledge of the Deity which really is and really acts. This much we know, he says, that God is what His works and acts reveal Him to be; though it must be admitted that His works and acts reveal not His metaphysical Being but His personal relations - not what He is apud se, but what He is quoad nos.

Of the nature of God in the abstract sense, thus - the quiddity of God, in scholastic phrase - Calvin has little to say.45 But his refusal to go behind the attributes which are revealed to us in God's works and deeds, affords no justification to us for going behind them for him and attributing to him against his protest developed conceptions of the nature of the divine essence, which he vigorously repudiates. Calvin has suffered more than most men from such gratuitous attributions to him of doctrines which he emphatically disclaims. Thus, not only has it been persistently asserted that he reduced God, after the manner of the Scotists, to the bare notion of arbitrary Will, without ethical content or determination,46 but the contradictory conceptions of a virtual Deism47 and a developed Pantheism48have with equal confidence been attributed to him. To instance but a single example, Principal A. M. Fairbairn permits himself to say that "Calvin was as pure, though not as conscious and consistent a Pantheist as Spinoza."49 Astonishing as such a declaration is in itself, it becomes more astonishing still when we observe the ground on which it is based. This consists essentially in the discovery that the fundamental conception of Calvinism is that "God's is the only efficient will in the universe, and so He is the one ultimate causal reality"50 - upon which the certainly very true remark is made that "the universalized Divine will is an even more decisive and comprehensive Pantheism than the universalized Divine substance."51 The logical process by which the Calvinistic conception of the sovereign will of God as the prima causa rerum - where the very term prima implies the existence and reality of "second causes" - is transmuted into the Pantheising notion that the will of God is the sole efficient cause operative in the universe; or by which the Calvinistic conception of God as the sovereign ruler of the universe whose "will is the necessity of things" is transmuted into the reduction of God, Hegelian-wise, into pure and naked will52 - although it has apparently appealed to many, is certainly very obscure. In point of fact, when the Calvinist spoke of God as the prima causa rerum (the phrase is cited from William Ames53) he meant by it only that all that takes place takes place in accordance with the divine will, not that the divine will is the only efficient cause in the universe; and when Calvin quotes approvingly from Augustine - for the words are Augustine's54 - that "the will of God is the necessity of things," so little is either he or Augustine making use of the words in a Pantheistic sense that he hastens to explain that what he means is only that whatever God has willed will certainly come to pass, although it comes to pass in "such a manner that the cause and matter of it are found in "the second causes (ut causa et materia in ipsis reperiatur).55

Calvin beyond all question did cherish a very robust faith in the immanence of God. "Our very existence," he says, "is subsistence in God alone" (I. i. 1). He even allows, as Dr. Fairbairn does not fail to inform us, that it may be said with a pious meaning - so only it be the expression of a pious mind - that "nature is God" (I. v. 5, end).56 But Dr. Fairbairn neglects to mention that Calvin adds at once, that the expression is "crude and unsuitable" (dura et impropria), since "nature is rather the order prescribed by God"; and, moreover, noxious, because tending to "involve God confusedly with the inferior course of His works." He neglects also to mention that the statement occurs at the end of a long discussion, in which, after rebuking those who throw an obscuring veil over God, retire Him behind nature, and so substitute nature for Him - Calvin inveighs against the "babble about some sort of hidden inspiration which actuates the whole world," as not only "weak" but "altogether profane," and brands the speculation of a universal mind animating and actuating the world as simply jejune (I. v. 4 and 5). Even his beloved Seneca is reproved for "imagining a divinity transfused through all parts of the world" so that God is all that we see and all that we do not see as well (I. xiii. 1), while the Pantheistic scheme of Servetus is made the object of an extended refutation (II. xiv. 5-8). To ascribe an essentially Pantheistic conception of God to Calvin in the face of such frequent and energetic repudiations of it on his own part57 is obviously to miss his meaning altogether. If he "may be said to have anticipated Spinoza in his notion of God as causa immanens," and "Spinoza may be said . . . to have perfected and reduced to philosophical consistency the Calvinistic conception of Deity"58 - this can mean nothing more than that Calvin was not a Deist. And in point of fact he repudiated Deism with a vehemence equal to that which he displays against Pantheism. To rob God of the active exercise of His judgment and providence, shutting Him up as an idler (otiosum) in heaven, he characterizes as nothing less than "detestable frenzy," since, says he, "nothing could less comport with God than to commit to fortune the abandoned government of the world, shut His eyes to the iniquities of men and let them wanton with impunity" (I. iv. 2).59

Calvin's conception of God is that of a pure and clear Theism, in which stress is laid at once on His transcendence and His immanence, and emphasis is thrown on His righteous government of the world. "Let us bear in mind, then," he says as he passes from his repudiation of Pantheism, "that there is one God, who governs all natures" (I. v. 6, ad init.), "and wishes us to look to Him, - to put our trust in Him, to worship and call upon Him" (I. v. 6); to whom we can look up as to a Father from whom we expect and receive tokens of love (I. v. 3). So little is he inclined to reduce this divine Father to bare will, that he takes repeated occasion expressly to denounce this Scotist conception. The will of God, he says, is to us indeed the unique rule of righteousness and the supremely just cause of all things; but we are not like the sophists to prate about some sort of "absolute will" of God, "profanely separating His righteousness from His power," but rather to adore the governing providence which presides over all things and from which nothing can proceed which is not right, though the reasons for it may be hidden from us (I. xvii. 2, end). "Nevertheless," he remarks in another place, after having exhorted his readers to find in the will of God a sufficient account of things - "nevertheless, we do not betake ourselves to the fiction of absolute power, which, as it is profane, so ought to be deservedly detestable to us; we do not imagine that the God who is a law to Himself is exlegem, . . . the will of God is not only pure from all fault, but is the supreme rule of perfection, even the law of all laws" (III. xxiii. 2, end).60 In a word, the will of God is to Calvin the supreme rule for us, because it is the perfect expression of the divine perfections.61

Calvin thus refuses to be classified as either Deist, Pantheist, or Scotist; and those who would fain make him one or the other of these have nothing to go upon except that on the one hand he does proclaim the transcendence of God and speaks with contempt of men who imagine that divinity is transfused into every part of the world, and that there is a portion of God not only in us but even in wood and stone (I. xiii. 1, 22); and on the other he does proclaim the immanence of God and invites us to look upon His works or to descend within ourselves to find Him who "everywhere diffuses, sustains, animates and quickens all things in heaven and in earth," who, "circumscribed by no boundaries, by transfusing His own vigor into all things, breathes into them being, life and motion" (I, xiii. 14); while still again he does proclaim the will of God to be inscrutable by such creatures as we are and to constitute to us the law of righteousness, to be accepted as such without murmurings or questionings. In point of fact, all these charges are but several modes of expressing the dislike their authors feel for Calvin's doctrine of the sovereignty of the divine will, which, following Augustine, he declares to be "the necessity of things": they would fain brand this hated conception with some name of opprobrium, and, therefore, seek to represent Calvin now as hiding God deistically behind His own law, and now as reducing Him to a mere stream of causality, or at least to mere naked will.62 By thus declining alternately to contradictories they show sufficiently clearly that in reality Calvin's doctrine of God coincides with none of these characterizations.

The peculiarity of Calvin's conception of God, we perceive, is not indefiniteness, but reverential sobriety. Clearing his skirts of all Pantheistic, Deistic, Scotist notions - and turning aside even to repudiate Manichaeism and Anthropomorphism (I. xiii. 1) - he teaches a pure Theism which he looks upon as native to men (I. x. 3). The nature of this one God, he conceives, can be known to us only as He manifests it in His works (I. v. 9); that is to say, only in His perfections. What we call the attributes of God thus become to Calvin the sum of our knowledge of Him. In these manifestations of His character we see not indeed what He is in Himself, but what He is to us (I. x. 2); but what we see Him to be thus to us, He truly is, and this is all we can know about Him. We might expect to find in the "Institutes," therefore, a comprehensive formal discussion of the attributes, by means of which what God is to us should be fully set before us. This, however, as we have already seen, we do not get.63 And much less do we get any metaphysical discussion of the nature of the attributes of God, their relation to one another, or to the divine essence of which they are determinations. We must not therefore suppose, however, that we get little or nothing of them, or little or nothing to the point. On the contrary, besides incidental allusions to them throughout the discussion, from which we may glean much of Calvin's conceptions of them, they are made the main subject of two whole chapters, the one of which discusses in considerable detail the revelation of the divine perfections in His works and deeds, the other the revelation made of them in His Word. We have already remarked upon the skill with which Calvin, at the opening of his discussion of the doctrine of God (chap. x.), manages, under color of pointing out the harmony of the description of God given in the Scriptures with the conception of Him we may draw from His works, to bring all he had to say of the divine attributes at once before the reader's eye. The Scriptures, says he, are in essence here merely a plainer (I. x. 1) republication of the general revelation given of God in His works and deeds: they "contain nothing" in their descriptions of God, "but what may be known from the contemplation of the creatures" (I. x. 2, med.). And he illustrates this remark by quoting from Moses (Ex. xxxiv. 6), the Psalms (cxlv.) and the prophets (Jer. ix. 24), passages in which God is richly described, and remarking on the harmony of the perfections enumerated with those which he had in the earlier chapter (v.) pointed out as illustrated in the, divine works and deeds. This comparison involves a tolerably full enumeration and some discussion of the several attributes, here on the basis of Scripture, as formerly (chap. v.) on the basis of nature. He does not, therefore, neglect the attributes so much as deal with them in a somewhat indirect manner. And, we may add, in a highly practical way: for here too his zeal is to avoid "airy and vain speculations" of what God is in Himself and to focus attention upon what He is to us, that our knowledge of Him may be of the nature of a lively perception and religious reaction (I. x. 2, ad init. et ad fin.).

In a number of passages Calvin brings together a plurality of the attributes - his name for them is "virtues"64 - and even hints at a certain classification of them. One of the most beautiful of these passages formed the opening words of the first draft of the "Institutes," but fell out in the subsequent revisions - to the regret of some, who consider it, on the whole, the most comprehensive description of God Calvin has given us.65 It runs as follows: "The sum of holy doctrine consists of just these two points, - the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. These, now, are the things which we must keep in mind concerning God. First, we should hold fixed in firm faith that He is infinite wisdom, righteousness, goodness, mercy, truth, power (virtus), and life, so that there exists no other wisdom, righteousness, goodness, mercy, truth, power, and life (Baruch iii.; James i.), and wheresoever any of these things is seen, it is from Him (Prov. xvi.). Secondly, that all that is in heaven or on earth has been created for His glory (Ps. cxlviii.; Dan. iii.; and it is justly due to Him that everything, according to its own nature, should serve Him, acknowledge His authority, seek His glory, and obediently accept Him as Lord and King (Rom. i.). Thirdly, that He is Himself a just judge, and will therefore be severely avenged on those who depart from His commandments, and are not in all things subject to His will; who in thought, word, and deed have not sought His glory (Ps. vii.; Rom. ii.). In the fourth place that He is merciful and long-suffering, and will receive into His kingdom, the miserable and despised who take refuge in His clemency and trust in His faithfulness; and is ready to spare and forgive those who ask His favor, to succor and help those who seek His aid, and desirous of saving those who put their trust in Him (Ps. ciii.; Is. Iv.; Ps. xxv., ixxxv.)." In the first clause of this striking paragraph we have a formal enumeration of God's ethical attributes, which is apparently meant to be generically complete - although in the course of the paragraph other specific forms of attributes here enumerated occur; and all of them are declared to exist in God in an infinite mode. The list contains seven items: wisdom; righteousness; goodness (clemency); mercy (long-sufferingness); truth; power; life.66 If we compare this list with the enumeration in the famous definition of God in the Westminster "Shorter Catechism" (Q. 4),67 we shall see that it is practically the same: the only difference being that Calvin adds to the general term "goodness" the more specific "mercy," affixes "life" at the end, and omits "holiness," doubtless considering it to be covered by the general term "righteousness."

If just this enumeration does not recur in the "Institutes" as finally revised, something very like it evidently underlies more passages than one. Even in the first section of the first chapter, which has taken its place, we have an enumeration of the "good things" (bona) in God which stand opposed to our "evil things" (mala), that brings together wisdom, power, goodness, and righteousness: for in God alone, we are told, can be found "the true light of wisdom, solid power (virtus), a perfect affluence of all good things, and the purity of righteousness" (I. i. 1). In the opening section of the next chapter we have two enumerations of the divine perfections, obviously rhetorical, and yet betraying an underlying basis of systematic arrangement: the later and fuller of these brings together power, wisdom, goodness, righteousness, justice, mercy - closing with a reference to God's powerful "protection." God, we are told, "sustains this world by His immense power (immensa potentia), governs it by His wisdom, preserves it by His goodness, rules over the human race especially by His righteousness and justice (iudicium), bears with it in His mercy, defends it by His protection (praesidium)." The most complete enumerations of all, however, are given, when, leaving the intimations of nature, Calvin analyses some Scriptural passages with a view to drawing out their descriptions of the divine perfections. His analysis of Exod. xxxiv. 6 is particularly full (I. x. 2). He finds the divine eternity and self-existence embodied in the name Jehovah; the divine strength and power (virtus et potentia) expressed in the name Elohim; and in the description itself an enumeration of those virtues which describe God not indeed as He is apud se, but as He is erga nos - to wit, His clemency, goodness, mercy, righteousness, justice, truth. The strongest claim which this passage has on our interest, however, is the suggestion it bears of a classification of the attributes. The predication to God of eternity and self-existence (auvtousi,a) evidently is for Calvin something specifically different from the ascription to Him of those virtues by which are described not what He is apud se, but what He shows Himself to be erga nos. They in a word belong rather to the quiddity of God than to His qualitas. In a subsequent passage (xiii. 1) we have a plainer hint to the same effect. There we are given "two epithets" which we are told are applied by Scripture to the very "essence" of God, in its rare speech concerning His essence - immensity and spirituality.68 It seems quite clear, then, that Calvin was accustomed to distinguish in his thought between such epithets, describing what God is apud se, and those virtues by which He is manifested to us in His relations erga nos. That is to say, he distinguishes between what are sometimes called His physical or metaphysical and His ethical attributes: that is to say, between the fundamental modes of the Divine Being and the constitutive qualities of the Divine Person.69

If we profit by this hint and then collect the attributes of the two classes as Calvin occasionally mentions them, we shall in effect reconstruct Calvin's definition of God.70 This would run somewhat as follows: There is but one only true God,71 a self-existent,72 simple,73 invisible,74 incomprehensible75 Spirit,76 infinite,77 immense,78 eternal,79 perfect,80 in His Being, power,81 knowledge,82 wisdom,83 righteousness,84 justice,85 holiness,86 goodness,87 and truth.88 In addition to these more general designations, Calvin employs a considerable number of more specific terms, by which he more precisely expresses his thought and more fully explicates the contents of the several attributes. Thus, for example, he is fond of the term "severity"89 when he is endeavoring to give expression to God's attitude as a just judge to the wicked; and he is fond of setting in contrast with it the corresponding term "clemency"90 to express His attitude towards the repentant sinner. It is especially the idea of "goodness" which he thus draws out into its several particular manifestations. Beside the term "clemency" he sets the still greater word "mercy," or "pity,"91 and by the side of this again he sets the even greater word "grace,"92 while the more general idea of "goodness" he develops by the aid of such synonyms as "beneficence"93 and "benignity,"94 and almost exhausts the capacity of the language to give expression to his sense of the richness of the Divine goodness.95 God is "good and merciful" (ii. 2), "benign and beneficent" (v. 7), "the fount and source of all good" (ii. 2), their fecund "author" (ii. 2), whose "will is prone to beneficence" (x. 1), and in whom dwells a "perfect affluence," nothing less than an "infinity," of good things. And therefore he looks upwards to this God not only as our Lord (ii. 1) the Creator (ii. 1), Sustainer (ii. 1), and Governor (ii. 1) of the world - and more particularly its moral governor (ii. 2), its "just judge" (ii. 2) - but more especially as our " defender and protector,"96 our Father97 who is also our Lord, in whose "fatherly indulgence"98 we may trust.

There is in the "Institutes" little specific exposition of the manner in which we arrive at the knowledge of these attributes. The works of God, we are told, illustrate particularly His wisdom (v. 2) and His power (v. 6). But His power, we are further told, leads us on to think of His eternity and His self-existence, "because it is necessary that He from whom everything derives its origin, should Himself be eternal and have the ground of His being in Himself":99 while we must posit His goodness to account for His will to create and preserve the world.100 By the works of providence God manifests primarily His benignity and beneficence; and in His dealing with the pious, His clemency, with the wicked His severity101 - which are but the two sides of His righteousness: although, of course, "His power and wisdom are equally conspicuous."102 It is precisely the same body of attributes which are ascribed to God in the Scriptures,103 and that not merely in such a passage as Ex. xxxiv. 6, to which we have already alluded, but everywhere throughout their course (x. 1, ad fin.). Psalm cxlv., for example, so exactly enumerates the whole list of God's perfections that scarcely one is lacking. Jeremiah ix. 24, while not so full, is to the same effect. Certainly the three perfections there mentioned are the most necessary of all for us to know - the divine "mercy in which alone consists all our salvation; His justice, which is exercised on the wicked every day, and awaits them more grievously still in eternal destruction; His righteousness, by which the faithful are preserved and most lovingly supported." Nor, adds Calvin, is there any real omission here of the other perfections - "either of His truth, or power, or holiness, or goodness." "For how could we be assured, as is here required, of His righteousness, mercy and justice, unless we were supported by His inflexible veracity? And how could we believe that He governs the world in justice and righteousness unless we acknowledged His power? And whence proceeds His mercy but from His goodness? And if all His ways are justice, mercy, righteousness, certainly holiness also is conspicuous in them." The divine power, righteousness, justice, holiness, goodness, mercy, and truth are here brought together and concatenated one with the others, with some indication of their mutual relations, and with a clear intimation that God is not properly conceived unless He is conceived in all His perfections. Any description of Him which omits more or fewer of these perfections, it is intimated, is justly chargeable with defect. Similarly when dealing with those more fundamental "epithets" by which His essence is described (xiii. 1), he makes it plain that not to embrace them all in our thought of God, and that in their integrity, is to invade His majesty: the fault of the Manichaeans was that they broke up the unity of God and restricted His immensity.104

There is no lack in Calvin's treatment of the attributes, then, of a just sense of their variety or of the necessity of holding them all together in a single composite conception that we may do justice in our thought to God. He obviously has in mind the whole series of the divine perfections in clear and just discrimination, and he accurately conceives them as falling apart into two classes, the one qualities of the divine essence, the other characteristics of the divine person - in a word, essential and personal attributes: and he fully realizes the relation of these two classes to each other, and as well the necessity of embracing each of the attributes in its integrity in our conception of God, if we are to do any justice whatever to that conception.

What seems to be lacking in Calvin's treatment of the attributes is detailed discussion of the notion imbedded in each several attribute and elaboration of this notion as a necessary element in our conception of God. Calvin employs the terms unity, simplicity, self-existence, incomprehensibility, spirituality, infinity, immensity, eternity, immutability, perfection, power, wisdom, righteousness, justice, holiness, goodness, benignity, beneficence, clemency, mercy, grace,105 as current terms bearing well-understood meanings, and does not stop to develop their significance except by incidental remarks.106 The confidence which he places in their conveyance of their meaning seems to be justified by the event; although, no doubt, much of the effect of their mere enumeration is due to the remarkable lucidity of Calvin's thought and style: he uses his terms with such consistency and exactness, that they become self-defining in their context. We are far, then, from saying that his method of dealing with the attributes, by mere allusion as we might almost call it, is inadequate for the practical religious purpose for which he was writing: and certainly it is far more consonant with the literary rather than scholastic form he gives his treatise. When we suggest, then, that from the scholastic point of view it seems that it is precisely at this point that Calvin's treatment of the attributes falls somewhat short of what we might desire, we must not permit to slip out of our memory that Calvin expressly repudiates the scholastic point of view and is of set purpose simple and practical.107 He does not seek to obtain for himself or to recommend to others such a knowledge of God as merely "raises idle speculation in the brain"; but such as "shall be firm and fruitful" and have its seat in the heart. He purposely rejects, therefore, the philosophical mode of dealing with the attributes and devotes himself to awakening in the hearts of his readers a practical knowledge of God, a knowledge which functions first in the fear (timor) of God and then in trust (fiducia) in Him.

And here we must pause to take note of this two-fold characterization of the religious emotion, corresponding, as it does in Calvin's conception, to the double aspect in which God is contemplated by those who know Him. God is our Lord, in whose presence awe and reverence become us; God is our Father, to whom we owe trust and love. Fear and love - both must be present where true piety is: for, says Calvin, what "I call piety (pietas) is that reverence combined with love of God, which a knowledge of His benefits produces" (I. ii. 1). In the form he has given this statement the element of reverence (reverentia) appears to be made the formative element: piety is reverence, although it is not reverence without love. But if it is not reverence in and of itself but only the reverence which is informed by love, love after all may be held to become the determining element of true piety. And Calvin does not hesitate to declare with the greatest emphasis that the apprehension of God as deserving of our worship and adoration - in a word as our Lord - simpliciter, does not suffice to produce true piety: that is not born, he says, until "we are persuaded that God is the fountain of all that is good and cease to seek for good elsewhere than in Him" (ibid.); that is to say, until we apprehend Him as our Father as well as our Lord. "For," adds he, "until men feel that they owe everything to God, that they are cherished by His paternal care, that He is the author to them of all good things and nothing is to be sought out of Him, they will never subject themselves to Him in willing obedience (observantia, reverent obedience); or rather I should say, unless they establish for themselves a solid happiness in Him they will never devote themselves to Him without reserve truly and heartily (vere et ex animo totos)." And then he proceeds (I. ii. 2) to expound at length how the knowledge of God should first inspire us with fear and reverence and then lead us to look to Him for good. The first thought of Him awakes us to our dependence on Him as our Lord: any clear view of Him begets in us a sense of Him as the fountain and origin of all that is good - such as in anyone not depraved by sin must inevitably arouse a desire to adhere to Him and put his trust (fiducia) in Him - because he must recognize in Him a guardian and protector worthy of complete confidence (fides). "Because he perceives Him to be the author of all good, in trial or in need," he proceeds, still expounding the state of mind of the truly pious man, "he at once commits himself to His protection, expectant of His help; because he is convinced that He is good and merciful, he rests on Him in assured trust (fiducia), never doubting that a remedy is prepared in His clemency for all his ills; because he recognizes Him as Lord and Father, he is sure that he ought to regard His government in all things, revere His majesty, seek His glory, and obey His behests; because he perceives Him to be a just judge, armed with severity for punishing iniquities, he keeps His tribunal always in view, and in fear restrains and checks himself from provoking His wrath. And yet, he is not so terrified by the sense of His justice, that he wishes to escape from it, even if flight were possible: rather he embraces Him not less as the avenger of the wicked than as the benefactor of the pious, since he perceives it to belong to His glory not less that there should be meted out by Him punishment to the impious and iniquitous, than the reward of eternal life to the righteous. Moreover, he restrains himself from sinning not merely from fear of punishment, but because he loves and reverences God as a father (loco patris) and honors and worships Him as Lord (loco domini), and even th

÷ 04 Calvin's Doctrine of the Trinity1

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

When Calvin turns, in his discussion of the doctrine of God, from the Divine Being in general to the Trinity (chap. xiii.), he makes the transition most skillfully by a paragraph (Â§ 1) which doubtless has the design, as it certainly has the effect, of quickening in his readers a sense of the mystery of the divine mode of existence.2 The Scriptures, he tells us, speak sparingly of the divine essence. Yet by two "epithets" which they apply to it, they effectually rebuke not only the follies of the vulgar but also the subtleties of the learned in their thought of God. These epithets are "immensity" and "spirituality"; and they alone suffice at once to check the crass and to curb the audacious imaginations of men. How dare we invade in our speculations concerning Him either the spirituality or the immensity of this infinite Spirit, conceiving Him like the Pantheists as an impersonal diffused force, or like the Manichaeans limiting His immensity or dividing His unity? Or how can we think of the infinite Spirit as altogether like ourselves? Do we not see that when the Scriptures speak of Him under human forms they are merely employing the artless art of nurses as they speak to children? All that we can either say or think concerning God descends equally below His real altitude. Calvin thus prepares us to expect depths in the Divine Being beyond our sounding, and then turns at once to speak of the divine tripersonality, which he represents as a mysterious characteristic of the divine mode of existence by which God is marked off from all else that is. "But" - this is the way he puts it (xiii. 2, ad init.) - "He points Himself out by another special note also, by which He may be more particularly defined: for He so predicates unity of Himself that He propones Himself to be considered distinctively in three Persons; and unless we hold to these there is nothing but a bare and empty name of God, by no means (sine) the true God, floating in our brain."

That we may catch the full significance of this remarkable sentence we should attend to several of its elements. We must observe, for example, that it ranges the tripersonality of God alongside of His immensity and spirituality as another special "note" by which He is more exactly defined. The words are: "But He designates Himself also by another special note, by which He may be more particularly distinguished," - the another referring back to the "epithets" of immensity and spirituality.3 The tripersonality of God is conceived by Calvin, therefore, not as something added to the complete idea of God, or as something into which God develops in the process of His existing, but as something which enters into the very idea of God, without which He cannot be conceived in the truth of His being. This is rendered clearer and more emphatic by an additional statement which he adjoins - surely for no other purpose than to strengthen this implication - to the effect that "if we do not hold to these [the three Persons in the divine unity], we have nothing but a naked and empty name of God, by no means the true God, floating in our brain." According to Calvin, then, it would seem, there can be no such thing as a monadistic God; the idea of multiformity enters into the very notion of God.4 The alternative is to suppose that he is speaking here purely a posteriori and with his mind absorbed in the simple fact that the only true God is actually a Trinity: so that he means only to say that since the only God that is, is, in point of fact, a Trinity, when we think of a divine monad we are, as a mere matter of fact, thinking of a God which has no existence - which is a mere naked and empty name, and not the true God at all. The simplicity of Calvin's speech favors this supposition; and the stress he has laid in the preceding discussion upon the necessity of conceiving God only as He reveals Himself, on pain of the idolatry of inventing unreal gods for ourselves, adds weight to it. But it scarcely seems to satisfy the whole emphasis of the statement. The vigor of the assertion appears rather to invite us to understand that in Calvin's view a divine monad would be less conceivable than a divine Trinity, and certainly suggests to us that to him the conception of the Trinity gave vitality to the idea of God.5

This suggestion acquires importance from the circumstance that the Reformers in general and Calvin in particular have been sometimes represented as feeling little or no interest in such doctrines as that of the Trinity. Such doctrines, we are told, they merely took over by tradition from the old Church, if indeed they did not by the transference of their interest to a principle of doctrinal crystallization to which such doctrines were matters of more or less indifference, positively prepare for their ultimate discarding. Ferdinand Christian Baur, for example, points out that the distinctive mark of the Reformation, in contrast with Scholasticism with its prevailing dialectic or intellectualistic tendency, was that it was a deeply religious movement, in which the heart came to its rights and everything was therefore viewed from the standpoint of the great doctrines of sin and grace.6 He then seeks to apply this observation as follows: "The more decisively Protestantism set the central point of its dogmatic consciousness in this portion of the system, the more natural was the consequence that even such doctrines as that of the Trinity were no longer able to maintain the preponderating significance which they possessed in the old system; and although men were not at once clearly conscious of the altered relation - as, in point of fact, they were not and could not be - it is nevertheless the fact that the doctrines which belong to this category attracted the interest of the Reformers only in a subordinate degree; and, without giving themselves an exact account of why it was so, men merely retained with reference to them the traditional modes of teaching - abiding by these all the more willingly that they could not conceal from themselves the greatness of the difference which existed between them and their opponents in so many essential points."7 They no doubt set themselves in opposition to the more radical spirits of their time who, taking their starting point from the same general principles, were led by their peculiarities of individuality and relations, of standpoint and tendency, to discard the doctrine of the Trinity altogether. But they could not stem the natural drift of things. "How could the Protestant principle work so thoroughgoing an alteration in one part of the system, and leave the rest of it unaffected?"8 And what was to be expected except that the polemic attitude with reference to the ecclesiastical doctrine of the Trinity, which was at first confined to small parties outside the limits of recognized Protestantism, should ultimately become a part of Protestantism itself?9

In accordance with this schematization, Baur represents Melanchthon as, in the first freshness of his Reformation-consciousness, passing over in his "Loci" such doctrines as that of the Trinity altogether as incomprehensible mysteries of God which call rather for adoration than scrutiny;10 and, though he returned to them subsequently, doing so with a difference, a difference which emphasized their subordinate and indeed largely formal place in his system of thought.11 While as regards Calvin, he sees in him the beginnings of a radical transformation of the doctrine of the Trinity. Calvin does, indeed, like Melanchthon, present the doctrine as the teaching of Scripture, and attaches himself to the ecclesiastical definitions of it as merely a republication of the Scriptural doctrine in clearer words. "We perceive, however, that he does not know how to bring the doctrine itself out of its transcendental remoteness into closer relations with his religious and dogmatic consciousness. Instead, therefore, of speculatively developing the Trinitarian relation as the objective content of the idea of God, out of itself, he rather repels the whole conception as a superfluity which leads to empty speculation (Inst., I. xiii. 19 and 20), or else where he enters most precisely into it, inclines to a mode of apprehending it in which the ecclesiastical homoousia is transmuted into a rational relation of subordination."12 "The intention was to retain the old orthodox doctrine unchanged; but it was internally, in the new consciousness of the times, already undermined, since there was no longer felt for it the same religious and dogmatic interest, as may be seen from the whole manner in which it is dealt with in these oldest Protestant theologians. Men could no longer find their way in the old, abstract form of the dogma. A new motive impulse must first proceed from the central point of the Protestant consciousness. The first beginnings of a transformation of the dogma are already discoverable in Calvin, when he locates the chief element of the doctrine of the Trinity in the practical consciousness of the operations in which the Son and Spirit make themselves known as the peculiar principles of the divine life (I. xiii. 13, 14), and finds the assurance of the election in which the finite subject has the consciousness of his unity with God solely in the relation in which the individual stands to Christ."13 That is to say, if we understand Baur aright, the new construction of the Trinity already foreshadowed in Calvin was to revolve around Christ; but around Christ as God-man conceived as the mediating principle between God and man, the unity of the finite and infinite, bearing to us the assurance that what God is in Himself that also He must be for the finite consciousness - in which mode of statement we see, however, a great deal more of Baur's Hegelianism than of Calvin's Protestantism.

So far as this representation implies that Calvin's interest in the doctrine of the Trinity was remote and purely traditional, it is already contradicted, as we have seen, by the first five lines of his discussion of the subject (I. xiii. 2, ad init.) - if, that is, as we have seen some reason to believe, he really declares there that vitality is given to the idea of God only by the Trinitarian conception of Him. It is indeed contradicted by itself. For the real meaning of the constitutive place given in Calvin's thought of the Trinity to "the practical consciousness of the operations in which the Son and Spirit make themselves known as the peculiar principles of the divine life," is that the doctrine of the Trinity did not for him stand out of relation to his religious consciousness but was a postulate of his profoundest religious emotions; was given, indeed, in his experience of salvation itself.14 For him, thus, certainly in no less measure than it had been from the beginning of Christianity, the nerve of the doctrine was its implication in the experience of salvation, in the Christian's certainty that the Redeeming Christ and Sanctifying Spirit are each Divine Persons. Nor did he differ in this from the other Reformers. The Reformation movement was, of course, at bottom a great revival of religion. But this does not mean that its revolt from Scholasticism was from the doctrines "of God, of His unity and His trinity, of the mystery of creation, of the mode of the incarnation"15 themselves, but from the formalism and intellectualism of the treatment of these doctrines at the hands of the Scholastic theologians. When Melanchthon demands whether, when Paul set down a compendium of Christian doctrine in his Epistle to the Romans, he gave himself over to philosophical disquisitions (philosophabatur) "on the mysteries of the Trinity, on the mode of the incarnation, on active and passive creation," and the like, we must not neglect the emphasis on the term "philosophical disquisitions."16 Melanchthon was as far as possible from wishing to throw doubt upon either the truth or the importance of the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, Creation. He only wished to recall men from useless speculations upon the mysterious features of these doctrines and to focus their attention no doubt on the great central doctrines of sin and grace, but also on the vital relations of such doctrines as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Creation to human needs and the divine provision for meeting them. The demand of the Reformers, in a word, was not that men should turn away from these doctrines, but that they should accord their deepest interest to those elements and aspects of them which minister to edification rather than to curious questions that furnish exercise only to intellectual subtlety. Any apparent neglect of these doctrines which may seem to be traceable in the earliest writings of the Reformers was, moreover, due not merely to their absorption in the proclamation of the doctrine of grace, but also to the broad fact that these doctrines were not in dispute in their great controversy with Rome, and therefore did not require insisting upon in the stress of their primary conflict. So soon as they were brought into dispute by the radicals of the age, we find the Reformers reverting to them and reasserting them with vigor: and that is the real account to be given of the increased attention given to them in the later writings of the Reformers, which seems to those historians who have misinterpreted the relatively small amount of discussion devoted to them in the earlier years of the movement, symptomatic of a lapse from the purity of their first love and of a reentanglement in the Scholastic intellectualism from which the Reformation, as a religious movement, was a revolt. In point of fact, it marks only the abiding faith of the Reformers in doctrines essential to the Christian system, but not hitherto largely asserted and defended by them because, shortly, there was not hitherto occasion for extended assertion and defense of them.

In no one is the general attitude of the Reformers to the doctrine of the Trinity more clearly illustrated than in Calvin. The historian of Protestant Dogmatics, Wilhelm Gass, tells us that "Calvin's exposition of the Trinity is certainly the best and most circumspect which the writings of the Reformers give us: surveying as it does the whole compass of the dogma and without any loss to the thing itself wisely avoiding all stickling for words."17 That this judgment is quoted by subsequent expounders of Calvin's doctrine of the Trinity,18 surprises us only in so far as so obvious a fact seems not to need the authority of Gass to support it. Apart, however, from the superiority of Calvin's theological insight, by which his treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity is made not only "the best and most circumspect which the writings of the Reformers have given us," but even one of the epoch-making discussions of this great theme, Calvin's whole dealing with the doctrine of the Trinity supplies an exceptionally perfect reflection of the attitude of the Reformers at large to it. At one with them in his general point of view, the circumstances of his life forced him into a fulness and emphasis in the exposition of this doctrine to which they were not compelled. The more comprehensive character of the work, even in its earliest form, coÃ¶perated with the comparative lateness of the time of its publication19 and his higher systematic genius, to secure the incorporation into even the first edition of Calvin's "Institutes" (1536) not only of a Biblical proof of the doctrine of the Trinity, argued with exceptional originality and force, but also of a strongly worded assertion and defense of the correctness and indispensableness of the current ecclesiastical formulation of it. No more than the earlier Reformers, however, was Calvin inclined to confound the essence of the doctrine with a particular mode of stating it; nor was he willing to confuse the minds of infantile Christians with the subtleties of its logical exposition. The main thing was, he insisted, that men should heartily believe that there is but one God, whom only they should serve; but also that Jesus Christ our Redeemer and the Holy Spirit our Sanctifier is each no less this one God than God the Father to whom we owe our being; while yet these three are distinct personal objects of our love and adoration.20 He was wholly agreed with his colleagues at Geneva in holding that "in the beginning of the preaching of the Gospel," it conduced more to edification and readiness of comprehension to refrain fromthe explanation of the mysteries of the Trinity, and even from the constant employment of those technical terms in which these mysteries are best expressed, and to be content with declaring clearly the divinity of Christ in all its fulness, and with giving some simple exposition of the true distinction between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.21 He acted on this principle in drawing up the formularies of faith with which he provided the Church at Geneva immediately after his settlement there, and he vigorously defended this procedure when it was called in question by that "theological adventurer," as he has been not unjustly called,22 Peter Caroli. This, of course, does not mean that he was under any illusions as to the indispensableness to the Christian faith of a clear as well as a firm belief in the doctrine of the Trinity, or as to the value for the protection of that doctrine of the technical terms which had been wrought out for its more exact expression and defense in the controversies of the past. He was already committed to an opposite opinion by his strong assertions in the first edition of his "Institutes" (1536), which he retained unaltered through all the subsequent editions; and the controversies in which he was contemporaneously embroiled - with Anabaptists, Antitrinitarians, "theological quacks" - were well calculated to fix in his mind a very profound sense of the importance of stating this doctrine exactly and defending it with vigor. He was only asserting, as strongly as he knew how, the right of a Christian teacher, holding the truth, to avoid strife about words and to use his best endeavors to "handle aright the word of truth." He never for one moment doubted, we do not say the truth merely, but also the importance for the Christian system, of the doctrine of the Trinity. He held this doctrine with a purity and high austerity of apprehension singular among its most devoted adherents. As we have seen, he conceived it not only as the essential foundation of the whole doctrine of redemption, but as indispensable even to a vital and vitalizing conception of the Being of God itself. He did not question even the importance of the technical phraseology which had been invented for the expression and defense of this doctrine, in order to protect it from fatal misrepresentation. He freely confessed that by this phraseology alone could the subtleties of heresy aiming at its disintegration be adequately met. But he asserted and tenaciously maintained the liberty of the Christian teacher, holding this doctrine in its integrity, to use it in his wisdom as he saw was most profitable for the instruction of his flock - not with a view to withdrawing it in its entirety or in part from their contemplation or to minimizing its importance in their sight or to corrupting their apprehension of it, but with a view to making it a vital element in their faith; first perhaps more or less implicitly - as implied in the very core of their creed - and then more or less explicitly, as they were able to apprehend it; but never as a mere set of more or less uncomprehended traditional phrases. To him it was a great and inspiring reality: and as such he taught it to the babes of the flock in its most essential and vital elements, and defended it against gainsayers in its most complete and strict formulation.

The illusion into which it is perhaps possible to fall in the case of the earlier Reformers, by which this double treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity is supposed to represent consecutive states of mind, is impossible in the case of Calvin. Circumstances compelled him to deal with the doctrine after both fashions contemporaneously. None can say of him, as Baur says of Melanchthon - in our belief wrongly interpreting the phenomena - that he first passed by the doctrine of the Trinity unconcernedly and afterwards reverted to the Scholastic statement of it. At the very moment that Calvin was insisting on teaching the doctrine vitally rather than scholastically, he was equally insisting that it must be held in its entirety as it had been brought into exact expression by the ecclesiastical writers.

Calvin began his work at Geneva on the fifth day of September, 1536, and among the other fundamental tasks with which he engaged himself during the winter of 1536 and 1537 was the drawing up of his first catechism, the "Instruction used in the Church at Geneva," as it is called in its French form, which was published in 1537, or the "Catechismus sive Christianae Religionis Institutio," as it is called in the Latin form, which was published early (March) in 1538. Along with this Catechism, there had been prepared in both languages also a briefer "Confession of Faith," written, possibly, not by Calvin himself, but by his colleagues in the Genevan ministry, or, to be more specific, by Farel,23 but certainly in essence Calvin's, and related to the Catechism very much as the Catechism was related to the "Institutes" of 1536; that is to say, it is a free condensation of the Catechism. In this Confession of Faith, although it was the fundamental documentation of the faith of the Genevan Church to which all citizens were required to subscribe, there is no formal exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity at all: the unity of God alone is asserted (Â§ 2), and it is left to the mere recitation of the Apostles' Creed, which is incorporated into it (Â§ 6), supported only by a rare (Â§ 15) reference to Jesus as God's Son, to suggest the Trinity. Even in the Catechism24 the statement of the doctrine, although explicit and precise, and supported by equally explicit assertions of the uniqueness of our Lord's Sonship ("He is called Son of God, not like believers, by adoption and grace, but true and natural and therefore sole and unique, so as to be distinguished from the others," p. 53, cf. pp. 45-46, 53, 60, 62), and of His true divinity ("His divinity, which He had from all eternity with the Father," p. 53), is far from elaborate. It is confined indeed very much to the assertion of the fact of the Trinity - although even here it is suggested that it enters by necessity into our conception of God; and even this assertion is made apparently only because it seemed to be needed for the understanding of the Apostles' Creed. In the general remarks on this Creed, before the exposition of its several clauses is taken up (p. 52), we read as follows: "But in order that this our confession of faith in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit may trouble no one, it is necessary first of all to say a little about it. When we name the Father, Son and Holy Spirit we by no means imagine three Gods; but the Scriptures and pious experience itself show us in the absolutely simple (tres-simple) essence of God, the Father, His Son and His Spirit. So that our intelligence is not able to conceive the Father without at the same time comprehending the Son in whom His living image is repeated, and the Spirit, in whom His power and virtue are manifested. Accordingly, we adhere with the whole thought of our heart to one sole God; but we contemplate nevertheless the Father with the Son and His Spirit." There is certainly here a clear and firm assertion of the fact of the Trinity; we may even admire the force with which, in so few words, the substance of the doctrine is proclaimed, and it is also suggested that it has its roots planted not only in Scripture but in Christian experience, and indeed is involved in a vital conception of God. Calvin assuredly was justified in pointing to it, when the calumnies raised by Caroli were spread abroad and men were acquiring a suspicion that his "opinion concerning the personal distinctions in the one God dissented somewhat (non nihil) from the orthodox consent of the Church," as a proof that he had from the first taught the Church at Geneva "a trinity of persons in the one essence of God."25 But it is perhaps not strange that this should seem to some very little to say on the fundamental doctrine of the Trinity in a statement of fundamental doctrines which extends to some forty-two pages in length.26 In its brevity it may perhaps illustrate almost as strikingly as the entire omission of all statement of the doctrine from the accompanying Confession (except as implied in the repetition of the Apostles' Creed) the feeling of Calvin and his colleagues that the elaboration of this doctrine belongs rather to the later stages of Christian instruction, while for babes in Christ it were better to leave it implicit in their general religious standpoint (seeing that it is implicated in the experience of piety itself) than to clog the unformed Christian mind with subtle disputations about it. Meanwhile, at the very moment when Calvin and his colleagues were preparing these primary statements of faith, in which no or so small a space was given to the doctrine of the Trinity, they were also vigorously engaged in confuting and excluding from the Genevan Church impugners of that doctrine. For from the very beginning of his work at Geneva Calvin was brought into conflict with that anti-trinitarian radicalism the confutation of which was to draw so heavily upon his strength in the future. There were already in the early spring of 1537 Anabaptists to confute and banish, among whom was that John Stordeur whose widow was afterwards to become Calvin's wife.27 And there was to deal with just before their appearance that poor half-crazy fanatic Claude Aliodi - once Farel's colleague at NeuchÃ¢tel - who had as early as 1534 been denying the preÃ«xistence of Christ, and was in the spring of 1537 at Geneva, teaching his anti-trinitarian heresies.28

Calvin's exact attitude on the doctrine of the Trinity and its teaching was, moreover, just at this time forced into great publicity by the assaults made upon the Genevan pastors by one of the most frivolous characters brought to the surface by the upheaval of the Reformation.29 It was precisely at this time (January, 1537) that Peter Caroli, who was at the moment giving himself the airs of a bishop as "first pastor" at Lausanne, conceived the idea of avenging himself upon the pastors of Geneva for what he thought personal injuries by bringing against them the charge of virtual Arianism. That the charge received an attention which it did not deserve was, no doubt, due in part to an old suspicion which had been aroused against Farel by the calumnies of Claude Aliodi.30 These were founded on the circumstance that in his "Sommaire" (1524-1525), Farel - with a purely paedagogical intent, as he explained in a preface prefixed to the edition of 1537-1538, because he believed the doctrine of the Trinity too difficult a topic for babes in faith - had passed over the doctrine of the Trinity, just as the Genevan pastors did again in their Confession of 1537.31 It is difficult for us, in any event, however, at this late date, to understand the hearing which a man like Caroli obtained for his calumnies. The whole Protestant world was filled with suspicions of the orthodoxy of the Genevan pastors. It was whispered from one to another - at Bern, Basle, Zurich, Strasburg, Wittenberg - that they were strangely chary of using the terms "Trinity," "Person," - that they were even "heady" in their refusal to employ them in their popular formularies. It was widely reported that they were beginning to fall into Arianism, or rather into that worst of all errors (pessimus error) which Servetus the Spaniard was spreading abroad. Not only was a local crisis thus created, which entailed personal controversies and synods and decisions, but a widely spread atmosphere of distrust was produced, which demanded the most careful and prompt attention. All the spring and summer Calvin was occupied in writing letters hither and thither, correcting the harmful rumors which had, as he said, been set going by "a mere nobody" (homo nihili), urged on by "futile vanity."32 And after the conferences and synods and letters, there came at length treatises. The result is that all excuse is taken away for any misapprehension of Calvin's precise position.

Throughout the whole controversy - in which Calvin was ever the chief spokesman, coming forward loyally to the defense of his colleagues, who, rather than he, were primarily struck at - two currents run, as they run through all his writings on the Trinity, and not least through his chapter (I. xiii.) on that subject in the "Institutes." There is everywhere manifested not only a clear and firm grasp of the doctrine, but also a very deep insight into it, accompanied by a determination to assert it at its height. Along with this there is also manifest an equally constant and firm determination to preserve full liberty to deal with the doctrine free from all dictation from without or even prescription of traditional modes of statement. There is nothing inconsistent in these two positions. Rather are they outgrowths of the same fundamental conviction: but the obverse and reverse of the same mental attitude. At the root of all lies Calvin's profound persuasion that this is a subject too high for human speculation and his consequent fixed resolve to eschew all theoretical constructions upon it, and to confine himself strictly to the revelations of Scripture. On the one hand, therefore, because he appealed to Scripture only, he refused to be coerced in his expression of the doctrine by present authority or even the formularies of the past; on the other, because he trusted Scripture wholly, he was insistent in giving full validity to all that he found there. It was the purity of his Protestantism, in other words, which governed Calvin's dealing with this doctrine; giving it an independence which is not yet always understood and has afforded occasion once and again for comment upon his attitude which betrays a somewhat surprising inability to enter into his mind.33

For the matter, which has been thus vexed, was perfectly simple. Calvin refused to subscribe the ancient creeds at Caroli's dictation, not in the least because he did not find himself in accord with their teaching, but solely because he was determined to preserve for himself and his colleagues the liberties belonging to Christian men, subject in matters of faith to no other authority than that of God speaking in the Scriptures. He tells us himself that it was never his purpose to reject these creeds or to detract from their credit;34 and he points out that he was not misunderstood even by Caroli to be repudiating their teaching; but Caroli conceded that what he did was - in Caroli's bad Latin, or as Calvin facetiously calls it, "his Sorbonnic elegance" - "neither to credit nor to discredit them."35 He considered it intolerable that the Christian teacher's faith should be subjected to the authority of any traditional modes of statement, however venerable, or however true; and he refused to be the instrument of creating a precedent for such tyranny in the Reformed Churches by seeming to allow that a teacher might be justly treated as a heretic until he cleared himself by subscribing ancient symbols thrust before him by this or that disturber of the peace. There were his writings, and there was his public teaching, and he was ready to declare plainly what he believed: let him be judged by these expressions of his faith in accordance with the Word of God alone as the standard of truth. Accordingly, when he first confronted Caroli in behalf of the Genevan ministers, he read the passage on the Trinity from the new Catechism as the suitable expression of their belief. And when Caroli cried out, "Away with these new Confessions; and let us sign the three ancient Creeds," Calvin, not without some show of pride, refused, on the ground that he accorded authority in divine things to the Word of God alone.36 "We have professed faith in God alone," he said, "not in Athanasius, whose Creed has not been approved by any properly constituted Church."37 His meaning is that he refused to treat any human composition as an authoritative determination of doctrine, from which we may decline only on pain of heresy: that belongs to the Word of God alone. At the subsequent Council of Lausanne he took up precisely the same position, and addressing himself more, as he says,38 ad hominem than ad rem, turned the demand that he should express his faith in the exact words of former formularies into ridicule. He was, he tells us, in what he said about the Creeds just "gibing"39 Caroli. Caroli had attempted to recite the Creeds and had broken down at the fourth clause of the Athanasian Symbol.40 You assert, Calvin said, that we cannot acceptably confess our faith except in the exact words of these ancient symbols. You have just pronounced these words from the Athanasian Creed: "Which faith whosoever doth not hold cannot be saved." You do not yourself hold this faith: and if you did, you could not express it in the exact words of the Creed. Try to repeat those words: you will infallibly again stick fast before you get through the fourth clause. Now what would you do, if you should suddenly come to die and the Devil should demand that you go to the eternal destruction which you confess awaits those who do not hold this faith whole and entire, meaning unless you express this your faith in these exact terms? And as for the Nicene Creed - is it so very certain it was composed by that Council? One would surely suppose those holy Fathers would study conciseness in so serious a matter as a creed. But see the battology here: "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God." Why this repetition - which adds neither to the emphasis nor to the expressiveness of the document? Don't you see that this is a song, more suitable for singing than to serve as a formula of confession?41 We may or may not think Calvin's pleasantry happy. But we certainly cannot fail to marvel when we read in even recent writers that Calvin refused to sign the Athanasian Creed because of its damnatory clauses, "which are unjust and uncharitable," and that he "depreciated the Nicene Creed."42 According to his own testimony, he did nothing of the kind: he "never had any intention of depreciating (abiicere) these creeds or of derogating from their credit."43 His sole design was to make it apparent that Caroli's insistence that only in the words of these creeds could faith in the Trinity be fitly expressed was ridiculous.

Calvin's refusal to be confined to the very words of the old formulas in his expression of the doctrine of the Trinity did not carry with it, therefore, any unwillingness to employ in his definition of the doctrine the terms which had been beaten out in the Trinitarian controversies of the past. These terms he considered rather the best expressions for stating and defending the doctrine. That they were unwilling to employ them had indeed been made the substance of one of the charges brought by Caroli against the Genevan pastors. But the refutation of this calumny, so far as Calvin himself was concerned, was easy. He had only to point to the first edition of the "Institutes " (1536), in which he had not only freely used the terms in question, but had defended at large the right and asserted the duty of employing them, as the technical language by which alone the doctrine of the Trinity can be so expressed as to confound heretical misconstructions. When, then, Caroli expressed his wonder at "the pertinacity with which Calvin refused the terms 'Person,' 'Trinity,'" Calvin replied flatly that neither he nor Farel nor Viret ever had the smallest objection to these terms. "The writings of Calvin," he adds, " testify to the whole world that he always employed them freely, and even reprehended the superstition of those who either disliked or avoided them."44 That the Genevan pastors passed them by in their Confession, and refused to employ them when this was violently demanded of them, he explains, was due to two reasons. They were unwilling to consent to such tyranny as that when a matter has been sufficiently and more than sufficiently established, credit should be bound to words and syllables. But their more particular reason was, he adds, that they might "deprive that madman of the boast he had insolently made." "For Caroli's purpose was to cast suspicion on the entire doctrine of men of piety and to destroy their influence."45 Though they felt to the full, therefore, the value of these terms, not only for confounding heresy, but also for consolidating churches in a common confession, when their use was contentiously demanded of them they followed a high example and refused to give place, in the way of subjection, even for an hour.

Calvin's attitude to the employment of this technical language is sufficiently interesting in itself to repay a pause to observe it. As we have intimated, it is fully set forth already in the first edition of the "Institutes" (1536) in a very interesting passage, which is retained without substantial alteration throughout all the subsequent editions. The position of this passage in the discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity, however, is changed in the final edition from its end (as in all the earlier editions) to its beginning. In the final edition, therefore, it appears as a preface to the discussion of the substance of the doctrine (I. xiii. 3-5), and it is strengthened in this edition by an introductory paragraph (Â§ 2), in which an attempt is made to vindicate for one of these technical terms direct Biblical authority. Calvin finds the term "Person" in the u`po,stasij of Heb. i. 3; and insists, therefore, that it, at least, is not of human invention (humanitus inventa). The argument in which he does this is too characteristic of him and too instructive, not only as to his attitude towards the terms in question, but also as to his doctrine of the Trinity and his exegetical methods, to be passed over in silence. We must permit ourselves so much of a digression, therefore, as will enable us to attend to it.

What Calvin does, in this argument, is in essence to subject the statement of Heb. i. 3 that the Son is "the very image of the hypostasis of God" - the carakth.r th/j u`posta,sewj auvtou/ - to a strict logical analysis. The termu`po,stasij, he argues, must designate something the Son is not: for He could scarcely be said to be the image of something He is. When we say image, we postulate two distinct things: the thing imaged and the thing imaging it. If the Son is the image of God's hypostasis, then, the hypostasis of God must be something which the Son does not share; it must be rather something which He is like. The Son shares the Divine essence: hence hypostasis here cannot mean essence. It must be taken then in its alternative sense of "person": and what the author of the Epistle says, therefore, is that the Son is exactly like the Father in person; His double, so to speak. This Epistle, therefore, expressly speaks here of two Persons in the Godhead, one Person which is imaged, another which precisely images it. And the same reasoning may be applied to the Holy Spirit. There is Biblical warrant, therefore, for teaching that there are three hypostases in the one essence of God - "therefore, if we will give credit to the Apostle's testimony, there are in God three hypostases," - and since the Latin "person" is but the translation of the Greek "hypostasis," it is mere fastidiousness to balk at the term "person." If anyone prefers the term "subsistence" as a more literal rendering, why, let him use it: or even "substance," if it be taken in the same sense. The point is not the vocable but the meaning, and we do not change the meaning by varying the synonyms. Even the Greeks use "person" (pro,swpon) interchangeably with "subsistence" (u`po,stasij) in this connection.

It is not likely that this piece of exegesis will commend itself to us. Nor indeed is it likely that we shall feel perfect satisfaction in the logical analysis, even as a piece of logical analysis. After all, the Son is not the image of the Father in His Personality - if we are, like Calvin, to take the Personality here in strict distinction from the Essence. What the Son differs from the Father in is, rather, just in His "Personality," in this sense: as Person He is the Son, the Father the Father, and what we sum up under this "Fatherhood" and "Sonship" is just the distinguishing "properties" by which the two are differentiated from each other. That concrete Person we call the Son is exactly like that concrete Person we call the Father; but the likeness is due to the fact that each is sharer in the identical essence. After all, therefore, the reason why the Son is the express image of the Father is because, sharing the divine essence, He is in His essence all that the Father is. He is the repetition of the Father: but the repetition in such a sense that the one essence in which the likeness consists is common to the two, and not merely of like character in the two. The fundamental trouble with Calvin's argument is that it seeks a direct proof for the Trinitarian constitution of the Godhead from a passage which was intended as a direct proof only of the essential deity of the Son. What the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews had in mind was not to reveal the relation of the Son to the Father in the Trinity - as a distinct hypostasis in the unity of the essence; but to set forth the absolute deity of the Son, to declare that He is all that God is, the perfect reflection of God, giving back to God when set over against Him His consummate image. The term "hypostasis" is not indeed to be taken here, in the narrow sense, as "essence": but neither is it to be taken, in the abstract sense, as "person." It means the concrete person, that is to say, the whole substantial entity we call God; which whole substantial entity is said to be in the Son exactly what it is in the Father. Nothing is said directly as to the relation of the Son to the Father, as distinct persons in the Trinity; the whole direct significance of the declaration is exhausted in the assertion that this "Son" differs in no single particular from "God": He is God in the full height of the conception of God.

It is not, however, the success or lack of success of Calvin's exegesis which most interests us at present. It is rather two facts which his exegetical argument brings before us with peculiar force. The one of them is that the developed doctrine of the Trinity lay so firmly entrenched in his mind that he makes it, almost or perhaps quite unconsciously, the major premise of his argument. And the other is that he was so little averse to designating the distinctions in the Godhead by the term "persons" that that term was rather held by him to have definite Biblical warrant. His argument thatu`po,stasij in this passage cannot mean "essence," but must mean "person," turns on this precise hinge - that the Father and Son are numerically one in essence, and can be represented as distinct only in person: "For since the essence of God is simple and indivisible (simplex et individua) Him - who contains in Himself the whole of it, not in apportionment or in deflection, but in unbroken perfection (integra perf ectione) - it would be improper or rather inept to call its image." In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity in its complete formulation is the postulate of his argument. And the outcome of the argument is that the Epistle to the Hebrews distinctly sets the Father and Son over against each other as distinguishable "Persons," employing this precise term,u`po,stasij, to designate them in their distinction. "Accordingly," says Calvin, "if the testimony of the Apostle obtains credit, it follows that there are in God three hypostases." This term as the expression of the nature of the distinctions in the Godhead is therefore not a "human invention" (humanitus inventa) to Calvin, but a divine revelation.

Since, then, the Bible had obtained credit with Calvin, he could not object to the use of the term "person" to express the distinctions in the Trinity. But he nevertheless takes over from the earlier editions, in which the discovery of the term in Heb. i. 3 is not yet to be found, a defense of the use of this term on the assumption that it is not Biblical. And this defense is in essence the assertion of the right and the exposition of a theory of interpretation. There are men, says Calvin, who cry out against every term framed according to human judgment (hominum arbitrio confictum nomen) and demand that our words as well as our thoughts concerning divine things shall be kept within the limits of Scripture example. If we use only the words of Scripture we shall, say they, avoid many dissensions and disputes, and preserve the charity so frequently broken in strifes over "exotic words." Certainly, responds Calvin, we ought to speak of God with not less religion than we think of Him. But why should we be required to confine ourselves to the exact words of Scripture if we give the exact sense of Scripture? To condemn as "exotic" every word not found in so many syllables in Scripture, is at once to put under a ban all interpretation which is not a mere stringing together of Scriptural phrases. There are some things in Scripture which are to our apprehension intricate and difficult. What forbids our explaining them in simpler terms - if these terms are held religiously and faithfully to the true sense of Scripture, and are used carefully and modestly and not without occasion? Is it not an improbity to reprobate words which express nothing but what is testified and recorded by the Scriptures? And when these words are a necessity, if the truth is to be plainly and unambiguously expressed - may we not suspect that the real quarrel of those who object to their use is with the truth they express; and that what they are offended by is that by their use the truth has been made clear and unmistakable (plana et dilucida)? As to the terms in which the mystery of the Trinity is expressed - the term Trinity itself, the term Person, and those other terms which the tergiversations of heretics have compelled believers to frame and employ that the truth may be asserted and guarded - such as homoousios, for example - no one would care to draw sword for them as mere naked words. Calvin himself would be altogether pleased to see them buried wholly out of sight - if only all men would heartily receive the simple faith, that the Father, Son, and Spirit are one God and yet neither is the Son the Father, nor the Spirit the Son, but they are each distinguished by a certain property (I. xiii. 5). But that is just the trouble. Men will not accept the simple faith, but palter in a double sense. Arius was loud enough in declaring Christ to be God - but wished to teach also that He is a creature and has had a beginning: he was willing to say Christ is one with the Father, if he were permitted to add that His oneness is the same in kind as our own oneness with God. Say, however, the one word o`moou,sioj - "consubstantial" - and the mask is torn from the face of dissimulation and yet nothing whatever is added to the Scriptures. Sabellius was in no way loath to admit that there are in the Godhead these three - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; but he really distinguished them only as attributes are distinguished. Say simply that in "the unity of God a trinity of persons subsists," and you have at once quenched his inane loquacity. Now, if anyone who does not like the words will ingenuously46 confess the things the words stand for - cadit quaestio: we shall not worry over the words. "But," adds Calvin significantly, "I have long since learned by experience, and that over and over again, that those who contend thus pertinaciously about terms, are really cherishing a secret poison; so that it is much better to bear their resentment than to consent to use less precise and clear language for their behoof" (I. xiii. 5, ad fin.). Golden words! How often since Calvin has the Church had bitter cause to repeat them! When we read, for example, William Chillingworth's subtle pleas for the use of Scriptural language only in matters of faith; his eloquent asseverations - "The Bible, I say, the Bible only is the religion of Protestants"; his loud railing at "the vain conceit, that we can speak of the things of God better than in the words of God," "thus deifying our own interpretations and tyrannously enforcing them upon others" - we know what it all means: that under this cloak of charity are to lie hidden a multitude of sins. When we hear Calvin refusing to swear in the words of another, we must not confuse his defense of personal right with a latitudinarianism like Chillingworth's. If he said, It is the Word of God, not the word of Athanasius, to which I submit my judgment, he said equally, The sense of Scripture, not its words, is Scripture. No ambiguous meanings should be permitted to hide behind a mere repetition of the simple words of Scripture, but all that the Scripture teaches shall be clearly and without equivocation brought out and given expression in the least indeterminate language.47

Calvin's interest was, in other words, distinctly in the substance of the doctrine of the Trinity rather than in any particular mode of formulating it. It rested on the terms in which it was formulated only because, and so far as, they seemed essential to the precise expression and effective guarding of the doctrine. This was consistently his attitude from the beginning. Already in the "Institutes" of 1536, as we have seen, he had given this attitude an expression so satisfactory to himself that he retained the sections devoted to it until the end. It is indeed astonishing how complete a statement of the doctrine of the Trinity itself was already incorporated into this earliest edition of the "Institutes," and how clearly in that statement all the characteristic features of Calvin's treatment of the doctrine already appear. The discussion was no doubt greatly expanded in its passage from the first to the last edition. In the first edition (1536) it occupies only five columns in the Strasburg edition; these have grown to fifteen and a half columns in the middle editions and to twenty-seven and a half (of which eleven and a half are retained from the earlier editions and sixteen are new) in the final edition of 1559. That is to say, its original compass was tripled in the middle editions and almost doubled again in the final edition, where it has become between five and six times as long as in the first draft.48 And in this process of expansion it has not only gathered increment but has suffered change. This change is not, however, in the substance of the doctrine taught or even in the mode of its formulation or the language in which it is couched or in the general tone which informs it. It is only in the range and the governing aim of the discussion.

The statement in the first edition is dominated by a simple desire to give guidance to docile believers, and therefore declines formal controversy and seeks merely to set down briefly what is to be followed, what is to be avoided on this great subject. Positing, therefore, at the outset that the Scriptures teach one God, not many, but yet not obscurely assert that the Father is God and the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God; Calvin here at once develops, by combining Eph. iv. 5 and Mat. xxviii. 19, a Biblical proof of the Trinity which in its strenuous logic reminds us of the analytical examination of Heb. i. 3 which we have already noted. Paul, he says, connects together one baptism, one faith and one God; but in Matthew we read that we are to be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit - and what is that but to say that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are together the one God of which Paul speaks?49 This is supported by Jeremiah's (xxiii. 33) designation of the Son by "that name which the Jews call ineffable"50 and other Scriptural evidence that our Lord is one God with the Father and the Spirit. He has in mind to prove both elements in the doctrine of the Trinity, the unity of God and the true distinction of persons, and therefore introduces these citations with the words: "There are extant also other clear (luculenta) testimonies, which assert, in part, the one divinity of the three, and in part their personal distinctions."51 Then comes the defense of the technical words by which the truth of the Trinity is expressed and protected, of which we have already spoken. The enlarged and readjusted treatment of the topic for the second edition of 1539 seems to have been composed under the influence of the controversy with Caroli. It is marked at least by the incorporation of a thorough proof of the Godhead of the Father, Son and Spirit, of the unity of their essence, and of the distinction between them, and a coloring apparently derived from this controversy is thrown over the whole discussion, in which liberty to formulate the doctrine in our own words and the value of the technical terms already in use are equally vigorously asserted. The material of 1539 remains intact throughout the middle editions (1543, 1550), although some short quotations from Augustine (Â§ Â§ 16, 20) and from Jerome and Hilary (Â§ 24) were introduced in 1543. But it is very freely dealt with in the final edition (1559). Only some two-thirds of it (eleven and a half columns out of fifteen and a half) is preserved in that edition, while sixteen new columns are added: about three-fifths of the whole is thus new.52 Moreover, whole sections are omitted (Â§Â§ 10 and 15), a new order of arrangement is adopted, and much minor alteration is introduced. In this recasting and expansion of the discussion the chief place in the formative forces determining its form and tone is taken by the attack of the radical Antitrinitarians. The existence of these Antitrinitarian scoffers is recognized, indeed, from the first: they are explicitly adverted to already in the edition of 1536 as "certain impious men, who wish to tear our faith up by the roots": it is quite clear, indeed, that Servetus' teachings were already before his mind at this date. But it is only for the final edition (1559) that their assault assumes the determining position at the basis of the whole treatment: and it is only in this edition that Servetus, for example, is named. Now, Calvin not only arrays against them the testimony of Scripture in a developed polemic, but adjusts the whole positive exposition of the doctrine to its new purpose, shaping and phrasing its statements and modifying them by added sentences and clauses. The result is a polemic the edge of which is turned no longer against those who may have doubted Calvin's orthodoxy, as was the case in 1539, but rather against those who have essayed to bring into doubt or even openly to deny the mysteries which enter into the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The sharp anti-scholastic sentences which are permitted to remain, serve to give a singular balance to the discussion, and to make it clear that the polemic against the Antitrinitarians has in view vital interests and not mere matters of phraseology.

The disposition of the material in this its final form follows the lines of its new dominant interest. The discussion opens, as we have seen, with a paragraph designed to bear in on the mind a sense of the mystery which must characterize the divine mode of existence (Â§ 1). This is immediately followed by an announcement of the Trinitarian fact and a defense of the technical terms used to express and protect it (Â§Â§ 2-5). After this introduction the subject itself is taken up (Â§ 6, ad init.) and treated in two great divisions, by way first of positive statement and proof (Â§Â§ 6-20) and by way secondly of polemic defense (Â§Â§ 21 to end). The positive portion opens with a careful definition of what is meant by the "Trinity" (Â§ 6) and is prosecuted by an exhibition of the Scriptural proof of the doctrine in three sections: first the proof of the complete deity of the Son (Â§Â§ 7-13), then the proof of the deity of the Spirit (Â§Â§ 14-15), and then the proof of the Trinitarian distinctions, which includes a dissertation on the nature of these distinctions on the basis of Scripture (Â§Â§ 16-20). The polemic phase of the discussion begins with some introductory remarks (Â§ 21) and then defends in turn the true personality of the Son against Servetus (Â§ 22) and His complete deity against its modern impugners, Valentinus Gentilis being chiefly in mind (Â§Â§ 23-29).

This comprehensive outline is richly filled in with details, all of which are treated, however, with a circumspection and moderation which illustrate Calvin's determination to eschew human speculations upon this high theme and to confine himself to the revelations of Scripture, only so far explicated in human language as is necessary for their pure expression and protection.53 We observe, for example, that he introduces no proofs or illustrations of the Trinity derived from metaphysical reasoning or natural analogies. From the example of Augustine it had been the habit throughout the Middle Ages to make much of these proofs or illustrations, and the habit had passed over into the Protestant usage. Melanchthon, for example, gave new currency alike to the old ontological speculations which under the forms of subject and object sought to conceive the Logos as the image of Himself which the thinking Father set over against Himself, and to the human analogies by which the Trinitarian distinctions were fancied to be illustrated, such, for example, as the distinctions between the intellect, sensibility and will in man. Calvin held himself aloof from all such reasoning, doubting, as he says (Â§ 18), "the value of similitudes from human things for expressing the force of the Trinitarian distinction," and fearing that their employment might afford only occasion to those evil disposed for calumny and to those little instructed for error.54 What he desired was a plain proof from Scripture itself of the elements of the doctrine, freed from all additions from human speculation. This proof he attempted, in outline at least, to set down in his pages. It is interesting to observe how he conducts it.

He begins, as we have already pointed out, with a plain statement of what he means by the Trinity (Â§ 6). Such a "short and easy definition" (brevis et facilis definitio) had been his object from the outset (Â§ 2, ad init.), and it was in fact in order to obtain it that he entered upon the defense, which fills the first sections, of the term and conception of "Person" as applied to the distinctions in the Godhead. Reverting to it after this defense, he carefully defines (Â§ 6) what he means by "Person" in this connection, viz., "a subsistence in the Divine essence, which, related to the others, is yet distinguished by an incommunicable property." What he has to prove, therefore, he conceives to be that in the unity of the Godhead there is such a distinction of persons; or, as he phrases it, in a statement derived from Tertullian, that "there is in God a certain disposition or economy, which makes no difference, however, to the unity of the essence"; or, as he puts it himself a little later on (Â§ 20, ad init.), that "there is understood under the name of God, a unitary and simple essence, in which we comprise three persons or hypostases." In order to prove this doctrine, it would be necessary to prove that while God is one, there are three persons who are God, and Calvin undertakes the proof on that understanding. He does not pause here, however, to argue the unity of God at length, taking that for the moment for granted, though he reverts to it in the sequel to show that the distinction of persons which he conceives himself to have established in no respect infringes on it (Â§ 19), and indeed in his polemic against Valentinus Gentilis very fully vindicates it from the objections of the Arianisers and Tritheists (Â§Â§ 23 sq.). His proof resolves itself, therefore, into the establishment of the distinctions in the Godhead; and in order to do this he undertakes to prove first that the Son and the Holy Spirit are each God, and then to show that the Scriptures explicitly recognize that there is such a distinction in the Godhead as their divinity (taken in connection with the Divine unity) implies.

The proof of the deity of the Son is very comprehensive and detailed, and is drawn from each Testament alike. The Word of God, by which, as God "spake," He made the worlds, it is argued, must be understood of the substantial Word, which is also called in Proverbs, Wisdom (Â§ 7); and must accordingly be understood as eternal. In connection with this, the whole scheme of temporal prolation as applied to the Son is sharply assaulted. It is impious to suppose that anything new can ever have happened to God in Himself (in se ipso), and there is "nothing less tolerable than to invent a beginning for that Word, who both was always God and afterwards became the maker of the world " (Â§ 8). To this more general argument is brought the support of a number of Old Testament passages, which, it is contended, advert to the Son with declarations of His deity: such as the Forty-fifth Psalm, "Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever "; Is. ix. 6, "His Name shall be called Mighty God, Father of Eternity"; Jer. xxiii. 6, "The Branch of David shall be called Jehovah our Righteousness" (Â§ 9). And then the phenomena connected with the manifestations of the Angel of Jehovah are adduced in corroboration (Â§ 10). The New Testament evidence is marshalled under two heads: the divine names are applied to Christ by the New Testament writers (Â§ 11), and divine works and functions are assigned to Him (Â§Â§ 12-13). Not only are Old Testament passages which speak of Jehovah applied to Christ in the New Testament (Is. viii. 14, Rom. ix. 33; Is. xlv. 23, Rom. xiv. 10, 11; Ps. lxviii. 18, Eph. iv. 8; Is. vi. l, Jno. xii. 41), but these writers themselves employ the term "God" in speaking of Christ (Jno. i. 1, 14; Rom. ix. 5; I Tim. iii. 16; I Jno. v. 20; Acts xx. 28; Jno. xx. 28), and the like. And what divine work do not the New Testament writers credit Him with, either from His own lips or theirs? They represent Him as having been coworker with God from all eternity (Jno. v. 17), as the upholder and governor of the world (Heb. i. 3), as the forgiver of iniquities (Mat. ix. 6) and the searcher of hearts (Mat. ix. 4). They not only accredit Him with mighty works, but distinguish Him from others who have wrought miracles, precisely by this - these others wrought them by the power of God, He by His own power (Â§ 13a). They represent Him as the dispenser of salvation, the source of eternal life and the fountain of all that is good: they present Him as the proper object of saving faith and trust, and even of worship and prayer (Â§ 13b).

The deity of the Spirit is similarly argued on the ground of certain Old Testament passages (Genesis i. 2; Is. xlviii. 16) where the Spirit of God seems to be hypostatized; of the divine works attributed to Him, such as ubiquitous activity, regeneration, and the searching of the deep things of God on the one hand and the bestowing of wisdom, speech and all other blessings on men on the other; and finally of the application of the name God to Him in the New Testament writings (e.g., I Cor. iii. 16, vi. 19; II Cor. vi. 16; Acts v. 3; xxviii. 25; Mat. xii. 31). Having thus established the deity of the Son and the Spirit, Calvin turns to the passages which elucidate their deity to us by presenting to us the doctrine of the Trinity. These are all in the New Testament, as was natural (suggests Calvin), because the advent of Christ involved a clearer revelation of God and therefore a fuller knowledge of the personal distinctions in His being (Â§ 16). The stress of the argument here is laid upon Eph. iv. 5 in connection with Mat. xxviii. 19, which were already expounded at length, as we have seen, in the first edition of the "Institutes," and are here only strengthened and clarified by a better statement. As we are initiated by baptism into faith in the one God and yet baptism is in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, argues Calvin, it is "solidly clear" that the Father, Son and Spirit are this one God; whence it is perfectly obvious that "there reside (residere) in the essence of God three Persons, in whom the one God is cognized" (cognoscitur); and "since it remains fixed that God is one not many, we can only conclude that the Word and the Spirit are nothing other than the essence of God itself." The Scriptures, however, he proceeds (Â§ 17), no more thus identify the Son and Spirit with God than they distinguish them -distinguish, not divide them. He appeals to such passages as Jno. v. 32, viii. 16, 18, xiv. 16, "another";55 xv. 26, viii. 16, "proceeding," "being sent": but this part of the subject is lightly passed over on the ground that the passages already adduced themselves sufficiently show that the Son possesses a "distinct property" by which He is not the Father - for, says he, "the Word could not have been with God unless He had been another than the Father, neither could He have had His glory with the Father, unless He was distinct from Him": the distinction noted in which passages it is plain, further, is not one which could have begun at the incarnation, but must date from whatever point He may be thought to have begun to be "in the bosom of the Father" (Jno. i. 18). The determination that there is a personal distinction between Father and Son and Holy Spirit leads Calvin to inquire what this distinction carries with it. He finds it to be Scriptural to say that "to the Father is attributed the principium agendi, as fountain and source of all things; to the Son, wisdom, counsel and the actual dispensation of things to be done; but to the Spirit is assigned the power and efficiency (virtus et efficacia) of the action" - that is to say, if we may be permitted to reduce the definitions to single words, the Father is conceived as the Source, the Son as the Director, the Spirit as the Executor of all the divine activities; the Father as the Fountain, the Son as the Wisdom emerging from Him, the Spirit as the Power by which the wise counsels of God are effectuated (Â§ 18).56 Only now when this argument is finished and his conclusion drawn (Â§ 19) does Calvin pause formally to point out that "this distinction in no way impedes the absolutely simple unity of God" - since the conception is that the "whole nature (natura) is in each hypostasis," while "each has its own propriety." "The Father," he adds, "is totus in the Son, and the Son totus in the Father" - as Christ Himself teaches in Jno. xiv. 10. We are here, however, obviously passing beyond the proof to the exposition of the Trinity - a topic which occupies some later sections (Â§Â§ 19 and 20).

It will have already become apparent from the citations incidentally adduced that in his doctrine of the Trinity Calvin departed in nothing from the doctrine which had been handed down from the orthodox Fathers. If distinctions must be drawn, he is unmistakably Western rather than Eastern in his conception of the doctrine, an Augustinian rather than an Athanasian.57 That is to say, the principle of his construction of the Trinitarian distinctions is equalization rather than subordination. He does, indeed, still speak in the old language of refined subordinationism which had been fixed in the Church by the Nicene formularies; and he expressly allows an "order" of first, second and third in the Trinitarian relations. But he conceives more clearly and applies more purely than had ever previously been done the principle of equalization in his thought of the relation of the Persons to one another, and thereby, as we have already hinted, marks an epoch in the history of the doctrine of the Trinity. That he was enabled to do this was a result, no doubt, at least in part, of his determination to preserve the highest attainable simplicity in his thought of the Trinity. Sweeping his mind free from subtleties in minor matters, he perceived with unwonted lucidity the main things, and thus was led to insist upon them with a force and clearness of exposition which throw them out into unmistakable emphasis. If we look for the prime characteristics of Calvin's doctrine of the Trinity, accordingly, we shall undoubtedly fix first upon its simplicity, then upon it consequent lucidity, and finally upon its elimination of the last remnants of subordinationism, so as to do full justice to the deity of Christ. Simplification, clarification, equalization - these three terms are the notes of Calvin's conception of the Trinity. And, of course, it is the last of these notes which gives above all else its character to his construction.58

The note of simplification is struck at the outset of the discussion when Calvin announces it as his intention to seek "a short and easy definition which shall preserve us from all error" (I. xiii. 2, ad init.). What the short and easy definition which he had in mind included is suggested when he tells us later (20) that "when we profess to believe in one God, under the name of God is to be understood the single and simple essence in which we comprehend three persons or hypostases." He accordingly expresses pleasure in the definition of Tertullian, when properly understood, that "there is in God a certain disposition or economy, which in no respect derogates from the unity of the essence" (6, ad fin.); and frankly declares that for him the whole substance of the doctrine is included in the simple statement "that the Father and the Son and the Spirit are one God; and yet neither is the Son the Father nor the Spirit the Son, but they are distinct by a certain property" (5). Similar simple forms of statement are thickly scattered through the discussion. "God so predicates Himself to be one," he says at its outset, "that He propones Himself to be distinctly considered in three Persons" (2, ad init.). "There truly subsist in the one God, or what is the same thing, in the unity of God," he says again, "a trinity of Persons" (4, ad fin.). "There are three proprietates in God " (ibid.). "In the one essence of God, there is a Trinity of Persons," and these are "consubstantial" (5, ad fin.). "In the divine essence there exist three Persons, in whom the one God is cognized" (16). "There is a Trinity of Persons contained in the one God, not a trinity of Gods" (25). It is quite clear, not only from the frequency with which he lapses into such brief formulas, but also from the distinctness with which he declares that they contain all that is essential to the doctrine of the Trinity (e.g., Â§ 5), that in Calvin's habitual thought of the Trinity it lay summed up in his mind in these simple facts: there is but one God; the Father, the Son, the Spirit is each this one God, the entire divine essence being in each; these three are three Persons, distinguished one from another by an incommunicable property.59

Calvin's main interest among the elements of this simple doctrine of the Trinity obviously lay in his profound sense of the consubstantiality of the Persons. Whatever the Father is as God, that the Son and the Spirit are also. The Son - and, of course, also the Spirit - contains in Himself the whole essence of God, not part of it only nor by deflection, but in complete perfection (Â§ 2). What the Father is, reappears therefore in its totality (se totum) in the Son and in the Spirit. This is a mere corollary of their community in the numerically one essence. If the "entire nature" (tota natura, Â§ 19) is included in each, it necessarily carries with it all the qualities by which it is made this particular nature which we call divine. Calvin is accordingly never weary of asserting that every divine attribute, in the height of its meaning, is manifested as fully in the Son - and, of course, also in the Spirit - as in the Father. In this indeed lay for him the very nerve of the doctrine of the Trinity. And in it, consistently carried out, lies the contribution which he made to the clear apprehension and formulation of that doctrine. For, strange as it may seem, theologians at large had been accustomed to apply the principle of consubstantiality to the Persons of the Trinity up to Calvin's vigorous assertion of it, with some at least apparent reserves. And when he applied it without reserve it struck many as a startling novelty if not a heretical pravity. The reason why the consubstantiality of the Persons of the Trinity, despite its establishment in the Arian controversy and its incorporation in the Nicene formulary as the very hinge of orthodoxy, was so long in coming fully to its rights in the general apprehension was no doubt that Nicene orthodoxy preserved in its modes of stating the doctrine of the Trinity some remnants of the conceptions and phraseology proper to the older prolationism of the Logos Christology, and these, although rendered innocuous by the explanations of the Nicene Fathers and practically antiquated since Augustine, still held their place formally and more or less conditioned the thought of men - especially those who held the doctrine of the Trinity in a more or less traditional manner. The consequence was that when Calvin taught the doctrine in its purity and free from the leaven of subordinationism which still found a lurking place in current thought and speech, he seemed violently revolutionary to men trained in the old forms of speech and imbued with the old modes of conception, and called out reprobation in the most unexpected quarters.

Particular occasion of offense was given by Calvin's ascription of "self-existence" (aseity, auvtoousi,a) to the Son, and the consequent designation of Him by the term auvto,qeoj. This term, which became famous in later controversy as designating Calvin's doctrine of Christ, seems, however, to have come forward only in the latest years of his life, in the dispute with Valentinus Gentilis (1558, 1561); and indeed to be rather Gentilis' word than Calvin's. Calvin, indeed, does not appear to have himself employed it, but only to have reclaimed it for Christ (and the Spirit) when Gentilis asserted that it was exclusively God the Father who could be so designated. "The Father alone," said Gentilis, "isauvto,qeoj, that is, essentiated by no superior divinity; but is God a se ipso"; "the lo,goj of God is not that oneauvto,qeoj whoselo,goj it is; neither is the Spirit of God that immense and eternal Spirit whose Spirit it is."60 Such assertions, declares Calvin, are against all Scripture, which makes Christ very God: for "what is more proper to God than to exist (vivere), and what else isauvtoousi,a than this?"61 But the thing represented by the term - "self-existence" - Calvin asserts of Christ from the beginning of his activity as a Christian teacher. It does not seem to be explicitly declared of Christ that He is self-existent, indeed, in the first edition of the "Institutes" (1536), although it is already implied there too, not only in the general vigor with which the absolute deity of Christ is asserted with all its implications, but also in the identification of Christ with Jehovah, which was to Calvin the especial vehicle of his representation of Him as the self-existent God. "That name which the Jews call ineffable is attributed to the Son in Jeremiah" (Jer. xxiii. 33),62 he already here tells us. In the spring of the following year,"63 however, at the councils held within a few days of one another respectively at Lausanne and Bern, our Lord's self-existence was fairly enunciated in so many words in the statement of his faith which Calvin made in rebuttal of the charges of Caroli. He begins with a very clear exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity, and then comes to speak of what peculiarly concerns Christ, adverting especially to His two natures. "For," he continues, "before He assumed flesh He was the eternal Word itself, begotten by the Father before the ages, very God, of one essence, power, majesty with the Father, and indeed Jehovah Himself, who has always had it of Himself that He should be and has inspired the power of subsisting in others."64 Caroli at once seized upon this declaration, and complained that therein "Christ was set forth as Jehovah, as if He had His essence of Himself (a se ipso)."65 From this beginning rose the controversy. For in this one of his "calumnies" Caroli found some following, and Calvin was worried by petty attacks upon this element of his teaching through a series of years.66

Calvin apparently was somewhat astonished by the pother which was raised over an assertion which seemed to him not only a very natural one to make, but also a very necessary one to make if the true deity of our Lord is to be defended. He calls this particular one of Caroli's assaults the "most atrocious" of all his calumnies, and he betrays some irritation at the repetition of it by others. One effect of it was, however, to make him see that, although it might seem to him a matter of course to speak of Christ as the self-existent God, it was not a matter which could be taken for granted, but needed assertion and defense. He inserted, therefore, in the "Institutes" of 1539 (second edition) a clear declaration on the subject, which, with only the adduction of some additional support chiefly drawn from Augustine (inserted in 1543 and 1559), was retained throughout the subsequent editions. "oreover," says he in this passage, "the absolutely simple unity of God is so far from being impeded by this distinction, that it rather affords a proof that the Son is one God with the Father, because He possesses one and the same Spirit with Him: while the Spirit is not another Being diverse from the Father and the Son, because He is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son. For in each hypostasis the whole nature is understood, along with that which is present to each one as His propriety. The Father is as a whole (totus) in the Son, the Son as a whole in the Father, as He Himself also asserts: 'I in the Father and the Father in me'; and that one is not separated from another by any difference of essence is conceded by the ecclesiastical writers.67 By this understanding the opinions of the fathers are to be conciliated, which otherwise would seem altogether at odds with one another. For they teach now that the Father is the principium of the Son; and now they assert that the Son has from Himself (a se ipso) both divinity and essence.68 When, however, the Sabellians raise a cavil that God is called now Father, now Son, now Spirit, in no way differently from His being named both strong and good and wise and merciful, they may easily be refuted from this, - that these manifestly are epithets which show what God is with respect to us, while the others are names which declare what He is really with respect to Himself. Neither ought anyone to be moved to confound the Spirit with the Father and the Son, because God announces Himself as a whole to be a Spirit (Jno. iv. 24). For there is no reason why the whole essence of God should not be spiritual, and in that essence the Father, Son and Spirit be comprehended. And this very thing is made clear by the Scriptures. For as we hear God called a Spirit in them, so also we hear the Holy Spirit spoken of, and that both as God's Spirit and as from God."69

Calvin was not permitted, however, to content himself with this brief positive declaration. A running fire was kept up upon his assertion of self-existence for Christ by two pastors of NeuchÃ¢tel and its neighboring country, Jean Chaponneau (Capunculus) and Jean Courtois (Cortesius) - the latter of whom had married the daughter of Chaponneau's wife.70 Calvin was disposed at first to treat their criticism lightly, but was ultimately driven to give it serious attention. Writing to theNeuchÃ¢tel ministers regarding certain articles which Courtois had drawn up - with the help, as was understood, of Chaponneau - Calvin remarks that he sees no reason for supposing them directed as a whole against him. One of them, however, he recognizes as having him in view - that one in which, "as from a tripod," the writer pronounces heretics those who say that "Christ, as He is God, is a se ipso." "The answer," he declares, "is easy. First let him tell me whether Christ is true and perfect God. Unless he wishes to parcel out the essence of God, he must confess that the whole of it is in Christ. And Paul's words are express: that 'in Him dwelleth the fulness of the Godhead.' Again I ask, 'Is that fulness of the Godhead from Himself or from some other source?' But he will object that the Son is of the Father. Who denies it? That I, for one, have not only always acknowledged, but even proclaimed. But this is where these donkeys deceive themselves: because they do not consider that the name of Son is spoken of the Person, and therefore is included in the predicament of relation, which relation has no place where we are speaking simply (simpliciter) of the divinity of Christ."71 In support of this distinction he then quotes Augustine, and proceeds to cite Cyril on the main point at issue - passages to which we shall revert in the sequel. This letter was written at the end of May, 1543, and later in the year we find Calvin holding a conference with Courtois, the course of which he reports to theNeuchÃ¢tel ministers in a letter written in November.72 Courtois went away, however, still unconvinced, and Calvin found himself compelled not many months later (opening of 1545) to write to theNeuchÃ¢tel pastors again at length on the subject, under considerable irritation.73 "This," he here declares, "is the state of the controversy (status controversiae): Whether it may be truly predicated of Christ, that He is, as He is God, a se ipso? This Capunculus denies. Why? Because the name of Christ designates the Second Person in the Godhead, who stands in relation to the Father. I confess that if respect be had to the Person, we ought not so to speak. But I say we are not speaking of the Person but of the essence. I hold that the Holy Spirit is the real (idoneum = proper) author of this manner of speaking, since He refers to Christ all the declarations in which auvtoousi,a is predicated of God, as in other passages, so in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. . . . He [Capunculus] contends that Christ, because He is of the substance of the Father, is not a se ipso, since He has a principium from another. This I allow to him of the Person. What more does he want? . . . I confess that the Son of God is of the Father. Accordingly, since the Person has a cause (ratio), I confess that He is not a se ipso. But when we are speaking, apart from consideration of the Person, of His divinity or simply of the essence, which is the same thing, I say that it is rightly predicated of Him that He is a se ipso. For who, heretofore, has denied that under the name of Jehovah, there is included the declaration of auvtoousi,a? . . ."

It was, however, in his "Defense Against the Calumnies of Peter Caroli," which was sent out in 1545 in reply to a new "libel" put forth by Caroli early that year,74 that Calvin speaks most at large on this subject, gathering up into this one defense, indeed, all the modes of statement and forms of argument he had hitherto worked out. He regards Caroli's strictures upon his assertion of Christ's self-existence as the most atrocious of all his calumnies, and prefixes to his discussion of them a citation of his own explanation of the matter, which he calls a "brief and naked explication." This runs as follows: "When we are speaking of the divinity of Christ all that is proper to God is rightly ascribed to Him, because respect is there had to the Divine essence and no question is raised as to the distinction which exists between the Father and the Son. In this sense it is true to say that Christ is the One and Eternal God, existing of Himself (a se ipso existentem). Nor can it be objected to this statement - what certainly is also taught by the ecclesiastical writers - that the Word or Son of God is of the Father (a Patre), even with respect to His eternal essence; since there is a notation of Persons, when there is commemorated a distinction of the Son from the Father. But what I have been speaking of is the divinity, in which is embraced not less the Father and the Spirit than the Son. So Cyril, who is often wont to call the Father the principium of the Son, holds it in the highest degree absurd for the Son not to be believed to have life and immortality of Himself (a se ipso). He also teaches that if it is proper to the ineffable nature to be self-existent (a se ipsa), this is rightly ascribed to the Son. And moreover in the tenth book of his Thesaurus, he argues that the Father has nothing of Himself (a se ipso) which the Son does not have of Himself (a se ipso)."75 From this beginning, he proceeds to elucidate the whole subject, drawing freely upon all that he had previously written upon it. The note of the discussion is given in the words: "I assert both truths - both that Christ is of the Father as He is the second Person, and that He is of Himself (a se ipso) if we have respect to the Divine essence simpliciter"76 - a declaration which he supports from the Fathers, particularly Augustine, thus: "Similarly Augustine (Sermo 38 'de tempore'): 'Those names which signify the substance . . . or essence of God, or whatever God is said to be in Himself (ad se), belong equally to all the Persons. There is not, therefore, any name of nature which can so belong to the Father that it may not belong also to the Son, or Holy Spirit.'" The whole is brought to a conclusion by a passage the substance of which we have already had before us, but which seems worth quoting again that its force may be appreciated in its new setting: "I confess that if respect be had to the Person we ought not so to speak, but I say we are not speaking of the Person but of the essence. I hold that the Holy Spirit is the real author of this manner of speaking, since He refers to Christ all the declarations in which auvtoousi,a is predicated of God, as well in other passages, as in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. . . . They contend that Christ, because He is of (ex) the substance of the Father, is not of Himself (a se ipso), since He has His principium from another. This I allow to them of the Person. What more do they ask? I acknowledge, then, that the Son of God is of the Father, and when we are speaking of the Person I acknowledge that He is not of Himself. But when, apart from consideration of the Person, we are speaking of His divinity, or which is the same thing simpliciter of the essence, I say that it is truly predicated of it that it is a se ipso. For who hitherto has denied of the name Jehovah, that it includes the declaration of auvtoousi,a? When, then, they object that the Son is of the Father, that I not only willingly acknowledge, but have even continually proclaimed. But here is where these donkeys are in error - that they do not consider that the name of Son is spoken of the Person, and is therefore contained in the predication of relation; which relation has no place when we are talking of Christ's divinity simpliciter. And Augustine discourses eloquently on this matter " . . . quoting the passages from Augustine to which we have already made reference.77

That Calvin let the paragraph he had prepared on this subject for the second edition of his "Institutes" (1539) stand practically unchanged - strengthened only by a couple of passages cited from Augustine - in the editions of 1543 and 1550, may be taken as indication that he supposed that what he had brought together in his "Defense Against the Calumnies of Caroli" (1545), incorporating as it does the essence of former expositions and defenses, was a sufficient exposition of the subject and defense of his point of view. In the meantime, however, the troubles in the Italian church in Geneva had broken out, culminating after a while in the controversies with Valentinus Gentilis (1558), in which new occasion was given for asserting the self-existence of Christ, and this brought it about that something more on this subject was incorporated into the "Institutes" of 1559. The positive statement was left, indeed, much as it had been given form in the "Institutes" of 1539 (Â§ 19): but in the long defense of the doctrine of the Trinity against Gentilis and his congeners with which the discussion of the doctrine closes in this edition much more is added on the self-existence of Christ. As over against these opponents the especial point in the doctrine of the Trinity which required defense was the true deity of the second and third Persons. On this defense Calvin entered con amore, for he ever showed himself, as he had himself expressed it, a "detester as sacrilegious of all who have sought to overturn or to minimise or to obscure the truth of the divine majesty which is in Christ."78 The God whom Isaiah saw in the Temple (vi. 1), he says, John (xii. 41) declares to have been Christ; the God whom the same Isaiah declares shall be a rock of offense to the Jews (viii. 14) Paul pronounces to be Christ (Rom. ix. 33); the God to whom the same Isaiah asserts every knee shall bow (xlv. 23), Paul tells us is Christ (Rom. xiv. 11); the God whom the Psalmist proclaims as laying the foundations of the earth and whom all angels shall worship (Ps. cii. 25, xcvii. 7) the Epistle to the Hebrews identifies with Christ (i. 6, 10). Now, continues Calvin, in every one of these passages it is the name "Jehovah" which is used, and that carries with it the self-existence of Christ with respect to His deity.79 "For if He is Jehovah, it cannot be denied that He is the same God who elsewhere cries through Isaiah (xliv. 6), 'I, I am, and besides me there is no God.' We must also weigh," he adds, "that declaration of Jeremiah (x. 11): 'the gods which have not made the heaven and the earth shall perish from the earth which is under heaven'; while on the other hand it must be acknowledged that it is the Son of God whose deity is often proved by Isaiah from the creation of the world. But how shall the Creator who gives being to all things not be self-existent (ex se ipso) but derive His essence from another? For whoever says the Son is essentiated by the Father, denies that He is of Himself (a se ipso). But the Holy Spirit cries out against this by naming Him Jehovah." "The deity, therefore, we affirm," he says a little later,80 "to be absolutely self-existent (ex se ipsa). Whence we acknowledge the Son, too, as He is God, to be self-existent (ex se ipso), when reference to His Person is not present: while, as He is Son, we say He is of the Father. Thus the essence is without principium; but the principium of the Person is God Himself."

It does not seem necessary, however, to multiply citations. Enough have already been adduced, doubtless, to illustrate the clearness, iterance and emphasis with which Calvin asserted the self-existence of Christ as essential to His complete deity; and at least to suggest his mode of conceiving the Trinity in accordance with this emphasis on the absolute equality, or rather, let us say, identity of the three Persons of the Godhead in their deity. His conception involved, of course, a strongly emphasized distinction between the essence and the Personality. In essence the three Persons are numerically one: the whole essence belongs to each Person:81 the whole essence, of course, with all its properties, which are only its peculiarities as an essence and are inseparable from it just because they are not other substances but only qualities. In person, however, the three Persons are numerically three, and are as distinct from one another as the distinguishing qualities by which one is the Father, another the Son and the third the Spirit. In these facts Calvin found the essence of the doctrine of the Trinity, and in accordance with his professed purpose to find a brief and easy definition of the Trinity we may say that in these facts are summed up all he held to be necessary to a doctrine of the Trinity.

Nevertheless Calvin's conception of the Trinity, if we cannot exactly say necessarily included, yet in point of fact included, more than this. It included the postulation of an "order" in the Persons of the Trinity, by which the Father is first, the Son second, and the Spirit third. And it included a doctrine of generation and procession by virtue of which the Son as Son derives from the Father, and the Spirit as Spirit derives from the Father and the Son. Perhaps this aspect of his conception of the Trinity is nowhere more succinctly expressed than in a passage in the eighteenth section of this chapter (xiii.). Here he explicitly declares that "although the eternity of the Father is the eternity of the Son and Spirit also, since God could never be without His Wisdom and Power, - and in eternity there is no question of first and last - it is nevertheless not vain or superfluous to observe an order [in the three Persons], since the Father is enumerated as the first, next the Son ex eo, and afterwards the Spirit ex utroque. For everyone's mind instinctively inclines to consider God first, then the Wisdom emerging from Him, and finally the Power by which He executes the decrees of His counsel. For this reason the Son is said to come forth (exsistere) from the Father (a Patre), the Spirit alike from the Father and the Son." The intimations which are here brought together are often repeated. Thus, for example: "For since the properties in the Persons bear an order, so that in the Father is the principium et origo . . . the ratio ordinis is held, which, however, in no respect derogates from the deity of the Son and Spirit" (Â§ 20). Again: "But from the Scriptures we teach that essentialiter there is but one God, and therefore the essence as well of the Son as of the Spirit is unbegotten (ingenitam). Yet inasmuch as (quatenus) the Father is first in order and has begotten His own Wisdom ex se, He is justly (as we have just said) considered the principium et fons of the whole divinity" (Â§ 25). Again, although he "pronounces it a detestable figment that the essence is the property of the Father alone as if He were the deificator of the Son," he yet "acknowledges that ratione ordinis et gradus, the principium divinitatis is in the Father" (Â§ 24). "The Father is the fountain of the deity, not with respect of the essence, but the order " (Â§ 26). And because the Father is thus the fons et principium deitatis (Â§ 23) from whom (ex eo, Â§ 18) there have come forth (exsistere, Â§ 18) the Son and afterwards from the Son along with the Father the Spirit (Â§ 18, ex utroque), there is involved here a doctrine of an eternal generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit. Both are repeatedly asserted. Of the Son, for example, we read: "It is necessary to understand that the Word was begotten of the Father (genitum ex Patre) before time (ante saecula)" (Â§ 7); "we conclude again, therefore, that the Word, before the beginning of time, was conceived (conceptum) by God" (Â§ 8); "He is the Son of God, because He is the Word begotten of the Father (genitus a Patre) before the ages (saecula)" (Â§ 23); "He is called the Son of God, . . . inasmuch as He was begotten of the Father (genitus ex Patre) before the ages (saecula)" (Â§ 24).82

Although such passages, however - and they are very numerous, or we may perhaps better say, pervasive, in Calvin's discussion of the Trinity - make it perfectly plain that he taught a doctrine of order and grade in the Persons of the Trinity, involving a doctrine of the derivation - and that, of course, before all time - of the second and third Persons from the first as the fountain and origin of deity, it is important for a correct understanding of his conception that we should attend to the distinctions by which he guarded his meaning. Of course, he did not teach that the essence of the Son or of the Spirit is the product of their generation or procession. It had been traditional in the Church from the beginning of the Trinitarian controversies to explain that generation and procession concerned only the Persons of the Son and Spirit;83 and Calvin availed himself of this traditional understanding. "The essence, as well of the Son as of the Spirit, is unbegotten (ingenitam)" (Â§ 25). "The essence of the Son has no principium, but God Himself is the principium of His Person" (Â§ 25). The matter does not require elaboration here, both because this is obviously the natural view for Calvin to present and hence goes without saying, and because his mode of presenting and arguing it has been sufficiently illustrated in passages already cited.84 There is another distinction he appears to have made, however, which is not so clear. Although he taught that the Son was begotten of the Father, and of course begotten before all time, or as we say from all eternity, he seems to have drawn back from the doctrine of "eternal generation" as it was expounded by the Nicene Fathers. They were accustomed to explain "eternal generation" (in accordance with its very nature as "eternal "), not as something which has occurred once for all at some point of time in the past - however far back in the past - but as something which is always occurring, a perpetual movement of the divine essence from the first Person to the second, always complete, never completed.85 Calvin seems to have found this conception difficult, if not meaningless. In the closing words of the discussion of the Trinity in the "Institutes" (I, xiii. 29, ad fin.) he classes it among the speculations which impose unnecessary burdens on the mind. "For what is the profit," he asks, "of disputing whether the Father always generates (semper generet), seeing that it is fatuous to imagine a continuous act of generating (continuus actus generandi) when it is evident that three Persons have subsisted in God from eternity?" His meaning appears to be that the act of generation must have been completed from all eternity, since its product has existed complete from all eternity, and therefore it is meaningless to speak of it as continually proceeding. If this is the meaning of his remark, it is a definite rejection of the Nicene speculation of "eternal generation." But this is very far from saying that it is a rejection of the Nicene Creed - or even of the assertion in this Creed to the effect that the Son is "God of God." We have just seen that Calvin explicitly teaches the "eternal generation" of the Son, in the sense that He was begotten by the Father before all time. It manifestly was a matter of fixed belief with him. He does indeed refuse to find proof texts for it in many of the passages which it had been the custom to cite in evidence of it.86 But he does not therefore feel that he lacks adequate proof of it. There is one argument for it, he tells us, which seems to him worth a thousand distorted texts. "It is certain that God is not a Father to men except through the intercession of that only begotten Son, who alone rightly vindicates to Himself this prerogative, and by whose beneficence it derives to us. But God always wished to be called upon by His people by His name of Father: whence it follows that there was already then in existence the Son through whom that relationship was established."87 That the Son is "God of God" he is therefore as fully convinced as the Nicene Fathers themselves. When, then, he criticises the formulas of the Nicene Creed, "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God," as repetitious, this is a criticism of the form, not of the content of this statement.88 And when he speaks of the "Deus de Deo" of the Creed as a "hard saying" (dura locutio), he by no means denies that it is "true and useful," in the sense its framers put on it, in the sense, that is, that the Son has His principium merely as Son in the Father, but only means that the form of the statement is inexact - the term "Deus" requiring to be taken in each case of its occurrence in a non-natural personal sense - and that, being inexact, it is liable to be misused in the interests of a created God, in the sense of Gentilis, and must therefore be carefully explained.89 His position is, in a word, that of one who affirms the eternal generation of the Son, but who rejects the speculations of the Nicene Fathers respecting the nature of the act which they called "eternal generation." It is enough, he says in effect, to believe that the Son derives from the Father, the Spirit from the Father and the Son, without encumbering ourselves with a speculation upon the nature of the eternally generating act to which these hypostases are referred. It is interesting to observe that Calvin's attitude upon these matters is precisely repeated by Dr. Charles Hodge in his discussion in his "Systematic Theology."90 It seems to be exactly Calvin's point of view to which Dr. Hodge gives expression when he writes: "A distinction must be made between the Nicene Creed (as amplified in that of Constantinople) and the doctrine of the Nicene Fathers. The creeds are nothing more than the well-ordered arrangement of the facts of Scripture which concern the doctrine of the Trinity. They assert the distinct personality of the Father, Son and Spirit; their mutual relation as expressed by these terms; their absolute unity as to substance or essence, and their consequent perfect equality; and the subordination of the Son to the Father, and of the Spirit to the Father and the Son, as to the mode of subsistence and operation. These are Scriptural facts, to which the creeds in question add nothing; and it is in this sense that they have been accepted by the Church Universal. But the Nicene Fathers did undertake in a greater or less degree to explain these facts. These explanations relate principally to the subordination of the Son and Spirit to the Father, and to what is meant by generation, or the relation between the Father and the Son. . . . As in reference to the subordination of the Son and Spirit to the Father, as asserted in the ancient creeds, it is not to the fact that exception is taken, but to the explanation of that fact, as given by the Nicene Fathers, the same is true with regard to the doctrine of Eternal Generation."

The circumstance that Dr. Charles Hodge, writing three centuries afterwards (1559-1871), reproduces precisely Calvin's position may intimate to us something of the historical significance of Calvin's discussion of the Trinity. Clearly Calvin's position did not seem a matter of course, when he first enunciated it. It roused opposition and created a party. But it did create a party: and that party was shortly the Reformed Churches, of which it became characteristic that they held and taught the self-existence of Christ as God and defended therefore the application to Him of the term auvto,qeoj; that is to say, in the doctrine of the Trinity they laid the stress upon the equality of the Persons sharing in the same essence, and thus set themselves with more or less absoluteness against all subordinationism in the explanation of the relations of the Persons to one another. When Calvin asserted, with the emphasis which he threw upon it, the self-existence of Christ, he unavoidably did three things. First and foremost, he declared the full and perfect deity of our Lord, in terms which could not be mistaken and could not be explained away. The termauvto,qeoj served the same purpose in this regard that the term o`moou,sioj had served against the Arians and the term u`po,stasij against the Sabellians. No minimizing conception of the deity of Christ could live in the face of the assertion of aseity or auvtoqeo,thj of Him. This was Calvin's purpose in asserting aseity of Christ and it completely fulfilled itself in the event. In thus fulfilling itself, however, two further effects were unavoidably wrought by it. The inexpugnable opposition of subordinationists of all types was incurred: all who were for any reason or in any degree unable or unwilling to allow to Christ a deity in every respect equal to that of the Father were necessarily offended by the vindication to Him of the ultimate Divine quality of self-existence. And all those who, while prepared to allow true deity to Christ, yet were accustomed to think of the Trinitarian relations along the lines of the traditional Nicene orthodoxy, with its assertion of a certain subordination of the Son to the Father, at least in mode of subsistence, were thrown into more or less confusion of mind and compelled to resort to nice distinctions in order to reconcile the two apparently contradictory confessions ofauvtoqeo,thj and of qeo.j evk qeou/ of our Lord. It is not surprising, then, that the controversy roused by Caroli and carried on by Chaponneau and Courtois did not die out with their refutation; but prolonged itself through the years and has indeed come down even to our own day. Calvin's so-called innovation with regard to the Trinity has, in point of fact, been made the object of attack through three centuries, not only by Unitarians of all types, nor only by professed Subordinationists, but also by Athanasians, puzzled to adjust their confession of Christ as "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God" to the at least verbally contradictory assertion that in respect of His deity He is not of another but of Himself.

The attack has been especially sharp naturally where the assailants were predisposed to criticism of Calvin on other grounds, as was the case, for example, with Romanists, Lutherans and afterward with Arminians. As was to be expected, it is found in its most decisive form among the Romanists, and we are afraid we must say with Gomarus that with them it seems to have been urged in the first instance, rather because of a desire to disparage Calvin and the Calvinists than in any distinct doctrinal interest.91 The beginning of the assault seems to have been made by Genebrardus, who "in the first book of his treatise on the Trinity, refutes what he calls the heresy of those denominated Autotheanites, that is of those who say that Christ is God of Himself (a se ipso), not of the Father, attributing this heresy to Calvin and Beza and in the Preface to his work [mistakenly] surmising that Francis Stancarus was the originator of it."92 The way thus opened, however, was largely followed by the whole crowd of Romish controversialists, the most notable of whom in the first age were probably Anthony Possevinus, Alphonsus Salmeron, William Lindanus, Peter Canisius, Dionysius Petavius,93 all of whom exhaust the resources of dialectics in the endeavor to fix upon Calvin and his followers a stigma of heresy in the fundamental doctrine of the Trinity. A more honorable course was pursued by probably the two greatest Romish theologians of the time, Gregory of Valentia and Robert Bellarmine. Although in no way disinclined to find error in the teaching of Calvin and the Calvinists, these more cautious writers feel compelled to allow that Calvin in his zeal to do full justice to the deity of Christ has not passed beyond Catholic truth, and blame him therefore only for inaccuracy of phrase. Gregory of Valentia, whom Gomarus calls "the Coryphaeus of Papal theologians," speaking of the error of the Autotheanites, remarks: "Genebrardus has attributed this error to Calvin (Inst., I. xiii), but, in point of fact, if he be read attentively, it will be seen that he [Calvin] meant merely that the Son, as He is indeed essentially God, is ex se, and is ex Patre only as He is a Person: and that is true. For although the Fathers and Councils assert that He is Deus ex Deo most truly, by taking the term [God] personally, so that it signifies the Person itself at once of the Father and of the Son;94 nevertheless the Son, as He is essentially God, that is, as He is that one, most simple Being which is God, is not from another, because as such He is an absolute somewhat. If this were all that were meant by the other heretics who are called 'Autotheanites,' there would be no occasion for contending with them. For it was in this sense that Epiphanius, Haer. 69, seems to have called the Son auvtoqeo,j."95 Bellarmine's candor scarcely stretches so far as Gregory's. While he too feels compelled to allow that Calvin's meaning is catholic, he yet very strongly reprobates his mode of stating that meaning and declares that it gives fair occasion for the strictures which have been passed upon him. "When," says he, "I narrowly look into the matter itself, and carefully consider Calvin's opinions, I find it difficult to declare that he was in this error. For he teaches that the Son is of Himself (a se), in respect of essence, not in respect of Person, and seems to wish to say that the Person is begotten by the Father [but] the essence is not begotten or produced, but is of itself (a se ipsa); so that if you abstract from the Person of the Son the relation to the Father, the essence alone remains, and that is of itself (a se ipsa)." But on the other hand Bellarmine thinks "that Calvin has undoubtedly erred in his manner of expressing himself, and given occasion to be spoken of as he has been spoken of by our [the Romish] writers." This judgment is supported by the following specifications: "For he [Calvin] says, Inst., I. xiii. 19: 'The ecclesiastical writers now teach that the Father is the principium of the Son, now assert that the Son has both divinity and essence of Himself (a se ipso).' And below this: 'Accordingly, when we speak of the Son simpliciter without respect to the Father, we may well and properly assert that He is of Himself (a se).' And in the twenty-third section, speaking of the Son, 'How,' he asks, 'shall the creator who gives being to all things not be of Himself (a se ipso), but derive His essence from another?' And in his letter to the Poles and in his work against Gentilis, Calvin frequently asserts that the Son is auvto,qeoj, that is, God of Himself (a se ipso), and [declares] the expression in the Creed 'God of God, Light of Light' an improper and hard saying."96

The gravamen of Bellarmine's charges we see from a later passage (p. 334b, near bottom) turns on Calvin's assertion that "the Son has [His] essence from Himself (a se)." This, Bellarmine declares, is to be "repudiated simpliciter," as he undertakes to demonstrate, on the grounds that it is repugnant to Scripture, the definitions of the Councils, the teaching of the Fathers, and reason itself, and as well to Calvin's own opinions; and is not established by the arguments which Calvin adduces in its behalf. In Bellarmine's view, however, in so speaking Calvin merely expressed himself badly: he really meant nothing more than that the Son with respect to His essence, which is His as truly as it is the Father's, is of Himself (a se ipso). He thinks this is proved by the fact that Calvin elsewhere speaks in terms which infer his orthodoxy in the point at issue. He speaks of the Son, for example, as begotten of the Father, which would be meaningless, if He does not receive His nature, or essence, from the Father, since "it is not a mere relation which is called the Son, but a real somewhat subsisting in the divine nature," and the Son is "not a mere propriety but an integra hypostasis." He even plainly says in so many words (I. xiii. 28) that the essence is communicated from the Father to the Son: "If the difference is in the essence, let them reply whether He has not shared it (communicaverit) with the Son. . . . It follows that it is wholly and altogether (tota et in solidum) common to the Father and Son." And he does not embrace the errors which would flow from ascribing to the Son His essence of Himself: for example, he ascribes but a single essence to the Persons of the Trinity, and he does not distinguish the essence from the Persons realiter but only ratione.

Petavius does not find it possible to follow Bellarmine in this exculpating judgment. For his part, he willingly admits that Calvin sometimes speaks inconsistently with himself, but he cannot doubt that he means what he says, when he declares that the Son has His essence not from the Father but from Himself - and this is a thing which, says he, is not only false, but impious to say, and cannot be affirmed by any Catholic. For it stands to reason, he argues, that everyone "has his essence from him by whom he is begotten; since generation is just the communication of the nature, - whether, as in created things, in kind, or, as in the divine production of the Word, in number. It is indeed impossible to form any conception of generation without the nature, and some communication of the essence, occurring to the mind."97 The whole question of Calvin's orthodoxy, between these writers, it will be seen, turns on their judgment as to his attitude towards the doctrine of "eternal generation." Bellarmine judges that, on the whole, though he has sometimes expressed himself inconsistently with regard to it, Calvin soundly believes in the doctrine of "eternal generation"; and therefore he pronounces him orthodox. Petavius judges that, though he sometimes expresses himself in the terms of the doctrine of "eternal generation," Calvin does not really believe in it; and therefore he pronounces him heretical. To both authors alike the test of orthodoxy lies in conformity of thought to the Nicene speculation, and they cannot conceive of a sound doctrine of the Trinity apart from this speculation and all the nice discriminations and adjustments which result from it.98 And it can scarcely be denied that Calvin laid himself open to suspicion from this point of view. The principle of his doctrine of the Trinity was not the conception he formed of the relation of the Son to the Father and of the Spirit to the Father and Son, expressed respectively by the two terms "generation" and "procession": but the force of his conviction of the absolute equality of the Persons. The point of view which adjusted everything to the conception of " generation " and " procession " as worked out by the Nicene Fathers was entirely alien to him. The conception itself he found difficult, if not unthinkable; and although he admitted the facts of " generation " and " procession," he treated them as bare facts, and refused to make them constitutive of the doctrine of the Trinity. He rather adjusted everything to the absolute divinity of each Person, their community in the one only true Deity; and to this we cannot doubt that he was ready not only to subordinate, but even to sacrifice, if need be, the entire body of Nicene speculations. Moreover, it would seem at least very doubtful if Calvin, while he retained the conception of "generation" and "procession," strongly asserting that the Father is the principium divinitatis, that the Son was "begotten" by Him before all ages and that the Spirit "proceeded" from the Father and Son before time began, thought of this begetting and procession as involving any communication of essence. His conception was that, because it is the Person of the Father which begets the Person of the Son, and the Person of the Spirit which proceeds from the Persons of the Father and Son, it is precisely the distinguishing property of the Son which is the thing begotten, not the essence common to Father and Son, and the distinguishing property of the Spirit which is the product of the procession, not the essence which is common to all three persons. Of course, he did not hold, as Bellarmine phrases it, that "the Son is a mere relation," "a mere property": the Son was to him too, as a matter of course, "aliquid subsistens in natura divina," "integra hypostasis." But he did hold that Sonship is a relation and that the Son differs from the Father only by this property of Sonship which is expressed as a relation (I. xiii. 6); and it looks very much as if his thought was that it is only in what is expressed by the term Sonship that the second Person of the Trinity is the Son of the Father, or, what comes to the same thing, has been begotten of the Father. His idea seems to be that the Father, Son and Spirit are one in essence, and differ from one another only in that property peculiar to each, which, added to the common essence, constitutes them respectively Father, Son and Spirit; and that the Father is Father only as Father, the Son, Son only as Son, or what comes to the same thing, the Father begets the Son only as Son, or produces by the act of generation only that by virtue of which He is the Son, which is, of course, what constitutes just His Sonship.

The evidence on which Bellarmine relies for his view that Calvin taught a communication of essence from Father to Son is certainly somewhat slender. If we put to one side Bellarmine's inability to conceive that Calvin could really believe in a true generation of the Son by the Father without holding that the Son receives His essence from the Father, and his natural presumption that Calvin's associates and pupils accurately reproduced the teaching of their master - for there is no doubt that Beza and Simler, for example, understood bygeneration a communication of essence - the evidence which Bellarmine relies on reduces to a single passage in the "Institutes" (I. xiii. 23). Calvin there, arguing with Gentilis, opposes to the notion that the Father and Son differ in essence, the declaration that the Father "shares" the essence together with the Son, so that it is common, tota et in solidum, to the Father and the Son. It may be possible to take the verb "communicate" here in the sense of "impart" rather than in that of "have in common," but it certainly is not necessary and it seems scarcely natural; and there is little elsewhere in Calvin's discussion to require it of us. Petavius points out that the sentence is repeated in the tract against Gentilis - but that carries us but a little way. It is quite true that there is nothing absolutely clear to be found to the opposite effect either. But there are several passages which may be thought to suggest a denial that the Son derives His essence from the Father. Precisely what is meant, for example, when we are told that the Son "contains in Himself the simple and indivisible essence of God in integral perfection, not portione aut deflexu," is no doubt not clear: but by deflexu it seems possible that Calvin meant to deny that the Son possessed the divine essence by impartation from another (I. xiii. 2). It is perhaps equally questionable what weight should be placed on the form of the statement (Â§ 20) that the order among the Persons by which the principium and origo is in the Father, is produced (fero) by the "proprieties"; or on the suggestion that the more exact way of speaking of the Son is to call Him "the Son of the Person" (Â§ 23) - the Father being meant - the term God in the phrase "Son of God" requiring to be taken of the Person of the Father. When it is argued that "whoever asserts that the Son is essentiated by the Father denies that He is selfexistent" (Â§ 23), and "makes His divinity a something abstracted from the essence of God, or a derivation of a part from the whole," the reference to Gentilis' peculiar views of the essentiation of the Son by the Father, i.e., His creation by the Father, seems to preclude a confident use of the phrase in the present connection. Nor does the exposition of the unbegottenness of the essence of the Son and Spirit as well as of the Father, so that it is only as respects His Person that the Son is of the Father (Â§ 25) lend itself any more certainly to our use. A survey of the material in the "Institutes" leads to the impression thus that there is singularly little to bring us to a confident decision whether Calvin conceived the essence of God to be communicated from the Father to the Son in "generation" and from the Father and Son to the Spirit in "procession." And outside the "Institutes" the same ambiguity seems to follow us. If we read that Christ has "the fulness of the Godhead" of Himself (Opp. xi. 560), we read equally that the Fathers taught that the Son is "of the Father even with respect to His eternal essence" (vii. 322), and is of the substance of the Father (vii. 324). In this state of the case opinions may lawfully differ. But on the whole we are inclined to think that Calvin, although perhaps not always speaking perfectly consistently, seeks to avoid speaking of generation and procession as importing the communication of the Divine essence; so that Petavius appears to be right in contending that Calvin meant what he says when he represents the Son as "having from Himself both divinity and essence" (I. xiii. 19).

We have thought it worth while to dwell with some fulness on this matter, because, as we have suggested already, it is precisely in this peculiarity of Calvin's doctrine of the Trinity that the explanation is found of the widespread offense which was taken at it. Men whose whole thought of the Trinity lived, moved and had its being in the ideas of generation and procession, that is, in the notion of a perpetual communication of the Divine essence from the Father as the fons deitatis to the Son, who is thereby constituted the Son, and from the Father and Son to the Spirit, who is thereby constituted the Spirit, could not but feel that the Trinity they had known and confessed was taken away when this conception was conspicuous only by its absence, or was at best but remotely suggested, and all the stress was laid on the absolute equality of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Such a conception of the Trinity would inevitably appear to them to savor of Sabellianism or of Tritheism, according as their minds dwelt more on the emphasis which was laid upon the numerical unity of the essence common to all the Persons or on that which was laid upon the distinctness of the Persons. Dissatisfaction with Calvin's Trinitarian teaching was therefore not confined to Romish controversialists seeking ground of complaint against him, but was repeated in all whose thought had run strictly in the moulds of Nicene speculation. Despite an occasional defender like Meisner or Tarnov,99 the Lutheran theologians, for example, generally condemned it. Many, like Tilemann Heshusius and Aegidius Hunnius and, later, Stechmannus, hotly assailed it, and the best that could be hoped for at Lutheran hands was some such firm though moderately worded refusal of it as is found, for example, in John Gerhard's "Loci Theologici." "The Greek doctors," he tells us,100 "call only the Father auvto,qeoj kai. auvtoou,sioj, not because there is a greater perfection of essence in the Father than in the Son, but because He is avge,nhtoj and a se ipso and does not have deity through generation or spiration. Bucanus, Loc. i, De Deo, p. 6, responds thus: 'The Son is a se ipso as He is God; from the Father as He is Son.' This he got from Calvin, who, Book I, c. xiii, Â§ 25, writes: 'The Son as He is God we confess is ex se ipso, considered apart from His Person, but as He is Son we say that He is of the Father; thus His essence is without principium, but of His Person God is Himself the principium.' We are not able, however, to approve these words, but confess rather with the Nicene Creed that 'the Son is begotten of the Father, God of God, Light of Light,' and follow the saying of Christ, Jno. v. 26 . . . Prov. viii. 24. . . . Zacharias Ursinus101 therefore is right to separate from his preceptor here, writing in Catech., p. II. q. 25, p. 179: 'The Son is begotten of the Father; that is, He has the Divine Essence in an ineffable manner communicated to Him from the Father.' D. Lobechius, disp. 3 in Auqustinum Conf. th. 26, says: 'The essence should be considered in a two-fold way, either with respect to itself or with respect to its own being, or else with respect to its communication: it has no principium with respect to its own being; but with respect to its communication we say that the essence has as its principium, to be from the Father in the Son, for it has been communicated from the Father to the Son.'" Nevertheless, Gerhard, of course, does not deny that, when properly explained, the Son may fitly be called auvto,qeoj; since that would be tantamount to denying His true divinity. Accordingly he writes elsewhere:102 "The term is ambiguous: for it is either opposed to communication of the divine essence and in that sense we deny that Christ isauvto,qeoj, because He receives the essence by eternal generation from the Father; or it is opposed to the inequality of the Divine essence, and in that sense we concede that Christ isauvto,qeoj. Gregory of Valentia, De Trinitate, i. 22: 'The Son as He is a Person is from another; as the most simple being, is not from another.' Christ is verily and in Himself God (vere et se ipso Deus), but He is not of Himself (a se ipso) God." One would think Gerhard was skating on very thin ice to agree with Gregory of Valentia - who agrees with Calvin and uses his very mode of statement - and yet not agree with Calvin.

The subordinationism103 of the Arminians was of quite a different quality from that of the Lutherans. The dominant note which the Lutheran Christology sounded was the majesty of Christ; nothing that tended to exalt Christ could be without its appeal to Lutherans; they drew back from Calvin's assertion of His auvtoqeo,thj only in the interests of the traditional Nicene construction of the Trinity. The Arminians had, on the other hand, a distinct tendency to the proper subordinationism of the Origenists; and in the later members of the school, indeed, there was present a strong influence from the Socinians. To them, of course, the Father alone could be thought of as auvto,qeoj and the Son was conceived as in His very nature, because God only by derivation, less than the Father. As in his whole theological outlook, Arminius himself was here better than his successors. He fairly saves his orthodoxy, indeed; but he emphatically denies theauvtoqeo,thj of the Son. The Son may just as well be called Father, he intimates, as be represented as "having His essence a se ipso or a nullo"; and the employment of such language cannot be justified by saying that to affirm that the Son of God, as God, has His essence a se ipso, is only to say that the divine essence is not ab aliquo: there can, in fact, be no reason for calling the Sonauvto,qeoj.104 On the other hand, nevertheless, he recognizes that the wordauvto,qeoj may be taken in two senses. It may describe the one to whom it is applied either merely as vere et se ipso God, or else as God a se. In the former usage it is as applied to the Son tolerable; in the latter not.105 He argues that we must distinguish between saying that the essence which the Son has is from none, and that the Son which has this essence is from none: "for," says he, "the Son is the name of a person, which has a relation to the Father, and therefore cannot be defined or contemplated apart from this relation; while the essence, on the other hand, is an absolute somewhat."106 "To contend," he urges, "that to say 'He is God' and 'He has His essence from none' are equivalent statements, is to say either that the Father alone is God, or else that there are three collateral Gods." He cheerfully allows that neither of these assertions expresses the meaning of Calvin or Beza: but he contends that they use misleading language when they call Christauvto,qeoj and he appeals to Beza's admission, when excusing Calvin, that "Calvin had not strictly observed the discrimination between the particles a se and per se."

The gravitation of Arminianism was, however, downward; and we find already taught by Episcopius, no longer a certain subordination in order among the Persons of the Trinity in the interests of the Nicene doctrine of "eternal generation " and "procession," but rather a generation and procession in the interests of a subordination in nature among the Persons of the Trinity. "It is certain" from Scripture, says he, "that this divinity and the divine perfections are to be attributed to these three persons, not collaterally and coordinately, but subordinately." "This subordination," he adds, "should be carefully attended to, because of its extremely great usefulness, since by it not only is there fundamentally overthrown the triqeo,thj which collateralism almost necessarily involves, but also the Father's glory is preserved to Him unimpaired." Wherefore, he continues, "they fall into perilous error who contend that the Son isauvto,qeoj, in such a manner that as He is God He is of Himself, as He is Son of the Father; because from this point of view, the true subordination between the Father and the Son is taken away."107 It is scarcely necessary to pause to point out with Triglandius108 that to say that the Son and Spirit are not collaterally or coordinally divine with the Father is to say they are not equally divine with Him, and to say that it is injurious to the Father's glory to call the Sonauvto,qeoj, even as He is God, is to say that He is inferior to the Father even in His essence. No doubt Episcopius says in the same breath that "one and the same divine nature" is to be attributed to the three Persons. But this is not easy to conciliate with his argument, except on the supposition that in saying "one and the same nature," his thought wavered somewhat between numerical oneness and specific oneness,109 or else that he conceived the relation of the several Persons to this one nature to differ among themselves - one possessing it of Himself, the others by derivation from - shall we even suggest, by favor of? - another.

The path thus opened by Episcopius was eagerly walked in by his successors. All that may be thought to be latent in Episcopius came to light in Curcellaeus. We will, however, permit another hand to describe to us his teaching with regard to the Trinity. "If you take his own account," writes Robert Nelson, in his "Life of Dr. George Bull,"110 there would be no man more orthodox and catholic" than Curcellaeus is "in the doctrine of the Trinity, as also in that of the Incarnation of Christ. And he insisted, that both from the pulpit and from the chair, he had always taught and vindicated that faith, into which he had been baptized, and which he had publicly professed in the congregation, according to the form generally received; and did even teach and vindicate the same at that very time, when the charge of Anti-trinitarianism was brought against him. Yea, he expressed so great a zeal for the orthodox doctrine in this great fundamental, as he would seem forward to seal the truth thereof, even with his blood; if, as he said, God would vouchsafe him this honor. Notwithstanding all this, it is notoriously known, and that from his own very Apology, that he was no less an enemy to the Council of Nice than his master before him, if not more than he; that he was no friend at all to the use of the word 'Trinity'; that he so explained himself concerning that mystery as to assert no more than a 'specifical unity' in the divine Persons; that he defended the cause of Valentinus Gentilis, beheaded at Bern in Switzerland for Tritheism, maintaining his doctrine to have been the same with that of the primitive Fathers, particularly of Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Tertullian, and Clemens Alexandrinus; that he impeached the common (which he called the Modern and Scholastic) doctrine of the Trinity for approaching so very near Sabellianism, as hardly to be distinguished from it, and charged it to be a thousand years younger than that which was taught by Christ and His apostles; that he exploded the notion of consubstantiality, in the sense in which it is now generally taken, when applied to the Father and Son; that he was very much afraid to have his mind perplexed with the 'divine relations,' or with the manner of 'generation' and 'procession' in the Deity, or with modes of 'subsistence' and 'personalities,' or with 'mutual consciousness,' and the like; and therefore was for discarding at once all such terms and phrases as are not 'expressly legitimated' by the sacred writers; that he fully believed the Godhead of the Father to be more excellent than that of the Son, or of the Holy Ghost, even so far as to look upon this superiority as a thing unquestionable, and to appeal to the consentient testimony of the primitive Church for evidence; and lastly that he took care to recommend Petavius, and the author of Irenicum Irenicorum,111 a learned physician of Dantzick . . . to the perusal of his readers, for the sake of that collection of testimonies which is to be found in them, as wherein they might easily find 'an account of the primitive faith' concerning these great articles." A subordinationism like this, of course, could not endure Calvin's Trinitarianism, of which the cornerstone was the equality of the Persons in the Trinity - which equality it was that was safeguarded by the ascription ofauvtoqeo,thj to Christ.

Indeed, this ascription was equally unacceptable to a subordinationism of far less extreme a type than that of Curcellaeus and his Remonstrant successors. It is the biographer of George Bull to whom we have appealed to bring Curcellaeus' trinitarian teaching before us: and George Bull is perhaps the best example of that less extreme, convinced, no doubt, but well-guarded, subordinationism which we have now in mind - the subordinationism which entrenched itself in the Nicene definitions and the explanations of the Nicene Fathers, interpreted, however, rather from the tentative and inadequate constructions out of which they were advancing to a sounder and truer trinitarianism, than from this sounder and truer trinitarianism of which they were the expression. It can scarcely be doubted that Bull's subordinationism owed much to the Arminian movement, from the extremes of which, on this point at least, he drew back. The Arminianism flowing in from the continent had been a powerful co-factor in the production of that Catholic reaction of seventeenth century England of which Bull was, in its post-Restoration days of triumph, one of the representatives and ornaments. It is interesting to note that the "Theological Institutes" of Episcopius, at the time that Bull was contemplating writing his "Defence of the Nicene Creed," was "generally in the hands of students of divinity in both universities, as the best system of Divinity that had appeared,"112 and that Bull himself speaks of Episcopius with high respect in all except his attitude towards the Nicene Fathers.113 Indeed, when he comes to state the subordinationism which he professes to defend as commended by Catholic antiquity, he avails himself of Episcopius' precise phrase, declaring that all "the Catholic Doctors, those that lived before and those that lived after the Council of Nice," "with one consent have taught that the divine Nature and Perfections do agree to the Father and Son, not collaterally or coordinately, but subordinately."114 But the particular form which Bull's subordinationism took was determined, naturally, by that special appeal which the neo-Catholic party to which he belonged made to primitive antiquity, by which he was led - with some insular exaggeration of the importance of his own position - to suppose that the design of Petavius in his exposition of the unformed trinitarianism of the ante-Nicene Fathers was to help "the cause of the Pope by showing that "there is very little regard to be had to the Fathers of the three first ages, to whom the Reformed Catholics" - that is to say, the Catholizing party of the Church of England - "generally do appeal."115 Whatever may be said of this conjecture, it cannot be doubted that Bull's design was to show that the appeal to the "first three ages" yielded in the matter of the Trinity the self-same doctrine which the Nicene Fathers formulated. In order to do this, however, he was compelled to saddle upon the Nicene doctrine a subordinationism which, of the very essence of the Logos Christology of the second and third centuries, was in the Nicene construction happily in the act of being transcended. In the interests of this subordinationism Calvin's equalization of the Son with the Father through the ascription to Him ofauvtoqeo,thj was necessarily distasteful to Bull. That the Son is "very God" and in that sense may fitly be calledauvto,qeoj he is, indeed, frank to allow, for he is himself, with all the Fathers, a true and firm believer in the Godhead of Christ: but that the Son isauvto,qeoj, "God of Himself," he repudiates with decision as inconsistent with "catholic consent" which pronounces Him rather qeo.j evk qeou/. For, depending here on Petavius, he will not allow that it is possible to say "that the Son is from God the Father, as He is Son, and not as He is God; that He received His Person, not His essence, or Divine Nature, from the Father"; on the ground that begetting means just communication of essence.116 It is a little amusing to see Bull, from his Anglican tripod, as Calvin would himself have said, patronizing Calvin. He graciously allows that Calvin has deserved well of us "for the good service which he rendered in purging the Church of Christ from the superstition of popery"; but he "earnestly exhorts pious and studious youths to beware of a spirit from which have proceeded such thing " as Calvin's unreverential allusions to the Nicene Creed, which he had dared to speak of as containing harsh expressions and "vain repetitions."117 "Even the zeal of Mr. Bull" thus, as his admiring biographer tells us, "hath not here hindered him from treating with esteem the author of so dangerous an opinion" as that Christ is God of Himself, the self-existent God, "while at the same time he is confuting it, for the sake of some laudable qualifications which he discerned in him, and was endeavoring to excuse him as well as the matter could bear, against the insults of the most learned writer of his whole order, so famous for learning"118 - by which we suppose Nelson means to intimate that Bull defended Calvin against injurious imputations of Petavius; though we have failed to observe this feature of Bull's discussion.

In England, too, however, the downward movement fulfilled itself. After Bull came Samuel Clarke and his fellow Arians in the established Church, matched by the Socinian drift among the dissenters. To these, naturally, Calvin'sauvto,qeoj was as far beyond the range of practical consideration as it was to Crell119 or Schlichting,120 who did him the honor to express their dissent from it. Clarke, however, may claim from us a moment's notice, not so much on his own account, as for the sake of a distinction which Waterland was led to make in refuting him. Clarke was willing to admit that the Son may have been begotten of the essence of the Father, though he wished it to be allowed that it was equally possible that He may have been made out of nothing. "Both are worthy of censure," he said,121 "who on the one hand affirm that the Son was made out of nothing, or on the other affirm that He is self-existent substance." In his response, Waterland exhibits afresh the difficulties which lie in wait for those who take their startingpoint from even the measure of subordinationism which is embalmed in the language of the Nicene formularies, when they seek to do justice to the full deity of Christ. In the interests of the Nicene doctrine of eternal generation, he proposes to distinguish between necessary existence and self-existence, and, denying the latter, to claim only the former for the Son. The Second Person of the Godhead, he says, participates in the one substance of the Godhead, and is therefore necessarily existent; but He participates in it by communication from the Father, not of Himself, and therefore He is not self-existent. "We say," he explains,122 "the Son is not self-existent, meaning He is not unoriginate. You" - that is, Clarke - "not only say the same, but contend for it, meaning not necessarily existing." "Self-existence as distinct from necessary existence, is expressive only of the order and manner in which the perfections are in the Father, and not of any distinct perfection."123 That is to say, in Waterland's view, the Son is all that the Father is, but not in the same manner: the Father is all that He is in this manner, viz., that He is it of Himself; the Son, in this manner, viz., that He is it of the Father. Both are necessarily all that they are, and therefore both are necessarily existent: but only the Father is all that He is of Himself, and therefore self-existence can be predicated of Him alone. What is really declared here is obviously only that the generation of the Son is a necessary and not a voluntary movement in the divine nature: and all that is affirmed is therefore merely that the existence of the Son is not dependent on the divine will. Is this all that need be affirmed, however, in order to vindicate to the Son true deity? We must bear in mind that it is not impossible to conceive creation itself as necessary: the history of theology has not been a stranger to the idea that the world is the eternal and necessary product of the divine activity. In order to vindicate true deity to the Son it is not sufficient, therefore, to affirm that He is equally with the Father "necessary in respect of existence."124 That might be true of Him even were He a creature. What must be affirmed of Him if we would recognize His true deity is not merely that He could not but exist, but that the ground of His existence is in Himself. It is self-existence, not necessary existence, in other words, which really imports deity, and it is a degradation of this great and fundamental attribute to attempt to reduce it to a mere synonym of "ingenerate." It is rather the synonym of necessary existence as applied to deity, describing this necessary existence in its deeper significance and implications. The artificial distinction which Waterland wishes to make between the two as applied to the Son, seems thus merely an invention to "save the face" of the Nicene doctrine of "generation." Let us admit, says he, in effect, that the Son is equally with the Father "necessary in respect of existence." That is, of course, "self-existent" according to the proper significance of the term in its application to a Divine Being. But let us agree to say that we will not use the term "self-existence" but "necessarily existing" in this sense, and will reserve "self-existence" for another sense, distinct from "necessary existence." Now, "as distinct from necessary existence,"

"self-existence" can express only "the order and manner in which the perfections are in the Father" and not "any distinct perfection." Granted. If we are to use the term "self-existence" to express some other idea than self-existence -then it may express something which the self-existing, i.e., necessarily existing God who is the Son is not. But then it remains true that this necessarily existing God who is the Son is at this very moment confessed to be the self-existent God - under its synonym of "necessarily existent." In a word, if we will agree to use the term "selfexistent" in the sense of "ingenerate" - which it does not in the least mean - we may, of course, deny that the Son who is "generate" is "self-existent": but if we employ that term in the sense of "necessarily existent," - which is just what it means in the full reach of that term as applied to God - why, then we must say that the Son is "self-existent." To put the thing in a nutshell: the Nicene doctrine that the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit are necessary movements in the divine essence and not voluntary acts of God the Father, carries with it the ascription of necessary existence, in the sense of that term applicable to God, that is of "selfexistence," to the Son and Spirit and requires that each be spoken of asauvto,qeoj. To deny to them the quality ofauvtoqeo,thj is thus logically to make them creatures of the Father's power, if not of His will; by which their true deity is destroyed. Thus the tendency among the so-called strict Nicenists to deny to our Lord that He is, as God, a se ipso betrays a lurking leaven of subordinationism in their thought. It indicates a tendency to treat the Nicene doctrine of eternal generation, not, as it was intended by its framers, as the safeguard of the absolute equality of the Son with the Father, but rather as the proclamation of the inferiority of the Son to the Father: the Son because generate must differ from the ingenerate Father - must differ in this, that He cannot be, as is the Father, self-existent God, which is, of course, all one with saying that He is not God at all, since the very idea of God includes the idea of self-existence.125

It was, therefore, a very great service to Christian theology which Calvin rendered when he firmly asserted for the second and third persons of the Trinity theirauvtoqeo,thj. It has never since been possible for men to escape facing the question whether they really do justice to the true and complete deity of the Son and Spirit in their thought of the Trinitarian distinctions. It has not even been possible since for men who heartily believe in the deity of the Son and Spirit to refuse to them the designation ofauvtoqeo,j. They may have distinguished, indeed, betweenauvto,qeoj andauvtoqeo,j - Self-Existent God and Very God - and allowed the latter to the second and third Persons while withholding the former.126 But in the very act of drawing such a distinction, they have emphasized the true deity of the second and third Persons, and have been deterred from ascribingauvtoqeo,thj to them in the sense of self-existence only by confusing it with "ingeneration." It is, however, a part of the heritage, particularly of the Reformed Churches, that they have learned from Calvin to claim for Christ the great epithet ofauvto,qeoj:127 and their characteristic mark has therefore become the strength of the emphasis which they throw on the complete deity of the Lord. Whatever differences may have existed among them have not concerned the true deity of Christ, but rather the attitude taken by their teachers towards the Nicene speculation of "eternal generation." Concerning this speculation differences early manifested themselves. Immediate successors of Calvin, such as Theodore Beza and Josiah Simler, were as firm and exact in their adhesion to it as Calvin was dubious with reference to it. "The Son," says Beza, "is of the Father by an ineffable communication from eternity of the whole nature."128 "We deny not," says Simler, "that the Son has His essence from God the Father; what we deny is a begotten essence."129 And no less or less prejudiced an authority than Bellarmine pronounces these declarations "Catholic."130 Indeed, despite the influence of Calvin, the great body of the Reformed teachers remained good Nicenists. But they were none the less, as they were fully entitled to be, good "Autotheanites" also. They saw clearly that a relation within the Godhead between Persons to each of whom the entire Godhead belongs, cannot deprive any of these Persons of any essential quality of the Godhead common to them all.131 And they were determined to assert the full and complete Godhead of them all. Of course, there have been others, on the other hand, who have followed Calvin in sitting rather loosely to the Nicene tradition. Examples of this class are furnished by Trelcatius, Keckermann, Maccovius.132 Keckermann, for example, while not denying that many have preferred to say that "the Son has His essence communicated from the Father," yet considers that this can be said only in a modified sense and must be accompanied by certain important explanations - for, says he, "it is false if spoken of the essence considered absolutely, since the Son (as also the Holy Spirit) has this a se ipso." For himself he prefers, therefore, to say that "the second mode of existence in the Trinity, which is called the Son, . . . is communicated from the Father."133 This is, as we have seen, apparently Calvin's own view, while the more advanced position still which rejects, or at least neglects, the conception of "communication" altogether, whether of essence or of mode of existence,134 although it cannot find an example in Calvin, may yet be said to have had its way prepared for it by him. The direct Scriptural proof which had been customarily relied upon for its establishment he destroyed, refusing to rest a doctrinal determination on "distorted texts." He left, therefore, little Biblical basis for the doctrine of "eternal generation" except what might be inferred from the mere terms "Father," "Son" and "Spirit," and the general consideration that our own adoption into the relation of sons of God in Christ implies for Him a Sonship of a higher and more immanent character, which is His by nature and into participation in the relation of which we are admitted only by grace.135 Certainly other explanations of these facts are possible;136 and the possibility - or preferability - of other explanations was certain sooner or later to commend itself to some. Nothing, meanwhile, could illustrate more strikingly the vitality of the ecclesiastical tradition than that in such a state of the case the Nicene construction of the Trinity held its ground: held its ground with Calvin himself in its substantial core, and with the majority of his followers in its complete speculative elaboration. We are astonished at the persistence of so large an infusion of the Nicene phraseology in the expositions of Augustine, after that phraseology had really been antiquated by his fundamental principle of equalization in his construction of the Trinitarian relations: we are more astonished at the effort which Calvin made to adduce Nicene support for his own conceptions: and we are more astonished still at the tenacity with which his followers cling to all the old speculations.137

The repeated appeals which he makes to the Fathers is, as we have just hinted, a notable feature of Calvin's discussion of the Trinity and especially of his defense of his construction of the Trinitarian relationships. The citations he drew from the Fathers for this purpose were naturally much striven over. One instance seems worth scrutinizing, as on it was founded an accusation that Calvin did not know the difference between the two Latin prepositions "ad" and "a.," or else chose to "play to the gallery," which he counted upon not to know it. That the best Latinist of his day, whose Latin style is rather classical than mediaeval, could fail to feel the force of the common prepositions of that language is, of course, absurd: that a reasoner conspicuous for his fair-mindedness in his argumentation could have juggled with ambiguous phrases is even more impossible. An attentive reading of the passages in question will, as was to be expected, quickly make it clear that it is not Calvin but his critics who are at fault. Bellarmine, arguing that the reasons which Calvin assigns for calling our Lordauvto,qeoj are not valid, adduces his appeal to the passages in which Augustine remarks that our Lord "is called Son, with reference to the Father (ad patrem) and God with reference to Himself (ad seipsum)." "But," he adds, in rebuttal, "it is not the same thing to say that the Son is God ad se, and that He is God a se." "For," he somewhat superfluously argues, "the first signifies that the name of God is not relative and yet belongs to the Son: and this Augustine says and says truly, for although the Son is a relative, it is nevertheless a relative which exists, is divine, and accordingly includes the essence which is absolute. But [to say] that the Son is God a se signifies that the Son of God is not the Son of God, but is unbegotten, which Augustine never said, but Calvin falsely attributes to him."138 "It is either," writes Petavius,139 improving even on Bellarmine, "a remarkable piece of chicanery or else a remarkable hallucination in Calvin, when he seems to take as equivalents these two terms ad se and a se: as also these two, ad alium and ab alio, which" [i.e., ad se and ad alium] "Augustine makes free use of in explaining the mystery of the Trinity." Then, after quoting Calvin's citation of Augustine, he concludes: "Unless Calvin had supposed ad se to be the same as a se, and ad alium to be the same as ab alio, he would not have employed these passages from Augustine."140 In point of fact, however, Calvin does not confuse "ad" and "a" and he does not cite Augustine's use of the one as if he had employed the other. His citations are not intended to show that Augustine taught that the Son is not of the Father but of Himself: but only to show that we may - or rather must - speak in a twofold way of the Son, absolutely, to wit, as He is in Himself and relatively, as He is with reference to the Father. It is his own statement, not Augustine's, when he proceeds to say that when we thus speak of our Lord absolutely as He is in Himself, we are to say that He is a se, and only when we speak of Him relatively as He is with reference to the Father are we to speak of Him as a Patre. It is marvellous that anyone could confuse this perfectly clear argument: more marvellous still that, on the ground of such a confusion, anyone should venture to charge Calvin with gross ignorance of the meaning of the simplest Latin words or else of "remarkable chicanery" in his use of Latin texts. Here is what Calvin actually says: "By these appellations, which denote distinction, says Augustine, that is signified by which they are mutually related to one another: not the substance itself by which they are one. By which explanation, the sentiments of the ancients which otherwise might seem contradictory may be reconciled with one another. For now they teach that the Father is the principium of the Son; and now they assert that the Son has His divinity and essence alike of Himself, and is therefore one principium with the Father. The cause of this diversity is elsewhere well and perspicuously explained by Augustine when he speaks as follows: Christ is called God with respect to Himself, He is called Son with respect to the Father. And again, the Father is called God with respect to Himself, with respect to the Son He is called Father. What is called Father with respect to the Son is not the Son; what is called Son with respect to the Father is not the Father: what is called Father with respect to Himself and Son with respect to Himself is God. When, then, we speak of the Son, simply, without respect to the Father, we rightly and properly assert that He is of Himself; and we therefore call Him the sole (unicum) principium; but when we are noting the relation in which He stands to the Father, we justly make the Father the principium of the Son."141 A simple reading of the passage is enough to refute the suggestion that Calvin makes Augustine assert that Christ is "of Himself" when he is merely asserting that Christ is God when considered with respect to Himself and not relatively to the Father. If a matter so clear in itself, however, can be made clearer by further evidence, it is easy enough to adduce direct evidence. For Calvin has incorporated into the "Institutes" here material he uses often elsewhere. And in more than one of these instances of its use elsewhere, he distinctly tells us that he did not understand Augustine in these passages to be asserting the aseity of the Son. We may take, for example, a letter to the NeuchÃ¢tel pastors, written in November, 1543, with respect to Cortesius, with whom he had been having a discussion on our Lord's aseity - or as Calvin puts it, peri. auvtoousi,aj Christi. In the course of the discussion, he says, "we came to that difficulty that he did not think he could speak of the essence of Christ without mention of the person. I opposed to this first the authority of Augustine, who testifies that we can speak in a twofold way (bifariam) of Christ, as He is God - according to relation, that is, and simply (simpliciter). And that the discussion might not be prolonged, I adduced certain passages of Cyril, where in so many words (dissertis verbis) he pronounces on what we were discussing."142 That is to say, the passages of Augustine were appealed to not as direct witness to the auvtoousi,a of Christ, but only to prove the subordinate point that we can speak of our Lord in a twofold way: the passages from Cyril alone "expressly" declare on the point at issue. The declaration that Cyril was adduced as pronouncing on the point itself in so many words, is a declaration that Augustine was not so adduced.

In his assertion of theauvtoqeo,thj of the Son Calvin, then, was so far from supposing that he was enunciating a novelty that he was able to quote the Nicene Fathers themselves as asserting it " in so many words." And yet in his assertion of it he marks an epoch in the history of the doctrine of the Trinity. Not that men had not before believed in the self-existence of the Son as He is God: but that the current modes of stating the doctrine of the Trinity left a door open for the entrance of defective modes of conceiving the deity of the Son, to close which there was needed some such sharp assertion of His absolute deity as was supplied by the assertion of Hisauvtoqeo,thj. If we will glance over the history of the efforts of the Church to work out for itself an acceptable statement of the great mystery of the Trinity, we shall perceive that it is dominated from the beginning to the end by a single motive - to do full justice to the absolute deity of Christ. And we shall perceive that among the multitudes of great thinkers who under the pressure of this motive have labored upon the problem, and to whom the Church looks back with gratitude for great services, in the better formulation of the doctrine or the better commendation of it to the people, three names stand out in high relief, as marking epochs in the advance towards the end in view. These three names are those of Tertullian, Augustine and Calvin. It is into this narrow circle of elect spirits that Calvin enters by the contribution he made to the right understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity. That contribution is summed up in his clear, firm and unwavering assertion of theauvtoqeo,thj of the Son. By this assertion the o`moousio,thj of the Nicene Fathers at last came to its full right, and became in its fullest sense the hinge of the doctrine.

Endnotes:

From The Princeton Theological Review, vii. 1909, pp. 553-652.

Something like Calvin's mode of transition here is repeated by Triglandius when he arrives at this topic in his "Antapologia" (c. v.). "That God is most simple in His essence," writes Triglandius, "eternal, infinite, and therefore of infinite knowledge and power, has been sufficiently demonstrated in the preceding chapter. Whence it is clear that He is one and unique. But Scripture sets before us here a great mystery, namely that in the one unique essence of God, there subsist three hypostases, the first of which is called the Father, the second the Son, the third the Holy Spirit. An arduous mystery indeed, and one simply incomprehensible to the human intellect; one, therefore, not to be measured by human reason, nor to be investigated by reasons drawn from human wisdom, but to be accredited solely from the Word of God; by going forward as far as it leads us, and stopping where it stops. Whenever this rule is neglected the human reason wanders in a labyrinth and cannot discern either end or exit" (in "Refutatio Apologiae Remonstrantium," p. 76).

We must not fancy, however, that Calvin conceived the personal distinctions in the Godhead as mere "epithets," that is, that he conceived the Trinity Sabellianwise as merely three classes of attributes or modes of manifestation of God. He does not say that the tripersonality of God is another "epithet" but another "note" along with His immensity and spirituality - that is to say, another characteristic fact defining God as differing from all other beings. He explicitly denies that the personal distinctions are analogous in kind to the qualities of the divine essence. He says: "Yet in that one essence of God we acknowledge the Father, with His eternal Word and Spirit. In using this distinction, however, we do not imagine three Gods, as if the Father were some other entity (aliud quiddam) than the Word, nor yet do we understand them to be mere epithets (nuda epitheta) by which God is variously designated, according to His operations; but, in common with the ecclesiastical writers, we perceive in the simple unity of God these three hypostases, that is, subsistences, which, although they coexist in one essence, are not to be confused with one another. Accordingly, though the Father is one God with His Word and Spirit, the Father is not the Word, nor the Word the Spirit." - "Adveraus P. Caroli Calumnias," Opp. vii. 312. And again in refuting the Sabellians he expressly draws the distinction: "The Sabellians do indeed raise the cavil that God is called now Father, now Son, now Spirit in no other sense than He is spoken of as both strong and good, and wise and merciful; but they are easily refuted by this, - that it is clear that these latter are epithets which manifest what God is erga nos, while the others are names which declare what God really is apud semetipsum." - "Institutes," ed. 2, and other middle edd., Opp. i. 491.

The idea of "multiformity," not of "multiplicity" - which would imply composition. Hence Calvin, I. xiii. 2, ad fin., declares that it is impious to represent the essence of God as "multiplex"; and at the beginning of that section he warns against vainly dreaming of "a triplex God," and defines that as meaning the division of the simple essence of God among three Persons. The same warning had been given by Augustine, "De Trinitate," VI. vii. 9: "Neither, because He is a Trinity, is He to be therefore thought to be triplex; otherwise the Father alone, or the Son alone, would be less than the Father and Son together, - although it is hard to see how we can say, either the Father alone, or the Son alone, since both the Father is with the Son and the Son with the Father always inseparably." That is to say, God is not a compound of three deities, but a single deity which is essentially trinal. This mode of statement became traditional. Thus Hollaz says: "That is triune which, one in essence, has three modes of subsistence; that is triplex which is compounded of three. We say God is triune; but we are forbidden by the Christian religion to say He is triplex " (in "Examinis Theol. Acroam.," 1741, p. 297). Again: "We may speak of the trinal, but not of the triple deity." Note also Hase's "Hutterus Redivivus," 1848, pp. 166-167; and Keckermann, "Syst. S. S. Theol.," 1615, p. 21.

So in his "Instruction" or "Catechism" of 1537 and 1538 (Opp. v. 337 or xxii. 52), Calvin says: "The Scriptures, and pious experience itself, show us in the absolutely simple essence of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; so that our intelligence is not able to conceive the Father without at the same time comprehending the Son in whom His living image is repeated, and the Spirit in whom His power and virtue are manifested." Cf. the Commentary on Gen. i. 26: "I acknowledge that there is something in man which refers to the Father and the Son and the Spirit" - the exact meaning of which, however, is not apparent (see below, note 54, p. 225).

"Die christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit," iii. 1843, pp. 6-7.

Pp. 9-10.

Pp. 10-11.

P. 10.

P. 20.

Pp. 24 sq.

Pp. 42-43.

Pp. 44-45.

In the "Catechism" of 1537, 1538 (Opp. v. 337 or xxii. 52) he says: "Scripture and pious experience itself show us in the absolutely simple essence of God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."

This is Melanchthon's enumeration of the doctrines which he will not enter into largely in his "Loci" Cf. Augusti's ed. of 1821, p. 8, as quoted by Baur, p. 20: "Proinde non est, cur multum operae ponamus in locis supremis de Deo, de unitate, de trinitate Dei, de mysterio creationis, de modo incarnationis." How little Melanchthon was intending to manifest indifference to these doctrines is already apparent from the word supremis here. Baur's comment is: "It is precisely with these doctrines which the dialectic spirit of speculation of the Scholastics regarded as its peculiar object, and on which it expended itself with the greatest subtlety and thoroughness, - with the doctrines of God, of His unity and trinity, of creation, incarnation, etc., - that Melanchthon would have so little to do, that he did not even make a place for them in his Loci, and that not on the ground that it did not belong to the plan of that first sketch of Protestant dogmatics to cover the whole system, but on the ground of the objective character of those doctrines, as they appeared to him from the standpoint determined by the Reformation" (p. 20). Even so, however, there is not involved any real underestimate of the importance of these doctrines, but only a reference of them to a place in the system less immediately related to the experience of salvation. Nor must we forget the origin of the "Loci" in an exposition of the Epistle to the Romans and its consequent lack of all systematic form, or completeness.

"Loci," as above, p. 9, quoted by Baur, p. 21. The point of Melanchthon's remark is that Paul did not give himself over to philosophical disquisition on abstruse topics, but devoted himself single-heartedly to applying the salvation of Christ to sinning souls.

"Geschichte der protestantischen Dogmatik," i. 1854, p. 105.

KÃ¶stlin, Theologische Studien und Kritiken, 1868, p. 420; Muller, "De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn," 1883, p. 31.

For example, Servetus' "De Trinitatis erroribus" appeared in 1531, and his "Dialogi de Trinitate" in 1532.

"Institutes," I. xiii. 5, ad init.: "I could wish that they [the technical terms by which the Trinity is expressed and guarded] were buried, indeed, if only this faith stood fast among all: that the Father and the Son and the Spirit are one God; and yet neither is the Son the Father, nor the Spirit the Son, but they are distinct by a certain property."

Cf. their defense of themselves, Opp. xi. 6.

Philip Schaff, "History of the Christian Church," vii. 1892, p. 351: "A more serious trouble was created by Peter Caroli, a doctor of the Sorbonne, an unprincipled, vain, and quarrelsome theological adventurer and turncoat.... He [Caroli] raised the charge of Arianism against Farel and Calvin at a synod in Lausanne, May, 1537, because they avoided in the Confession the metaphysical terms Trinity and Person, (though Calvin did use them in his Institutio and his Catechism) and because they refused, at Caroli's dictation, to sign the Athanasian Creed with its damnatory clauses, which are unjust and uncharitable." See also Schaff's "Creeds of Christendom," i. 1881, p. 27, note 1: "Calvin, who had a very high opinion of the Apostles' Creed, depreciates the Nicene Creed, as a 'carmen cantillando magis aptum, quam confessionis formula' (De Reform. Eccles.)." It would not, however, be easy to crowd more erroneous suggestions into so few words than Dr. Schaff manages to do here. Calvin did not have difficulty with the metaphysical terminology of the doctrine of the Trinity; he did not object to the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian Creed; he did not depreciate the Nicene Creed. Nor is the passage in which he speaks of the Nicene Creed as more suitable for a song than a creed to be found in the tract, "De vera, ecclesiae reformatione."

So the Strasburg editors and also A. Lang ("Die Heidelberger Katechismus," 1907, pp. xxxv.-xxxvi.; "Johannes Calvin," 1909, pp. 38 and 208). Doumergue ("Jean Calvin," ii. 1902, pp. 236-251) agrees with Rilliet ("Le Cat, fran. de Calvin, publie en 1537," 1878, pp. lii.-lvii) in assigning it to Calvin himself.

Opp. xxii. 33-74. The Latin edition of this Catechism (Opp. v. 317-354) was not printed until 1538, but it must have been prepared contemporaneously with the French, since it was quoted by Calvin in the debate with Caroli as early as February, 1537 (see Bahler, "Petrus Caroli und Johannes Calvin," in the Jahrbuch fÃ¼r schweizerische Geschichte, xxix. 1904, p. 64, note).

Preface to the Latin Translation, which was issued, in fact, precisely to meet these calumnies, which had obtained an incredible vogue (Opp. v. 318).

We may compare, however, the brevity with which the doctrine of the Trinity is dealt with in the Westminster Confession and Shorter Catechism.

So Colladon tells us, Opp. Calvini, xxi. 59; the registers of the Council of Geneva read the name, "Jehan Tordeur." See N. Weiss, Bulletin de la sociÃ©tÃ© de l'histoire du protestantisme franÃ§ais, lvi. 1907, pp. 228-229.

Cf. Doumergue, "Jean Calvin," ii. 1902, pp. 241-242. Herminjard, "Correspondance," etc., ed. 2, iii. 1878, Index (note especially pp. 172-175, notes 1, 5, 7). Cf. also the clear brief account of E. BÃ¤hler, "Petrus Caroli und Johannes Calvin" (in the JahrbuchfÃ¼r schweizerische Geschichte, xxix. 1904), pp. 73 sq.

The Strasburg editors (Calvini Opera, vii. p. xxx.) characterize Caroli as "vir vana ambitione agitatus, opinionibus inconstans, moribus levis." Doumergue's judgment upon him is embodied in these words: "Unhappily his character was not as high as his intelligence, and if the new ideas attracted him they did not transform him" (ii. 1902, p. 252). He quotes Douen's characterization of him as "a bold and adventurous spirit badly balanced, and more distinguished by talents than by rectitude of conduct" (p. 253, note 2). Kampschulte ("Johann Calvin," i. 1869, p. 162) contents himself with calling him "a man of restless spirit and changeable principles" - who (p. 295) was not above playing on occasion a dishonorable part. A. Lang's ("Johannes Calvin," 1909, p. 40) characterization runs: "Acute but also weak in character and self-seeking." The inevitable rehabilitation of Caroli has been undertaken by Eduard BÃ¤hler, Pastor at Thierachern in Switzerland, in a long article entitled "Petrus Caroli und Johannes Calvin: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Kultur der Reformationszeit," published in the twenty-ninth volume of the Jahrbuch fÃ¼r schweizerische Geschichte (1904, pp. 39188). BÃ¤hler's thesis is that Caroli belonged really to that large semi-Protestant party in the French Church which found its inspiration in Faber Stapulensis and its spiritual head in William BriÃ§onnet, Bishop of Meaux; occupying thus a middle ground he could rest content neither in the Roman nor in the Protestant camp - and from this ambiguous position is to be explained all his vacillations and treacheries. Granting the general contention and its explanatory value up to a certain point, it supplies no defense of Caroli's character and conduct, which BÃ¤hler's rehabilitation leaves where it found them. Cf. A. Lang's estimate of BÃ¤hler's lack of success: "There remains clinging to Caroli enough of wretched frivolity and of the most deplorable inconstancy. How great over against him stands out particularly Farel!" ("Johannes Calvin," 1909, p. 209). On Caroli the historians of the Protestant movement in Metz should be consulted, e.g., Dietsch, "Die evang. Kirche vonMetz," pp. 68-77, and Winkelmann, "Der Anteil der deutschen Protestanten an den kirchlichen Reformbestrebungen in Metz bis 1543," in the Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft fÃ¼r lothringische Geschichte und Altertumskunde, ix. 1897, pp. 229 sq.

Cf. Doumergue, "Jean Calvin," ii. 1902, p. 258, note; and BÃ¤hler, "Petrus Caroli und Johannes Calvin," p. 73.

Cf. BÃ¤hler, as cited, p. 71.

Doumergue, ii. 1902, pp. 266-268.

An old instance is supplied by Bellarmine, who, on Caroli's testimony, seeks to intimate that Calvin's refusal at the Council of Lausanne to sign theCreeds resembled the conduct of the Arians at the Council of Aquileia ("Controversia de Christo," ii. 19, near middle, in "Opp. Omnia," Paris, i. 1870, p. 335). "Calvin," he says, "is not unlike the Arians in this: for at the Council of Aquileia, St. Ambrose never could extort from the two Arian heretics that they should say that the Son is very God of very God; for they always responded that the Son is the very Only-begotten, Son of the very God, and the like, but never that He is very God of very God, although they were asked perhaps a hundred times. And that from Calvin at the Council of Lausanne, it could never be extorted that he should confess that the Son is God of God, Petrus Caroli, who was present, reports in his letter to the Cardinal of Lorraine." Bellarmine is blind to the fact that Calvin was ready to confess all that the Creeds contained to the exaltation of the Son and more, while the Arians would not confess so much. Even F. W. Kampschulte ("Johann Calvin," u. s. w., ii. 1899, p. 171) permits himself to say that Calvin "in the controversy with Caroli expresses himself on the Athanasian symbol in a very dubious way (in sehr bedenklichem Masse)," and adds in a note: "It was not groundlessly that he was upbraided with this by his later opponents. 'Calvin waxes angry and employs the same taunts as the anti-trinitarians against the Symbol of Athanasius and the Council of Nice, when his opinion touching the Trinity is brought under discussion.' Cf. F. Claude de Saintes, Declaration d'aucuns atheismes de la doctrine de Calvin, Paris, 1568, p. 108." Cf. on Kampschulte, Doumergue, "Jean Calvin," ii. 1902, p. 266. We have already had occasion to point out the uncomprehending way in which Dr. Schaff speaks of the matter (above, p. 199, note 22), in which, however, he is only the type of a great crowd of writers.

"Adv. P. Caroli calumnias," Opp. vii. 315: Calvino quidem et aliis propositum nequaque erat symbols, abiicere aut illis derogare fidem. Compare what he writes on Oct. 8, 1539, to Farel of the discussion at Strasburg: Quamquam id quoque diluere promtum erat, nos non respuisse, multo minus improbasse, sed ideo tantum detrectasse subscriptionem, ne ille, quod captaverat, de ministerio nostro triumpharet (Herminjard, vi. 1883, p. 53).

"Adv. P. Caroli calumnias," Opp. vii. 316: ego neque credo neque discredo. So Calvin tells Farel that Caroli had reported at Straaburg not that Calvin and his colleagues had denied the teaching of the three Symbols, but: nos vero non tantum detrectasse [subscriptionem], sed vexasse multis cachinnis symbola, illa. quae perpetua bonorum consensione authoritatem firmam in Ecclesia semper habuerunt (Herminjard, vi. 1883, p. 52). And, when writing to the Pope, what Caroli charges the Protestant preachers with doing is "ridiculing, satirizing, defaming" the symbols and denying not their truth but their authority: eoque devenisse ut concilii Niceni et divi Athanasii symbols, maiori ex parte riderent, proacinderent, proculcarent, et ab ecclesia legitima umquam fuisae recepta negarent (Herminjard, iv. ed. 2, 1878, p. 249). Compare below, note 37, p. 209.

Cf. A. Lang ("Johannes Calvin," 1909, p. 41): "There shows itself here Calvin's self-reliance and independence as over against every kind of ecclesiastical tradition.... Thus, in the Confession which he adduced at Lausanne in his and his colleagues' names, he explains: 'We cannot seek God's majesty anywhere except in His Word; nor can we think anything about Him except with His Word, or say anything of Him except through His Word.' . . . 'A religious Confession is nothing but a witness to the faith which abides in us; ... therefore it must be drawn only from the pure fountain of Scripture."'

Opp. xb. 83-84 (Herminjard, iv. ed. 2, 1878, pp. 185-186): "Ad haec Calvinus, nos in Dei unius fidem iurasse respondit, non Athanasii cuius Symbolum nulla unquam legitima ecclesia approbasset," Doumergue ("Jean Calvin," ii. 1902, p. 256) renders correctly: "Nous avons jure la foi en un seul Dieu, et non en Athanase, dont le symbole n'a Ã©tÃ© approuvÃ© par aucune Ã‰glise lÃ©gitime." Williston Walker ("John Calvin," 1906, p. 197), missing the construction, renders misleadingly: "We swear in the faith of the one God, not of Athanasius, whose creed no true church would ever have approved." So also A. Lang ("Johannes Calvin," 1909, p. 40): "Wir haben den Glauben an den einen Gott beschworen, aber nicht an Athanasius, dessen Symbol eine wahre Kirche nie gebilligt haben wÃ¼rde." Perhaps worst of all, James Orr, "The Christian View of God and the World," 1893, p. 309, note: "We have sworn to the belief in One God, and not to the creed of Athanasius, whose symbol a true Church would never have had admitted." Calvin is not declaring the Athanasian Creed unworthy of the approbation of any true church; he is recalling the fact that it is a private document authorized by no valid ecclesiastical enactment. For Caroli's account of what Calvin said, see above, note 35, end. Nevertheless, the Athanasian Creed had attained throughout the Western Church a position of the highest reverence (for the extent of its "reception and use" see Ommaney, "A Critical Dissertation on the Athanasian Creed," 1897, pp. 420 sq.), and was soon to be "approbated" by the Protestant Churches at large. Zwingli in the "Fidei Ratio" (1530) and Luther in the Smalcald Articles (1537) had already placed it among the Symbols of the Churches, whose authority they recognized: and the "Formula Concordiae" and many Reformed Confessions, beginning with the Gallican, were soon formally to accord it a place of authority in the Protestant Churches. See Loofs, "Athanasianum," in Herzog, "Realencyklopadie," ed. 3, ii. p. 179; Schaff, "Creeds of Christendom," ed. 1, i. p. 40; E. F. Karl Miller, "Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche," Index sub voc., "Athanasianum"; MÃ©nÃ©goz, as cited in note 42. Calvin found at Strasburg that the manner in which he had spoken of the Creeds was offensive to his colleagues there. He writes to Farel (Herminjard, vi. 1883, p. 53): "It was somewhat harder to purge ourselves in the matter of the Symbols: for this was what was offensive (odiosum), that we repudiated them, though they ought to be beyond controversy, since they were received by the suffrages of the whole Church. It was easy to explain that we did not disapprove, much less reject them, but only declined to subscribe them that he [Caroli] might not enjoy the triumph over our ministry which he longed for. Some odium, however, always remained."

Opp. vii. 316: non tam ad rem quam ad hominem.

iocatus est (ibid., p. 315).

"When he had recited three clauses of the Athanasian Symbol, he was not able to recite the fourth . . ." (ibid., p. 311, top).

Ibid., pp. 315-316. This manner of speaking of the Nicene Creed also impressed the Strasburg theologians unfavorably. Calvin writes to Farel Oct. 8, 1539 (Herminjard, vi. 1883, p. 54): "I had to give satisfaction about the battologies. I could not by any effort convince them that there is any battology there. I admitted, however, that I should not have so spoken if I had not been compelled by that man's wickedness."

Schaff: see p. 199 above, note 22. E. MÃ©nÃ©goz is therefore in the essentials of the matter right, when he expresses his wonder that men can suppose that the circumstances that Calvin "once refused to obey an injunction to sign the Symbol," or "pronounced a judgment unfavorable to the literary form of this document" - M.MÃ©nÃ©goz is confusing for the moment the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds - prove that "in the depths of his heart he held these anathemas in aversion" ("Publications diverses sur le FidÃ©isme," 1900, pp. 276-277). He adds with equal justice: "It is an infelicitous idea to appeal to Calvin as a witness that Protestantism, though receiving the Catholic Symbols, had no intention of approving their anathemas. And it is a historical error to imagine that the Reformers would have accepted these Symbols, if they had not firmly believed them, if they had felt any scruples, or cherished any mental reservations regarding the damnatory clauses. There was no paltering in a double sense in that age. There was no practice of 'economy.' . . . If the Protestants had felt any hesitation about the anathemas, they would have said so without ambiguity, and they would have purely and simply discarded the Symbols. Nothing would have been easier."

Opp. vii. 315.

Opp. vii. 318.

"Adv. P. Caroli calumnias": Opp. vii. 318.

non fraudulenter.

Dorner's account of Calvin's attitude to these questions is not quite exact either in the motive suggested, or in the precise action ascribed to him, though it recognizes Calvin's contribution to a better understanding of the doctrine ("Doctrine of the Person of Christ," E. T. II. ii. 1862, p. 158, note 1): "Even Calvin, about the time of his dispute with Caroli, asserted the necessity of a developing revision of the doctrine of the Trinity. On this ground he declined pledging himself to the Athanasian Creed, and wished to cast aside the terms 'persona,' 'Trinitas,' as scholastic expressions. At the same time he was so far from being inclined towards the Antitrinitarians, that he wished to carry out the doctrine of the Trinity still more completely. He saw clearly that in the traditional form of the doctrine, the Son had not full deity, because aseity (aseitas) was reserved to the Father alone, who thus received a preponderance over the Son, and was identified with the Monas, or the Divine essence. The Antitrinitarians, with whom he had to struggle, usually directed their attacks on this weak point of the dogma, and deduced therefrom the Antitrinitarian conclusions."

The "Institutes" as a whole were about doubled in length from the first edition (1536) to the second (1539), and again about doubled in the last edition (1559), so that the last edition (1559) is about four times as long as the first (1536). The treatment of the Trinity was, therefore, a little more expanded than the volume as a whole.

This argument is retained in the later editions and appears in its final form in the ed. of 1559, I. xiii. 16. In its earliest statement it runs thus (1536, pp. 107-108: Strasburg ed., p. 58): "Paul so connects these three things, God, faith and baptism, that he reasons from one to the other (Ephesians 4). So that,because there is one faith, thence he demonstrates that there is one God; because there is one baptism, thence he shows that there is one faith. For since faith ought not to be looking about hither and thither, neither wandering through various things, but should direct its view towards the one God, be fixed on Him and adhere to Him; it may be easily proved from these premises that if there be many faiths there should be many Gods. Again because baptism is the sacrament of faith, it confirms to us His unity, seeing that it is one. But no one can profess faith except in the one God. Therefore as we are baptized into the one faith, so our faith believes in the one God. Both that therefore is one and this is one, because each is of one God. Hence also it follows that it is not lawful to be baptized except into the one God, because we are baptized into faith in Him, in whose name we are baptized. Now, the Scriptures have wished (Mat. at end) that we should be baptized into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, at the same time that it wishes all to believe with one faith in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. What is that, truly, except a plain testimony that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one God? For if we are baptized in their name, we are baptized into faith in them. They are therefore one God, if they are worshipped in one faith."

Opp, i, 58. This awkward periphrasis suggests that, when the "Institutes" were written - in 1534-1535 - Calvin had no convenient expression at hand for the Tetragrammaton. This conjecture is supported by the circumstance that "Jehovah" does not seem to occur in the first edition; it is lacking even in the Preface to the First Commandment, where the customary Dominus takes its place. Already in the spring of 1537, however (Opp. vii. 314; ix. 704, 708, 709; xb. 107, 121) it is used familiarly; and thenceforward throughout Calvin's life. During his sojourn at Basle (1535) Calvin had studied Hebrew with Sebastian Munster (Baumgartner, "Calvin HÃ©braÃ¯sant," 1889, p. 18), and it was doubtless from him that he acquired the pronunciation "Jehovah" (see Munster on Ex. vi. 3 in "Critici Sacri," Amsterdam ed., 1698, i. 107, 108; Frankfort ed., i. 447; cf. 32). From his own comment on Ex. vi. 3 we may learn the clearness of Calvin's conviction that "Jehovah" is the right pronunciation: "It would be tedious to enumerate all the opinions on the name 'Jehovah.' It is certainly a foul superstition of the Jews that they dare not either pronounce or write it, but substitute 'Adonai' for it. It is no more probable that, as many teach, it is unpronounceable because it is not written according to grammatical rule. . . . Nor do I assent to the grammarians who will not have it pronounced because its inflection is irregular. . . ." How fixed the pronunciation "Jehovah" had become at Geneva by 1570 is revealed by an incident which occurred at the "Promotions" at the Academy that year. The Hebrew Professor, Corneille Bertram, having declared in response to an inquiry that "Adonai" not "Jehovah" was to be read, was rebuked therefor and compelled to apologize: "This M. de BÃ¨ze and all the Company found ill-said, and remonstrated with him for agitatingthis curious and idle question, and for affirming an opinion which very many great men of this age, of good knowledge, piety, and judgment, have held to be absurd, superstitious and merely Rabbinic" (Reg. Comp., 31 May, 1570, cited by Charles Borgeaud, "Histoire de l'Universite de Geneve," 1900, p. 228). - The history of the pronunciation "Jehovah" has not been adequately investigated. See, however, G. F. Moore, "Notes on the Name hyhy," A. J. T., 1908, xii. pp. 34-52; A. J. S. L., 1909, xxv. pp. 312-318; 1911, xxviii. pp. 56-62. It has become the scholastic tradition to say that it was introduced by Peter Galatin, confessor of Leo X, and first appears in his "De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis," ii. 10 (the first of two chapters so numbered) which was first published in 1516 (cf. Buhl's "Gesenius' Lexicon," ed. 13, 1899, p. 311, "about 1520 "; Brown, Driver, Briggs, "Hebrew and English Lexicon," 1906, p. 218a, 1520; Kittel, "Herzog," 3 viii. pp. 530-531, 1518; Davidson, Hastings' B. D., art. "God," 1520; A. J. Maclean, Hastings' One Vol. B. D., 1909, p. 300a, 1518; A. H. McNeile, "Westminster Commentary on Exodus," 1908, p. 23, 1518; Oxford English Dictionary, sub voc., 1516; and Moore, op. cit., 1518: cf. the very strong statement of Dillmann, "Alttest. Theologie," 1895, p. 215). But this tradition is simply reported from mouth to mouth, from Drusius' tract on the Tetragrammaton ("Critici Sacri," Amsterdam ed., vol. I. part ii. pp. 322 sq.: also in Reland, "Decas. Exercitationum ... de vera pronuntiatione nominis Jehova," 1707). Since Drusius no one seems to have made any independent effort to ascertain the facts, except F. BÃ¶ttcher, "AusfÃ¼hrliches Lehrbuch der HebrÃ¤ischen Sprache," i. 1866, Â§ 88 (p. 49, note 2). In copying Drusius the scholars have failed to note that he himself points out in a later note, inserted on p. 355, that the form "Jehovah" (Porchetus' form is Johova, not Jehova) occurs already in Porchetus, A.D. 1303: and it has been pointed out also that it occurs in Raimund Martini's "Pugio Fidei," which was written about 1270 (BÃ¶ttcher's suggestion that it may be an interpolation in the "Pugio Fidei" does not seem convincing, although Moore agrees with him here, op. cit.). It is not unlikely that Galatin, who draws heavily on Martini either directly or through Porchetti, may have derived it from him: and in any event he uses it not as a novel invention of his own, but as a well-known form. The origin and age of the pronunciation are accordingly yet to seek. The words of Dr. F. Chance (The AthenÃ¦um, No. 2119, June 6, 1868, p. 796) are here in point: "There is no doubt, I think, that the letters jhvh were from the very introduction of the Hebrew points pointed as they now are . . . and if so, surely anybody that read what he had before him must have read Jehovah. If the word were never so written before the sixteenth century, it was probably because up to that time Hebrew was studied by very few people, except byJews who could not write this holiest of God's names, and by Gentiles who, having learned their Hebrew from Jews, followed their example in substituting for it in reading and writing, Adonai, the Lord, etc." - No doubt the vogue of the form in the middle of the sixteenth century is due, not to its accidental occurrences in Galatin's book, but to the progress of Hebrew scholarship in sequence to the revival of letters, which looked upon the Jewish refusal to pronounce the name as mere superstition and attached an exaggerated importance to the Massoretic pointing. The debate about the proper pronunciation of the name is, in any event, a Humanistic phenomenon, and the form "Jehovah" is found in use everywhere where Hebrew scholarship penetrated, until it was corrected by this scholarship itself. Reuchlin indeed appears not to have used it; nor Melanchthon. But it is used by Luther (1526-1527 and 1543, though not in his Bible), and by Matthew Tyndale in his Pentateuch of 1530, and so prevailingly by Protestant scholars that Romish controversialists were tempted to represent it as an impiety (so Genebrardus) of the "Calviniani et Bezani" following the example of Sanctes Pagninus (who, according to MS. but not printed copies did indeed use it).

Opp. i. 58.

The most notable additions are the argument on u`po,stasij in Heb. i. 3 (Â§ 2) ; the definition of "person" (Â§ 6); and the whole polemic against Servetus and Gentilia (Â§Â§ 22 to end). These sections contain nine of the sixteen new columns.

Cf. KÃ¶stlin, Studien und Kritiken, 1868, p. 419, who speaks of "the circumspect, cautious moderation with which Calvin confines himself to the simplest principles of the Church conception and refuses to pass beyond the simple declarations of Scripture to a dogmatic formulation, much more to scholastic questions and answers, one step farther than seemed to him to be demanded for the protection of the Godhead of the Redeemer and of the Holy Spirit from the assaults of old and new enemies."

Cf. I. xv. 4, ad fin. Cf. Commentary on Genesis, i. 26, where, speaking of the human faculties, he remarks: "But Augustine, beyond all others, speculates with excessive refinement for the purpose of fabricating a trinity in man. For in laying hold of the three faculties of the soul enumerated by Aristotle, the intellect, the memory and the will, he afterwards out of one trinity derives many. If any reader, having leisure, wishes to enjoy such speculations, let him read the tenth and fourteenth books of The Trinity, also the eleventh book of The City of God. I acknowledge indeed that there is something in man which refers to the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit; and I have no difficulty in admitting the above distribution of the faculties, ... but a definition of the image of God ought to rest on a firmer basis than such subtleties." For the later Reformed attitude, see Heppe, "Die Dogmatik der ev.-ref. Kirche," 1861, pp. 85 sqq.

In ed. 1 (1536) he remarks (Opp. i. 59) that "that the Holy Spirit is 'another' than Christ is proved by more than ten passages from the Gospel of John (John xiv. xv.)."

This passage is already found in ed. 1 (1536) (Opp. i. 62): "The Persons are so distinguished by the Scriptures that they assign to the Father the principium agendi, and the fountain and origin of all things; to the Son the wisdom and consilium agendi; to the Spirit the virtus et efficacia actionis; whence also the Son is called the Word of God, not such as men speak or think, but eternal and unchangeable, as emerging in an ineffable manner from the Father."

Cf. L. L. Paine, "The Evolution of Trinitarianism," 1900, p. 95: "It is a remarkable fact that the Protestant Reformation only increased the prestige of Augustine. . . . The question of the Trinity was not a subject of controversy and the Augustinian form of trinitarian doctrine became a fixed tradition. The Nicene Creed, as interpreted by the Pseudo-Athanasian Creed, was accepted on all sides and passed into all the Protestant Confessions. It is to be noted that Calvin insisted on the use of the term 'person' as the only word that would unmask Sabellianism. He also held to numerical unity of essence. This would seem to indicate that Calvin believed that God wasone Being in three real persons, and, if so, he must have allowed that in God nature and person are not coincident. Yet he nowhere raises the question, and I am inclined to think he was not conscious of any departure from the views of Augustine." Calvin does, however, repeatedly raise the question whether "nature" and "person" are coincident and repeatedly decides that they are, in the sense that the person is the whole nature in a personal distinction. "The whole nature (tota natura)" is affirmed to be "in each hypostasis (in unaquaque hypostasi)," though there is present to each one its own propriety (I. xiii. 19). Hence there is no such thing as "a triplex God," as "the simple essence of God being divided among the three Persons" (xiii. 2); the essence is not multiplex, and the Son contains the whole of it in Himself (totam in se), etc. (ibid.).

It is the same thing that is meant by G. A. Meier, "Lehre von der TrinitÃ¤t, etc.," 1844, ii. pp. 58-59, where, after remarking that the Reformed were prone to emphasize especially the unity of God (which involves whatwe have called "equalization"), he proceeds: "External circumstances early led to the sharp emergence of this peculiarity. In the controversy with Gentilis, who maintained that the essential being of the Son was from the Father, Calvin was compelled to contend that in His Godhead and in His nature, the Son is of Himself, and without principium, and only in His personal subsistence, has His principium in the Father.1 Catholic theologians, especially Petau, have charged him with heresy for this, though he was only enunciating with increased sharpness the conviction of the Church, and rightly recalling that otherwise a plurality of Gods would be introduced.2" At the points indicated the following notes are added. "1. 'Since the name Jehovah is used in the passages cited above, it follows that the Son of God is with respect to His deity solely of Himself.' Val. Gentilis impietatum brevis explic. (Calv. Opp., Amstel. 1667, viii. p. 572). 'The essence of the Son has no principium, but the principium of the Person is God Himself' (loc. cit., p. 573). 'We concede that the Son takes origin from the Father, so far as He is Son, but it is an origin not of time, nor of essence.... but of order only' (l. c., p. 580)." "2. 'Unless moreover the Son is God along with the Father, a plurality of Gods will necessarily be brought in' (Ep. ad Fratres Polonos, p. 591). Accordingly Calvin called the "Deus de Deo" a "hard saying." Against him see Petau, De theol. dogm., II. lib. iii. c. 3, Â§Â§ 2, 3. On the other hand, Bellarmine acknowledges that in the maintenance of the auvtoqeo,thj of the Son there is no real departure from the doctrine of the Church."

Cf. "Adv. P. Caroli calumnias" (Opp. vii. 312): "Yet in that one essence of God we acknowledge the Father with His eternal Word and Spirit. In using this distinction, however, we do not imagine three Gods, as if the Father were some other thing than the Son, nor yet do we understand them to be naked epithets, by which God is variously designated from His actions; but, along with the ecclesiastical writers, we perceive in the simple unity of God these three hypostases, that is subsistences, which although they coexist in one essence are not to be confused with each other. Accordingly, though the Father is one God with His Word and Spirit, the Father is not the Word, nor the Word the Spirit."

"Expositio impietatis Valentini Gentilis," 1561 (Opp. ix. 374, 380).

Ibid., Preface, p. 368. Cf. Beza in his Life of Calvin, who speaks of Gentilis under the year 1558 and describes him as wishing to make the Father alone auvto,qeoj (Opp. xxi. 154). These four references (ix. 368, 374, 380; xxi. 154) are all that are given in the Index to the Strasburg ed. (xxii. 493 - this word does not occur in the Index of xxiii. sq.) of Calvin's works under the wordauvto,qeoj.

Opp. i. 58, at bottom of column.

May 14 and 31, 1537.

Opp. vii. 314: qui a se ipso semper habuit ut esset, et aliis subsistendi virtutem inspiravit. Cf. ix. 707; xb. 107, 121. Cf. Ruchat, "Histoire de la reformation de la Suisse," 1835 sq., v. pp. 27-28; BÃ¤hler, as cited, p. 78; and also Merle D'AubignÃ©, "History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin," E. T. vi. 1877, p. 316.

Ibid., p. 315.

Ibid., p. 322: "But the most atrocious calumny of all is where he impugns this statement: that Christ always had it of Himself that He should be; in which he has been followed by some others, men of no account, who, however, worry good men with their improbity; in the number of whom is a certain rogue (furcifer) very like himself (Caroli), who calls himself Cortesius."

References to Augustine and Cyril are given in the margin: and in 1543 the following is inserted here in the text: "'By these appellations which denote distinctions,' says Augustine, 'what is signified is a reciprocal relation; not the substance itself which is one."'

In 1543 there was added: "and therefore is one principium with the Father. The cause of this diversity, Augustine explains well and perspicuously in another place, speaking as follows: 'Christ with reference to Himself (ad se) is called God; with reference to the Father (ad patrem) is called Son.' And again 'The Father ad se is called God, ad filium is called Father. What is called Father ad filium is not the Son; what is called Son ad patrem is not the Father: what is called Father ad se, and Son ad se is the same God.' When therefore we speak simpliciter of the Son without respect to the Father, we well and properly assert Him to be a se, and therefore call Him the unique principium. When, however, we are noting the relation in which He stands to the Father, we properly make the Father the principium of the Son." To this there is further added in 1559: "To the explication of this matter the fifth book of Augustine's De Trinitate, is wholly devoted. It is far safer to rest in that relation which he teaches, than by more subtly penetrating into the divine mystery to wander through many vain speculations." And with these words the paragraph closes in 1559.

Opp., i. 490-491.

See Haag, "La France protestante," sub nom., "Chaponneau," ed. 2, iii. p. 1084: "Shortly afterwards Chaponneau married; he married a widow whose daughter soon became the wife in turn of the Pastor John Courtois, known by some disputes that he had with Calvin. Chaponneau no more than his son-in-law hesitated to enter the lists with Calvin. The quarrel had its rise from a question relating to the person of Jesus. . . ."

Opp. xi. 560, Letter 474.

Opp. xi. 652, Letter 521.

Opp. xii. 16, Letter 607; cf. the letter of Capunculus, Opp. xi. 781, Letter 590.

The "Defensio" was pseudonymously published under the name of Nicholas des Gallars, Calvin's secretary. BÃ¤hler, as cited, pp. 153 sq., judges it very unfavorably and sharply criticises the advantage taken of its pseudonymity and its inaccuracies, as well as its harshness of tone. "The number of Calvin's polemical writings," says he, "is great, and they are all masterworks of their order. No other, however, surpasses the Defensio in harshness and bitterness. It is all in all, scarcely a happy creation of Calvin's.... From the standpoint of literary history the Defensio indisputably deserves unrestricted praise. The elegant, crisp style, the skill with which the author not only morally annihilates his opponent, but puts upon him the stamp of an impertinent person not to be taken seriously, and permeates all with the most sovereign scorn, makes the reading of this book, now nearly four hundred years old, an aesthetic enjoyment, which obscures the protest of righteous indignation at the startling injustices and glaring untruths which the author has permitted himself against Caroli. No doubt Calvin's conduct, if it cannot be excused, may yet to a certain degree be understood, when we reflect that Caroli, through almost ten years, had brought to the Reformer of Geneva incessant annoyances and the most bitter mortification, and by his accusations had imperilled his life-work as perhaps no other antagonist had been able to do" (p. 159). Compare the more measured censure of A. Lang ("Johannes Calvin," 1909, p. 42) of the harshness of tone and opprobrious language used towards Caroli, in contrast with the high praise given the three Reformers - "when, although it was questionless written by Calvin himself, it was published in the name of his amanuensis, Nicholas des Gallars."

Opp. vii. 322.

Opp. vii. 323.

Opp. vii. 323-324.

Opp. vii. 314.

Opp. ii. 110; "Institutes," 1559, I. xiii. 23: nam quum ubique ponatur nomen Iehovae, sequitur deitatis respectu ex se ipso esse.

P. 113: I. xiii. 25.

Cf. I. xiii. 2: The Son contains in Himself the whole essence of God: not a part of it only, nor by deflection only, but in integra perfectione.

Already in the first edition of the "Institutes" this phraseology is fixed; Opp. i. 64: "By which we confess that we believe in Jesus Christ, who, we are convinced, is the unique Son of God the Father, not like believers by adoption and grace only, but naturally as begotten from eternity by the Father." So p. 62: "The Word of the Father - not such as men speak or think, but eternal and unchangeable, as emerging in an ineffable manner from the Father."

Cf. De Moor, "In Marckii Compend.," i. 1761, p. 775: "The Nicene fathers had reference to nothing but the personal order of subsistence when they said the Son is 'God of God, Light of Light'; while, considered absolutely and essentially, the Son is the same God with the Father." This is expressed by Dr. Shedd with his wonted clearness and emphasis as follows ("A History of Christian Doctrine," 1873, i. pp. 339 sq.): "The Nicene Trinitarians rigorously confined the ideas of 'Sonship' and 'generation' to the hypostatical character. It is not the essence of the Deity that is generated, but a distinction in that essence. And, in like manner, the term 'procession' applied to the Holy Spirit pertains exclusively to the third hypostasis, and has no application to the substance of the Godhead. The term 'begotten' in the Nicene trinitarianism is descriptive only of that which is peculiar to the second Person, and confined to Him. The Son is generated with respect only to His Sonship, or, so to speak, His individuality (ivdio,thj), but is not generated with respect to His essence or nature.... The same mutatis mutandis is true of the term 'procession.' . . . Thus, from first to last, in the Nicene construction of the doctrine of the Trinity, the terms 'beget,' 'begotten,' and 'proceed,' are confined to the hypostatical distinctions, and have no legitimate or technical meaning, when applied to the Trinity as a whole, or, in other words, to the Essence in distinction from the hypostasis." . . . Calvin was fully entitled to avail himself of this distinction, as he fully did so.

His later Trinitarian controversies with Gentilis and his companions brought out many strong assertions precisely in point. For example, in the discussion in the "Institutes" (I. xiii. 23 sq.), he defines the precise thing he wishes to refute as the representation of the Father as "the sole essentiator" who "in forming the Son and the Spirit has transfused His own deity into them" (Â§ 23); to whom therefore alone the "essence of God belongs" and to whom as "essentiator" the Son and Spirit owe their essence. In opposition to this he declares that "although we confess that in point of order and degree the principium divinitatis is in the Father, we nevertheless pronounce it a detestable figment that the essence is the property of the Father alone, as if He were the deificator of the Son; because in this way either the essence would be multiplex or the Son would be called God only in a titular andimaginary sense. If they allow that the Son is God but second from the Father, then the essence will be in Him genita et formata, which is in the Father ingenita et informis" (Â§24, near end). "we teach from the Scriptures," he explains (Â§ 25, beginning) "that there is one God in point of essence (essentialiter), and therefore the essence of both Son and Spirit is ingenita. But inasmuch as the Father is first in order and has begotten from Himself (genuit ex se) His own wisdom, He is rightly considered, as I have just said, the principium et fons totius divinitatis. Thus God indefinitely is ingentitus; and the Father with regard to His Person also is ingenitus." Calvin's weapon against the tritheists, therefore, was precisely that the essence of God, whether in the first, second or third Person, is not generated: that it is only the Person which is generated, and that, strictly speaking, only the Person of the Son - the Person of the Father being ingenerate, and it being more proper to speak of the Person of the Spirit as "proceeding." This is merely, however, the traditional representation, utilized by Calvin, not a new view of his own.

Cf. Sheldon, "History of Christian Doctrine," 1886, i. p. 202: "Like Origen, the Nicene fathers seem to have conceived of the generation, not as something accomplished once for all, but as something parallel with the eternal life of the Son, ever complete and ever continued." Also, Shedd, "A History of Christian Doctrine," i. 1864, p. 317: "Eternal generation is an immanent perpetual activity in an ever existing essence."

Of this Scholten, "De Leer der Hervormde Kerk," ed. 4, ii. p. 237 (cf. i. p. 24, ii. p. 229) makes great capital. In the middle edd. of the "Institutes," i. 483, however, Calvin in the very act of discarding these texts as proof asserts his firm belief in the fact of the Divine Sonship of our Lord, as is immediately to be shown. On Calvin's clear-sightedness and critical honesty in dealing with such texts Baumgartner has some good remarks ("Calvin HÃ©braÃ¯sant," 1889, pp. 37, 38). He illustrates the scandal it created at the time among those accustomed to rely on these texts by citing Aegidius Hunnius' book with the portentous title: Calvinus judaizans, hoc est: Judaicae glossae et corruptelae quibus Johannes Calvinus illustrissima Scripturae sacrae loca et testimonia de gloriosa trinitate, deitate Christi et Spiritus Sancti, cumprimis autem vaticinia prophetarum de adventu Messiae, nativitate ejus passione et resurrectione, ascensione in coelos et sessione ad dextram Dei, detestandum in modum corrumpere non exhorruit. Addita est corruptelarum confutatio (Wittemberg: 1593).

Middle edd. of "Institutes," Opp. i. 483.

Opp. vii. 315, where it is explicitly declared that he had no intention of derogating from the symbol: cf. p. 316.

Preface to the "Expositio impietatis Valen. Gentilis," 1561 (Opp. ix. 368): "But the words of the Council of Nice run: Deum esse de Deo. A hard saying (dura locutio), I confess; but for removing its ambiguity no one can be a more suitable interpreter than Athanasius, who dictated it. And certainly the design of the fathers was none other than to maintain the origin which the Son draws from the Father in respect of Person, without in any way opposing the sameness of the essence and deity in the two, so that as to essence the Word is God absque principio, while in Person the Son has His principium from the Father." Petavius' criticism is therefore wide of the mark when ("De Trinitate," III. iii. 2, ed. Paris, 1865, pt. ii. p. 523; cf. also Bellarmine, "De Christo," Preface of his "Opera," i. p. 244) he declares that Calvin "speaks rashly and altogether untheologically (temere et prorus avqeologh,twj) when he calls this locution 'hard,' because he supposes that Christ, as He is God is a se ipso, i.e., auvto,qeoj." But Calvin (who certainly does believe that Christ is self-existent God and therefore may properly be called auvto,qeoj), does not find the locution Deus de (or ex) Deo "hard" (dura) on that account: he thoroughly believes both in the qeo,j evk qeou/ of the Creed and in the auvtoqeo,thj of Christ, and found no difficulty whatever in harmonizing them. When he pronounces this locution "harsh" his mind is on the possibility of its misuse by the Antitrinitarians as if it meant that the Son was made God by the Father. When, therefore, Petavius adds (Â§ 3, p. 524): "So then, the locution, God is from God, is not only true but useful (proba) and consentaneous to Christian teaching; not as the Autotheani and Calvinists ignorantly babble, hard" - he says no more for the substance of it than Calvin had himself said in the very passage in which he called the locution "harsh," - that is to say, that it expresses an important truth, this, to wit, that the Son draws His origin, with respect to His Person, from the Father. No doubtCalvin may also suggest that there might wisely have been chosen a less ambiguous way of saying this than the "harsh" locution Deus de Deo - which certainly is capable of being misunderstood as teaching that the Son owes His divinity to the Father - as Gentilis taught. See below, note 94.

"Systematic Theology," i. 1874, pp. 462 sq. On pp. 466, 467 he gives a very clear statement of Calvin's position, of which he expresses full approval.

"Diatribe de Christo auvtoqew|/," printed by Voetius, in "Selectae Disputationes Theologicae," Part i. 1648, p. 445: calumniandi potius libidine quam erroris cum Arianis societate.

We are quoting from Bellarmine, "De Christo," II. cap. xix. ad init. (his "Opera," i. p. 333). Cf. the opening words of Petavius' discussion, "DeTrinitate," VI. xi. 5 (his "Opera," iii. p. 251): "With respect to more recent writers, there exists a far from small altercation of the Catholics with heretics, especially with Calvin, Beza and their crew (asseclis). For Genebrardus in the first book of his "De Trinitate" very sharply upbraids (insectatur) them and gives them the name autotheanites, because they say the Son has His divinity and essence of Himself; an error mentioned also by William Lindanus."

Voetius, "Dispt.," i. pp. 453, 454, gives an account of the opponents of the Reformed ascription of auvtoqeo,thj to Christ. There are three classes: Romanists, Lutherans, and Arminians, to which he adds as fourth and fifth classes Peter Caroli, and the Antitrinitarians (Crell and Schlichting). The Romanists he subdivides into two classes, those who find that Calvin taught heresy and those who object to his language only. The latter sub-class includes only Bellarmine and Gregory of Valentia. Under the former, however, he enumerates a long list of writers with exact references. Cf. also De Moor, "In Marck. Comp.," i. 1761, pp. 773-774 (V. x.).

That is to say, the phrase "God of God" is interpreted to mean "God the Son, of God the Father" - God in the first instance meaning (not the essence but) the Person of the Son, and in the second instance (not the essence but) the Person of the Father. Only on this supposition, as Gregory allows, can the phrase "God of God" be applied to Christ in exactness of speech. That is to say, Gregory finds the phrase as inexact as Calvin does when he calls it a dura locutio.

We repeat the passage from Gomarus' citation in Voetius' "Disputat.," i. 1648, p. 448. Gomarus cites Gregory, "Ad summae Thomae," part i. disp. 2, quaest. 1, punct. 1, p. 718. The passage is found also, however, in Gregory's treatise "De Trinitate," ii. 1 (to which Voetius refers us, p. 454, adding appropriate references also to i. 22 and ii. 17). See Gregorii de Valentia ". . . de rebus fidei hoc tempore controversis Libri," Paris, 1610, p. 205, first column, B and C.

Op. cit., p. 334a.

Op. cit., p. 252a.

It is interesting to observe how constantly the argument hangs formally on the suppressed premise of the Nicene doctrine of generation.Thus Bellarmine argues (p. 334b) that "those who assert that the Son has His essense a se ipso err because they are compelled either (1) to make the Son ingenerate and the same person with the Father, or (2) to multiply the essences, or at least (3) to distinguish the essence from the person realiter and so introduce a quaternity." As Calvin does none of these things, he is pronounced orthodox in meaning. But the point now to be illustrated lies in the assumption under (1) that to make the Son ingenerate is to make Him the same person with the Father. It does not occur to Bellarmine as possible that one should deny the Son to be generated and yet not make Him the same person with the Father, while holding free from (2) and (3). Similarly, when replying to Danaeus, who asks: "If He is not God a se, how is He God?" Petavius (p. 256) declares that so to speak is perfidious and ignorant - "for," says he, "it either robs the Son of His deity or denies that He is God begotten of the Father." The one seems to him as intolerable as the other. Neither Bellarmine nor Petavius seems fairly to have faced the possibility of a doctrine of a true Trinity of Persons in one essence which did not hang on the doctrine of "eternal generation," which seemed to them, thus, equipollent with the doctrine of the Trinity.

It is to be hoped that modern Lutherans in general will subscribe the excellent remarks of Prof. Milton Valentine, "Christian Theology," 1906, i. 309: "Emphasis must . . . be laid on the attribute of aseity as belonging to the whole Godhead, to the divine Being as such. . . . It cannot therefore be allowable to think of God as originating the Trinality of the Godhead, as though there was a time when He was not Tripersonal in His Being. . . ." Accordingly he ascribes self-existence to the Son (pp. 321-322). A. Ritschl, "Justification and Reconciliation," iii. E. T. 1900, p. 470, represents " theological tradition," which at least includes Lutheran tradition, as "expressly excluding aseity" in its representations of the Deity of Christ.

Ed. Cotta, i. Tubingen, 1762, pp, 291-292 (Loc. IV. pars ii. cap. v. Â§ 179).

It must not be supposed, however, that Ursinus separated himself from Calvin as to the self-existence of the Son as He is God: his language is: "the Son is begotten of the Father, of the essence of the Father, but the essence of the Son is not begotten, but, existent of itself (a se ipsa existens), is communicated to the Son at His begetting (nascenti) by (a) the Father." "And what is said concerning the generation of the Son," he adds, "is to be understood also of the procession of the Spirit" ("Loci," p. 542).

iii. Tubingen, 1764, p. 395 (Locus IV. cap. v. Â§ 67).

Cf. H. Bavinck, "Geref. Dogmatiek," ed. 1, ii. p. 263. Remarking that the tendency which finds its typical form in Arianism, has manifested itself in various forms in the Church for centuries: "First of all in the form of Subordinationism: the Son is to be sure eternal, generated out of the essence of the Father, no creature, and not made of nothing; but He is nevertheless inferior to or subordinated to the Father. The Father alone is o` qeo,j( phgh, qeo,thtoj, the Son isqeo,j, receives His nature by communication from the Father. This was the teaching of Justin, Tertullian, Clement, Origen, etc., also of the Semi-Arians, Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia, who placed the Son evkto.j tou/ patro,j and declared Him o`moioou,siouj with the Father; and later of the Remonstrants (Conf. Art. 3; Arminus Op. theol. 1629, pp. 232 sq.; Episcopius, Instit. theol. IV. sect. ii. c. 32; Limborch, Theol. Christ. II. c. xvii. Â§25), of the Supranaturalists (Bretschneider, Dogm., i9 pp. 602 sq.; Knapp, Glaubenslehre, i. p. 260; Muntinghe, Theol. Christ. pars theor. Â§ 134 sq., etc.), and of very many theologians of recent times (Frank, Syst. d. chr. Wahr., i. pp. 207 sq.; Beck, Chr. Gl. ii. pp. 123 sq.; Twesten, ii. p. 254; Kahnis, i. pp. 353, 398; van Oosterzee, ii. Â§ 52; Doedes, Ned. Gel. 71 sq.)." Cf. also H. C. Sheldon, "History of Christian Doctrine," ii. 1886, p. 97: "The Arminians, while they held to the doctrine of three Divine Persons in the Godhead, diverged from the current teaching on the subject by an express emphasis upon the subordination of the Son and the Spirit. Arminius was not specially related to this development, and contented himself with denying, in opposition to Calvin's phraseology, the propriety of attributing self-existence to the Son. But Episcopius, Curcellaeus, and Limborch were very pronounced in the opinion that a certain preeminence must be assigned to the Father over the Son and the Spirit."

"Declaratio sententiae suae ad ordines Holl. et Westfr.," in "Opera Theol.," 1635, pp. 100-101. See E. T. "Works," translated by James Nichols, London, i. 1825, pp. 627-631.

"Resp, ad xxxi. Articulos," in "Opera," p. 131 (E. T. "Works," ii. 1828, pp. 29-32).

Ibid., p. 132.

Cf. Episcopius' theologial works, printed at Amsterdam, 1650-1665; espec. his "Instit. Theolog.," lib. iv. Â§ 11, de Deo, capp. 32-36. But we cite from Triglandius.

Triglandius, "Antapologia," cap. v. pp. 77 sq.

Cf. Triglandius, pp. 579, 580.

London, 1713, pp. 290 sq.

Daniel Zwicker. See "Allgem. deuteche Biog.," xlv. 1900, p. 533.

Nelson, as cited, p. 301.

"Defence," Proem., Â§5. Ralph Cudworth was at the moment teaching a doctrine of the Trinity indistinguishable from that of Episcopius and his followers.

Nelson, p. 315, Bull, Sect. iv. cap. i. Â§ 1 (E. T. Oxford, 1852, p. 557, in the "Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology").

Nelson, p. 287: Bull, Proem, Â§ 8.

"Defence of the Nicene Faith," IV. i. 7 sq.

Ibid., Â§ 8.

Nelson, pp. 319 sq.

"Tract. de uno Deo Patre," Book I. sect. ii. cap. 2.

"Contra Meisnerum."

"On the Trinity," 1712, Part ii. Â§ 14, p. 276. Cf. ii. Â§ 5. An interesting account of Clarke may be found in Nelson, as cited, pp. 322 sq.

"Vindication," etc., Q. xiii. (Cambridge, 1721, p. 207).

"Second Defense," Q. iii. (London, 1723, p. 172).

Ibid.

De Moor, "In Marck. Compend.," i. 1761, p. 772, seems to prefer the word "independence" for the expression of the aseity of God and of the Son as God: "By parity of reasoning, it is certain that if the Son be true God, He is independent God; for independence is easily first among the attributes of God, and is inseparable from the essence of God. . . . And this being true, the titleauvto,qeoj or auvtoqeo,j (for the theologians accent it differently) cannot be denied to the Son, nor to the Spirit, as if this title were suitable to the Father only." . . . "By independence," he continues, "God is, as we have seen at chap. iv. Â§ 20, a se in the negative sense, not in the sense of a proper causality of Himself, and it is this that the titleauvtoqeo,j expresses. 1. If then the Son is the supreme and independent God He isauvtoqeo,j. 2. And since the reality of the Divine essence cannot exist without independence, the Son would not be true God unless He was at the same timeauvtoqeo,j. 3. If the Father be acknowledged to beauvtoqeo,j, the Son must also be such, unless the Son be denied to be the same God with the Father and a plurality of Gods is erected, a numerical plurality of divine essences. For the same God and the same Divine essence cannot at the same time be a se ipso and not a se ipso. The Son is not, of course, auvtoui`o,j, Son a se ipso; but He certainly isauvtoqeo,j, God a se ipso. He is of the Father relatively to His being Son, but He is a se considered absolutely as He is God: as He has the Divine essence existing a se, and not divided or produced by another essence; but not as if having that essence a se ipso. He is 'God a se'; not, 'He is a se, God,' or, what is the same thing, He is not Son a se."

The debate on theauvtoqeo,thj of the Son caused the theologians to enter into long disquisitions on the force ofauvto,j in composition and the proper sense or senses ofauvto,qeoj. Voetius, for example (pp. 449-451) argues thatauvto,j in composition has five senses. It either (1) emphasises singularity; or (2) distinguishes as kat v evxoch,n; or (3) means a se; or (4) per se, intrinsically, essentially; or (5) per se and operating with a proper and sufficient principialforce, producing somewhat. Accordingly it is improper to assume that theologians always mean the third sense, when they employ the term auvto,qeoj. Any one of five senses may be intended: (1) Godkat v ejxoch,n; (2) The only, sole God; (3) God essentially, not by participation, per se and not per accidens, in se and essentially, not in some external respect or denomination; (4) God a se and not ab alio, a;narcoj, that is to say, kai. avnai,tioj; (5) God, the primus agens, primus motor, dependent on none, but the first cause.

Voetius, "Diap.," i. 1648, p. 460, gives a characteristic list of Reformed doctors who previous to himself (1648) had taught that Christ is properly to be called auvto,qeoj- lest anyone should think that theauvtoqeo,thj of Christ had been proclaimed only by one here and there, zealous for their own notion or loving novelty, rather than by all in the necessary defense of the common truth. His list includes, besides Calvin, Beza, Simler, the whole mass of representative Reformed teachers: Danaeus, Perkins, Keckermann, Trelcatius, Tilenus, Polanus, Wollebius, Scalcobrigius, Altingius, Grynaeus, Schriverius, Zanchius, Chamierus, Zadeel, Lectius, Pareus, Mortonus, Whittaker, Junius, Vorstius, Amesius, Rivetus. Heppe, "Dogmat. d. ev: ref. Kirche," 1861, p. 84, records: "And moreover the Son is as such not created or made by God, or adopted out of favor or on account of desert, but He is according to His nature God the Son, and is therefore like the Father and the Holy Spirit veritablyauvtoqeo,j."

"Axiomat. de Trinitate," Axiom 14.

"Epist. ad Polon." or " Lib. de Filio Dei."

Op. cit., p. 334b.

Cf. the remark of De Moor, "In Marck. Compend.," i. 1761, p. 775: "Distinctions in mode of subsistence, and the personal order which flows from this, cannot affect the equality of essence; and inferiority and inequality cannot consist with numerical oneness of essence."

Cf. Voetius, as cited, p. 465: "Trelcatius, Loc. Com., and Keckermann, Syst. Theol., seem to deny the communication of the essence: and Maccovius, in his Metaphysica, c. 8, follows them, when, against Arminius, he determines that not the essence, but the personality, is communicated from the Father." "Strictly speaking, however, we must say," adds Voetius, "that the Person is begotten by the communication of the essence: though these authors are to be excused because they took the word 'communication' too physically and had Valentinus Gentilis in view." Voetius' own view is expressed in the "maxims" (p. 461) that: "The essence in divinis neither begets nor is begotten, but the person of the Father begets in, de and ex His essence which is the same with the essence of the Son": "the essence may therefore be said to be communicated, given, by the Father, and received, and had, by the Son from that communication or gift. Briefly, the Person of the Father begets the Person of the Son by the communication of the essence."

"Systema SS. Theologiae," Hanoviae, 1615, p. 54.

This position was taken by Herman Alexander RoÃ«ll, professor at Franeker, at the end of the seventeenth century. The idea of "eternal generation" he held to be wholly unscriptural and at war with the perfect nature of God -whether as Father or as Son. The designation of the Second Person of the Trinity as Son he at first found to rest on His consubstantiality with the Father ("By the words 'Son' and 'Generation' is signified, in emphasis, that the Second Person has the same essence and nature with the First, and has coexisted with Him from eternity," - "De Generatione Filii," 1689, p. 5), but afterwards to be expressive rather of His divine mission, and the clear relation existing between God the Sender and God the Sent. A good account is given of his views by Ypeij and Dermout, "Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Hervormde Kerk," ii. 1822, pp. 544 sq. The idea of Herman Muntinghe, professor at Hardewijk and later at Groningen, at the end of the next century (see Ypeij and Dermout, iv. 1827, pp. 271 sq.) was similar. Much the same notions were introduced into the Congregational churches of New England by Nathaniel Emmons. "We feel constrained to reject the eternal generation of the Son, and the eternal procession of the Holy Ghost, as such mysteries as cannot be distinguished from real absurdities, and as such doctrines as strike at the foundation of the true doctrine of three equally divine persons in one God" ("Works," iv. 1842, p. 114). "The Scripture teaches us that each of the divine persons takes His peculiar name from the peculiar office which He sustain's in the economy of redemption.... The first person assumes the name of Father, because He is by office the Creator or Author of all things, and especially of the human nature of Christ. The second person assumes the name of Son and Word, by virtue of His incarnation and mediatorial conduct. ... The third person in the Trinity is called the Holy Ghost on account of His peculiar office as Sanctifier" (p. 109). This view became thereafter the common view among the New England churches, finding its complete expression in Moses Stuart (" Letters on the Eternal Generation of the Son," 1822) and Horace Bushnell ("God in Christ," 1849). Cf. George P. Fisher, "Discussions in History and Theology," 1880, p. 273: "Hopkins was the last to hold to the Nicene doctrine of the primacy of the Father and the eternal Sonship of Christ. The whole philosophy of the Trinity, as that doctrine was conceived by its great defenders in the age of Athanasius, when the doctrine was formulated, had been set aside. It was even derided; and this chiefly for the reason that it was not studied. Professor Stuart had no sympathy with or just appreciation of the Nicene doctrine of the generation of the Son." It should be noted, however, that the "eternal primacy" of the Father and the "eternal generation" of the Son do not necessarily go together. Neither RoÃ«ll norEmmons, for example, while decidedly denying the "eternal generation" of the Son, doubted that the Father is first in the Trinity, not only in office but also in order - as Emmons (p. 137) expresses it, is "the head of the sacred Trinity." They do deny, however, that the Father is superior to the Son in nature; and they take their starting point from the absolute deity of the Son, in the interests of which it is largely that they deny the doctrine of " eternal generation." When Dr. Fisher (p. 273) says, "The eternal fatherhood of God, the precedence of the Father, is as much a part of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity as is the divinity of the Son," by the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity he means the doctrine as it was formulated by "the Nicene Fathers who framed the orthodox creed." The rejoinder lies ready at hand that the Nicene Fathers overdid the matter from the point of view of "the precedence of the Father," and left the way open for doing less than justice to "the divinity of the Son" - which therefore requires reassertion and better guarding. In point of fact, it is around these two foci - "the precedence of the Father," which in its exaggeration becomes Arianism, and "the divinity of the Son," which in its exaggeration becomes Sabellianism - that the Trinitarian constructions have revolved. The Trinitarian problem is, to find a mode of statement that does full justice to both. To do this it must of course be carefully ascertained from Scripture in what sense "the Father" has "precedence" of the Son; and in what sense the Son is God. RoÃ«ll and Emmons deny that the Scriptures accord such "precedence" to the Father as is expressed by the phrase "God of God": they affirm that the Scriptures ascribe absolute deity to the Son. On the New England doctrine of the Trinity from Emmons down see L. L. Paine, "The Evolution of Trinitarianism," 1900, pp. 104 sq.

Cf. the striking passage, already alluded to in part, which is found in the middle editions of the "Institutes," at the opening of the discussion (Opp. i. 482-483): "But since everything follows from the proof of the divinity [of the Son], we shall lay our chief stress on the assertion of that. The Ancients, whose idea was that the Son existed (exstitisse) by eternal generation from the Father, endeavored to prove it by the testimony of Isaiah (Is. liii. 8), 'Who shall declare His generation?' But it is clear that they were under an illusionin citing this text. For the prophet does not speak there of how the Father generated the Son but by how numerous a posterity His kingdom should be increased (so 1539: but 1550 sq.: "but through how long a period His kingdom should endure "]. Neither is there much force in what they take from the Psalms: 'from the womb before the morning star have I begotten Thee'; for that version is by no means consonant with the Hebrew, which runs thus (Ps. Exodus 3): 'From the womb of the morning is to thee the dew of thy nativity.' The argument, then, which seems to have special plausibility, is taken from the words of the Apostle in which it is taught that the worlds were made by the Son; for unless there had already been a Son, His power could not have been put forth. But little weight can attach to this argument either, as appears from similar formulas. For none of us would be affected if anybody sought to take the word 'Christ' back to that time, in which Paul says that 'Christ' was tempted by the Jews (I Cor. x. 9) [where Calvin evidently reads "Christ"]. For its particular application belongs properly to the humanity [of Christ]. Similarly, because it is said (Heb. xiii. 8) that 'Jesus Christ' was yesterday, is to-day, and shall be forever, if anybody should contend that the name of 'Christ' belonged to Him always, he has accomplished nothing. What do we do but expose the holy and orthodox doctrines of religion to the cavils of heretics, when we contort texts after this fashion, which, when taken in their proper sense, serve our cause either not at all or very little? To me, however, this one argument is worth a thousand for confirming my faith in the eternity of the Son of God. For it is certain that God is not a Father to men, except through the intercession of that only begotten Son, who alone rightly vindicates this prerogative to Himself, and by whose favor it comes to us. But God always wished to be worshipped by His people under the name of Father; from which it follows that already then [i.e., semper] He was Son, through whom that relationship is established." Similarly in his Commentaries he explains Micah v. 1, 2 of the eternal decree of God, not of the eternity of the generation of Christ: and on Ps. ii. 7 prefers to follow Paul (Acts xiii. 33) to referring it to the eternal generation of Christ by "subtly philosophizing on the word 'to-day.'" In the New Testament he follows the rule (with few exceptions) "that the writers of the New Testament, and especially Jesus Himself, speak of Christ not as the absolute Logos but as the God-man.... Especially in the Gospel of John, the declarations of Jesus concerning Himself are expounded not out of an absolute logos-consciousness but out of the theanthropic consciousness of Jesus, so that after John i. 14 there is no further reference to the Logos a;sarkoj or to the nuda divinitas Christi except only in Jno. viii. 58 and xvii. 5 " (Scholten, "De Leer der Hervormde Kerk," ed. 4, ii. p. 231; cf. p. 229 and i. p. 24). Similarly of the Holy Spirit (p. 236) he refuses to get proof for His trinitarian relation either from Jno. xiv. 16 or I Cor. ii. 10.

As, for example, that the terms "Son," "Spirit" are not expressiveof "derivation" (by "generation" or "spiration") but just of "consubstantiality." The Son is the repetition of the Father; the Spirit is the expression of God. So RoÃ«ll in his first view; and even Stuart remarks, justly: "The Hebrew idiom calls him the son of any person or thing, who exhibits a resemblance in disposition or character" (op. cit., p. 105). More broadly, W. Robertson Smith ("The O. T. in the Jewish Church," ed. 1, p. 427) remarks: "Among all Semites membership in a guild is figured as sonship." That is to say, in the Semitic view, sonship denotes broadly oneness of kind, class; more specifically likeness; at the height of its meaning, consubstantiality; and does not suggest derivation. As the son of a man is a man, the Son of God is God. It is the Indo-European consciousness which imparts to the terms Son, Spirit the idea of derivation.

When during the first weeks of its sessions, the Westminster Assembly was engaged on the revision of the Thirty-nine Articles, and Article viii. on the Three Creeds came up for discussion, objection was made to the evk qeou/ clauses. It does not appear that there was any pleading for the subordinationist position: the advocates for retaining the Creeds rather expended their strength in voiding the credal statement of any subordinationist implications. Thus Dr. Featley's reply to the current objection was that "although Christ is God of God, it doth not therefore follow that the deity of the Son is from the deity of the Father, . . . as it does not follow quia Deus passus est ergo Deitas passa est, or quia Maria mater Dei, ergo est Maria mater deitatis" (see his speech printed in his "Dippers Dipt," London, 1651, pp. 187-189). Were this taken literally it would explain the Sonship of our Lord wholly from the side of His humiliation and identify His filiation with the incarnation.

Op. cit., p. 335.

Op. cit., p. 252.

We suppose Arminius scarcely intended to repeat Bellarmine's and Petavius' accusation of confusion between a se and ad se when (" Works," E. T. ii. 1828, p. 32) he remarks on the modified manner in whichauvtoqeo,j is used when applied to Christ, and adds: "But their explanation does not agree with the phraseology they employ. For this reason Beza excuses Calvin, and openly confesses 'that he had not with sufficient strictness observed the difference between these particles a se and per se.'" The remark of Beza is referred to his "Praef. in Dialog. Athanasii." We have not access to Beza's edition of this Pseudo-Athanasian tractate and cannot assure ourselves of his meaning. We assume that he was not criticizing Calvin's philological equipment but his doctrinal construction; and we suspect that what he says is that Calvin in insisting that Christ is God a se ipso was not sufficiently carefully disguishing between saying He is God per se - in and of Himself, and that He is God a se - from Himself. In that likely case Beza is only explaining the differences between himself and Calvin which are expressed in Calvin's denial that the Son has His essence from the Father and Beza's affirmation that He has His essence from the Father. Calvin here, he says, is not sufficiently considering the difference between being God a se and being God per se. In this case Beza's distinction is much like Waterland's between self-existent and necessarily-existent God and makesauvtoqeo,thj mean merely ingenerateness; and we note that if our conjecture is right, there is involved a testimony from Beza that Calvin's real thought of the Trinity denied the communication of essence from Father to Son. In his letter to Prince Radziwil on "The Unity of the Divine Essence and the three Persons subsisting in it," against the Polish Unitarians, Beza declares ("Tractat. Theolog.," 1582, i. p. 647) that it is inept to say that "the Father alone isauvto,qeoj, that is, as they interpret it, has His Being a se ipso and therefore can be called God," - and gives his reason: "For to be a se and ab alio, do not constitute different kinds of nature; and therefore the Father cannot on that ground be said to be the sole and unique God, nor ought He to be, but rather the sole and unique Father, as the Son is sole and unique because 'only-begotten.'" Can we really say that "to be a se and ab alio do not constitute different kinds of nature (aliam naturae speciem)? If the contrast is that of self-existing and derived Being it can scarcely be said. But if the contrast is between ingenerate and generate Being - it is true enough. Every father and son are consubstantial, and the very point of the usage of Father and Son in this connection seems to be to assert their consubstantiality. Beza has this latter contrast in view and only means to say that the ascription ofauvtoqeo,thj to the Son is in no way interfered with by the fact that He is "generate" - for the generate and the generator are ever the same in kind.

"Institutes," I. xiii. 19.

Opp. xi. 653.

÷ 05 Calvin's Doctrine of the Creation1

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

In developing his system, Calvin proceeds at once from the doctrine of God to an exposition of His works of creation and providence (I. xiv.-xv. and xvi.-xviii.). That he passes over the divine Purpose or Decree at this point, though it would logically claim attention before its execution in creation and providence, is only another indication of the intensely practical spirit of Calvin and the simplicity of his method in this work. He carries his readers at once over from what God is to what God does, reserving the abstruser discussions of the relation of His will to occurrences for a later point in the treatise, when the reader's mind, by a contemplation of the divine works, will be better prepared to read off the underlying purpose from the actual event. The practical end which has determined this sequence of topics governs also the manner in which the subject of creation, now taken up (chaps. xiv.-xv.), is dealt with. There is no discussion of it from a formal point of view: the treatment is wholly material and is devoted rather to the nature of the created universe than to the mode of the Divine activity in creating it. Even in dealing with the created universe, there is no attempt at completeness of treatment. The spiritual universe is permitted to absorb the attention; and what is said about the lower creation is reduced to a mere hint or two introduced chiefly, it appears, to recommend the contemplation of it as a means of quickening in the heart a sense of God's greatness and goodness (xiv. Â§Â§ 20-22).

It is quite obvious, in fact, from the beginning, that Calvin's mind is set in this whole discussion of creation primarily on expounding the nature of man as a creature of God; and all else that he incorporates into it is subsidiary to this. He is writing for men and bends all he is writing to what he conceives to be their practical interests. He does not reach the actual discussion of man as creature, to be sure (chap. xv.), until after he has interposed a long exposition of the nature of angels and demons (xiv. 3-12, and 13-19). But this whole exposition is cast in a form which shows that angels and demons are interesting to Calvin only because of the high estimate he places upon the topic for the practical life of man; and it is introduced by a remark which betrays that his thought was already on man as the real subject of his exposition and all he had to say about other spiritual creatures was conceived as only preliminary to that more direct object of interest. "But before I begin to speak more fully concerning the nature of man," he says quite gratuitously at the opening of the discussion (xiv. 3, ad init.), "something should be inserted (inserere) about angels." What he actually says about angels, good and bad, in the amount of space occupied by it, is more than what he says about man; but it stood before his mind, we observe, as only "something," and as something, be it noted, "inserted," before the real subject of his discourse was reached. In his own consciousness what Calvin undertakes in these chapters is to make man aware of his own nature as a creature of God, and to place him as a creature of God in his environment, the most important elements of which he conceives to be the rest of the intelligent creation.

It is not to be inferred, of course, from the lightness with which Calvin passes over the doctrine of creation itself in this discussion that he took little interest in it or deemed it a matter of no great significance. That he does not dwell more fully on it is due, as we have said, to the practical nature of his undertaking, and was rendered possible by the circumstance that this doctrine was not in dispute.2 All men in the circles which he was addressing were of one mind on it, and there were sources of information within the reach of all which rendered it unnecessary for him to enlarge on it.3 That he had a clear and firm conception of the nature of the creative act and attributed importance to its proper apprehension is made abundantly plain; and is emphasized by his consecration of the few remarks he gives professedly to the topic to repelling assaults upon its credibility drawn from the nature of the Divine Being (xiv. 1-2).

In his conception of creation Calvin definitely separated himself from all dualistic,4 and especially from all pantheistic5 elements of thought by sharply asserting that all substantial existence outside of God owes its being to God, that it was created by God out of nothing, and that it came from God's hand very good. His crispest definition of creation he lets fall incidentally in repelling the pantheistic notion that, as he scornfully describes it, "the essence of the Creator is rent into fragments that each may have a part of it." "Creation," he says, "is not the transfusion, but the origination out of nothing, of essence."6 "God," says he again, "by the power of His Word and Spirit created out of nothing, the heavens and the earth," that is to say, all that exists, whether celestial or terrestial.7 Firmly stated as this doctrine of creation is, however, so as to leave us in no doubt as to Calvin's conception,8 the elements of it are little elaborated. There is no attempt for example to validate the doctrine of creation ex nihilo whether on Biblical9 or on such rational grounds as we find appealed to by Zwingli, who argues that creation ex materia implies an infinite series whether the material out of which the creation is made be conceived as like or unlike in kind to that which is made from it.10 As we have seen, Calvin does argue, however, (like Zwingli), that creation in its very nature is "origination of essence," so that he would have subscribed Zwingli's declaration: "This is the definition of creation: to be out of nothing."11 He does not even dwell upon the part which the Son takes in the creating, although he does not leave this important matter unmentioned, but declares that "the worlds were created by the Son" (I. xiii. 7), and that God created the heavens and earth "by the power of His Word and Spirit" (I. xiv. 20), thus setting the act of creation in its Trinitarian relation. It is, however, rather in the preceding chapter where he adduces the share they took in creation in proof of the deity of the Son and the Spirit that Calvin develops this fact. There he urges that "the power to create and the authority to command were common to the Father, Son, and Spirit," as is shown, he says, by the words "Let us make man in our image" of Genesis i. 26; and he argues at length from the creation-narrative of Genesis and the Wisdom passage in Proverbs, no less than from Heb. i. 2, 3, that it was through the Son that God made the worlds.12 On one thing, however, he manages to insist despite the sketchiness with which he treats the whole subject. This is that whatever came from the divine hands came from them good. " It is monstrous," he declares,13 "to ascribe to the good God the creation of any evil thing," and we may not admit that there is in the whole world anything evil in its nature,14 but must perceive that in all that He has made God has displayed His wisdom and justice. Wherever evil has appeared, then, whether in man or devil, it is not ex natura, but ex naturae corruptione (I. xiv. 3), not ex creatione but ex depravatione (I. xiv. 16, ad init.). We must beware, therefore, lest in speaking of evil as natural to man, we should seem to refer it to the author of nature, whether we more coarsely conceive it as in some measure proceeding from God Himself, or, with more appearance of piety, ascribe it only to "nature." We cannot attribute to God what is in the most absolute sense alien to His very nature, and it is equally dishonoring to Him to ascribe any intrinsic depravity to the "nature" which comes from His hands.15

Calvin expressly disclaims the intention of expounding in detail the story of the creation of the world,16 and judges it sufficient to refer his readers to the account given by Moses, along with the comments perhaps of Basil and Ambrose, for instruction in the particulars of its history (I. xiv. 20, ad init.; cf. I. xiv. 1). He lets fall, however, a few remarks by the way, which enable us to perceive his attitude towards the narrative of Genesis. Needless to say he takes it just as he finds it written. The six days he, naturally, understands as six literal days; and, accepting the prima facie chronology of the Biblical narrative, he dates the creation of the world something less than six thousand years in the past. He does not suppose, however, that Moses has included in his story anything like an exhaustive account of all that was created. The instance of angels, of whose origin Moses gives no history, is conclusive to the contrary. Moses, writing to meet the needs of men at large, accommodated himself to their grade of intellectual preparation, and confines himself to what meets their eyes.17 On the other hand Calvin will not admit that the created universe can be properly spoken of as infinite. God alone is infinite; and, "however wide the circuit of the heavens may be, it nevertheless has some dimension."18 He frankly conceives of the created universe as geocentric,19 or more properly as anthropocentric. "God Himself," he declares, "has demonstrated by the very order of creation, that He made all things for the sake of man."20 For, before making man, "He prepared everything which He foresaw would be useful or salutary for him" (I. xiv. 22). It was "for human use that He disposed the motions of the sun and stars, that He filled the earth, the waters, the air with living creatures, that He produced an abundance of all kinds of fruits which might be sufficient for food - thus acting the part of a provident and sedulous father of a family and showing His wonderful goodness towards us" (I, xiv. 2).

Two difficulties which arise out of the consideration of the infinitude of God in connection with His creative work, Calvin finds sufficiently important to pause even in so rapid a sketch to deal with. These concern the relation of the idea of creation to that of eternity on the one hand, and the description of the creation as a process on the other. Both of these also, however, he treats rather from a practical than a theoretical point of view.

He does not even hint at the metaphysical difficulty which has been perennially derived from the Divine eternity and immutability, that a definite creation implies a change in God -the difficulty which Wollebius so neatly turns by the remark that "creation is not the creator's but the creature's passage from potentiality to actuality."21 The difficulty to which he addresses himself is the purely popular one, which, with a view to rendering the idea of a definite act of creation on God's part incredible, asks what God was doing all those ages before He created the world (I. xiv. 1). His response proceeds in general on the principle of answering a fool according to his folly, although it is directed to the serious purpose of recalling men's minds, from fruitless attempts to fathom the mysteries of infinity, to a profitable use of the creation-narrative as a mirror in which is exhibited a lively image of God.22 The gist of this response seems to be summed up in a sentence which occurs in the Argument to his Commentary on the first chapter of Genesis - which runs very much parallel to the discussion here. "God," he says, "being wholly sufficient for Himself, did not create a world of which He had no need, until it pleased Him to do so." He does not disdain, however, before closing, to advert, under the leading of Augustine,23 even to the metaphysical consideration that there is no place for a question of "time when" in our thought of that act of God by which time began to be. We might as well inquire, Augustine had reasoned, why God created the world where He did, as why He created it only when He did. We may puzzle ourselves with the notion that there is room in infinite space for an infinite number of finite universes as readily as with the parallel notion that there was opportunity in eternal time for the creation of an infinite series of worlds before ours was reached. The truth is, of course, that, as there is no space outside of that material world the dimensions of which when abstractly considered constitute what we call "space"; so there is no time outside that world of mutable existence from which we abstract the notion of succession and call it "time." "If they say," reasons Augustine, " that the thoughts of men are idle, when they conceive of infinite places, since there is no place beside the world, we reply that, by the same showing, it is vain to conceive of past times of God's rest, since there is no time before the world." Utilizing Augustine's remarks Calvin warns his readers against vainly striving to press "outside of the world" (extra mundum) by "the boundaries of which we are circumscribed," and exhorts them to seek in "the ample circumference of heaven and earth" and the certainly sufficient space of "six thousand years" material for meditating on the glory of God who has made them all. The primary matter for us to observe in this discussion is the persistence with which Calvin clings to the practical purpose of his treatise, so as even in connection with such abstruse subjects to confine himself to the "practical use" of them. But it is not illegitimate to observe also the hints the discussion supplies of his metaphysical opinions. His doctrines of "space" and "time" are here suggested to us. Clearly, he holds that what we call "space" is only an abstraction from the concrete dimensions of extended substance; and what we call "time," an abstraction from the concrete successions of mutable being. "Space" and "time," therefore, were to him qualities of finite being, and have come into existence and will pass out of existence with finite being. To speak of "infinite" space or "infinite" time contains accordingly a contradictio in adjecto.

Perhaps it may not be improper to pause here a moment to observe in passing the employment of humor by Calvin in his discussions. It is rather a mordant bit of humor which appears here, it is true - this story of the "pious old man" who when a "scoffer" demanded of him what God had been doing before He created the world, replied, "Making hell for inquisitive people" (fabricasse inferos curiosis); and moreover it is borrowed - ultimately - from Augustine.24 But though borrowing a story of Augustine's, Calvin does not follow Augustine in his attitude towards it. Augustine declines to commend such a response, because, says he, he would shrink from making a laughing-stock of anyone who brings forward a profound question; while Calvin approves it as a fit answer to a scoffer who raises frivolous objections.25 And mordant though it is, it provides an instance of that use of humor in argument which was a marked trait of Calvin's manner - and which reveals to us an element of his character not always fully recognized. As this humor manifests itself in his writings - which are predominantly controversial in tone -it is sufficiently pungent. The instance before us is a fair sample of it; and we have already had occasion to note another characteristic instance - his rallying of Caroli in the matter of the ancient creeds.26 His "Very useful Notice of the great profit which would accrue to Christianity if there should be made an inventory of all the holy bodies and relics which are to be found in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and other kingdoms and nations" (1543) might almost be said to reek with similar instances. He became quickly famous for his biting pen and was solemnly reproved by Sebastian Castellion for employing such weapons and encouraging others in the use of them. He not only, however, approved Beza's and Viret's satirical polemics and heartily enjoyed them - commending them to his friends as full of delightfulness - but he even develops a theory of the use of humor in instruction, and of the nature of true facetiousness. "Many - or perhaps we may say, most - men," he says, "are much more readily helped when they are instructed in a joyous and pleasant manner than otherwise. . . . Those who have the gift to teach in such a manner as to delight their readers, and to induce them to profit by the pleasure they give them, are doubly to be praised." "He who wishes to use humor," he adds, however, "ought to guard himself from two faults," - he must neither be forced in his wit, nor must he descend to scurrility.

But his cutting satire was only one manifestation of a special talent for pleasantry which characterized all his intercourse. Laughter, he taught, is the gift of God: and he held it the right, or rather the duty, of the Christian man to practise it in its due season. He is constantly joking with his friends in his letters,27 and he eagerly joins with them in all the joys of life. "I wish I were with you for half a day," he writes to one of them, "to laugh with you."28 In a word, contrary to a general impression, Calvin was a man of a great freshness and jocundness of spirit; and so little was he inclined to suppress the expression of the gayer side of life that he rather sedulously cultivated it in himself and looked with pleasure on its manifestation in others. He enjoyed a joke hugely,29 with that open-mouthed laugh which, as one of his biographers phrases it,30 belonged to the men of the sixteenth century. And he knew even how to smile at human folly - wishing that the people might not be deprived of their pleasures31 and might even be dealt with indulgently in their faults. When his students misbehaved, for example, he simply said he thought they ought to have some indulgence and should be accorded the right to be sometimes foolish.32

That the work of creation should be thought to occupy time was as much a matter of scoffing from the evil-disposed as that it should take place in time. Why should the omnipotent God take six days to make the world? Did He perhaps find it too hard a task for a single effort?33 This cavil, too, Calvin deals with purely from the practical point of view, not so much undertaking to refute it as recalling men's minds from it to dwell on the condescension of God in distributing His work into six days that our finite intelligence might not be overwhelmed with its contemplation; and on the goodness of God in thus leading our thoughts up to the consideration of the rest of the seventh day; and above all on the paternal care of God in so ordering the work of bringing the world into being as to prepare it for man before He introduced him into it. In drawing the mind thus away from the cavil, Calvin does not, however, fail to meet the difficulty itself, which was adduced. His response to it, is, in effect, to acknowledge that God perfected the world by process (progressus, I. xiv. 2); but to assert that this method of performing His work was not for His own sake, but for ours; so that, so far is this progressive method of producing the world from being unworthy of God, because "alien from His power,"34 that it rather illustrates His higher attributes - His paternal love, for example, which would not create man until He had enriched the world with all things necessary for his happiness. Considered in Himself, "it would have been no more difficult" for God "to complete at once the whole work in all its items in a single moment, than to arrive at its completion gradually by a process of this kind."35

It should be observed that in this and similar discussions founded on the progressive completion of the world, Calvin does not intend to attribute what we may speak strictly of as progressive creation to God. With Calvin, while the perfecting of the world - as its subsequent government - is a process, creation, strictly conceived, tended to be thought of as an act. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth": after that it was not "creation" strictly so called, but "formation," gradual modelling into form, which took place. Not, of course, as if Calvin conceived creation deistically; as if he thought of God as having created the world-stuff and then left it to itself to work out its own destiny under the laws impressed on it in its creation. A "momentary Creator, who has once for all done His work," was inconceivable to him: and he therefore taught that it is only when we contemplate God in providence that we can form any true conception of Him as Creator.36 But he was inclined to draw a sharp distinction in kind between the primal act of creation of the heavens and the earth out of nothing, and the subsequent acts of moulding this created material into the forms it was destined to take; and to confine the term "creation," strictly conceived, to the former. Hence in perhaps the fullest statement of his doctrine of creation given us in these chapters (I. xiv. 20), he expresses himself carefully thus: "God, by the power of His Word and Spirit created out of nothing (creasse ex nihilo) the heavens and the earth; thence produced (produxisse) every kind of animate and inanimate thing, distinguished by a wonderful gradation the innumerable variety of things, endowed each kind with its own nature, assigned its offices, appointed its place and station to it, and, since all things are subject to corruption, provided, nevertheless, that each kind should be preserved safe to the last day." "Thus," he adds, "He marvellously adorned heaven and earth with the utmost possible abundance, variety and beauty of all things, like a great and splendid house, most richly and abundantly constructed and furnished; and then at last by forming (formando) man and distinguishing him with such noble beauty, and with so many and such high gifts, he exhibited in him the noblest specimen of His works."37 It is God who has made all things what they are, he teaches: but, in doing so, God has acted in the specific mode properly called creation only at the initial step of the process, and the result owes its right to be called a creation to that initial act by which the material of which all things consist was called into being from non-being. "Indigested mass" as it was, yet in that world-stuff was "the seed of the whole world," and out of it that world as we now see it (for "the world was not perfected at its very beginning, in the manner it is now seen"38) has been evoked by progressive acts of God: and it is therefore that this world, because evoked from it, has the right to be called a creation.

The distinction which Calvin here draws, it is to be observed, is not that which has been commonly made by Reformed divines under the terms, First and Second Creation, or in less exact language Immediate and Mediate Creation. This distinction posits a sequence of truly creative acts of God throughout the six days, and therefore defines creation, so as to meet the whole case, as that act "by which God produced the world and all that is in it, partly ex nihilo, partly ex materia naturaliter inhabili, for the manifestation of the glory of His power, wisdom and goodness";39 or more fully, as that "first external work of God, by which in the beginning of time, without suffering any change, by His own free will, He produced by His sole omnipotent command immediate per se things which before were not, from simple non-being to being - and that, either ex nihilo, or ex materia which had afore been made e nihilo, but is naturaliter inhabili for receiving the form which, created out of nothing, the Creator induces into it."40 It is precisely this sequence of truly creative acts which Calvin disallows; and he so expresses himself, indeed, as to give it a direct contradiction. Perhaps as distinct a statement of his view as any is found in his comment on Genesis i. 21, where the term "create" is employed to designate the divine production of the animals of the sea and air, which, according to verse 20, had been brought forth by the waters at the command of God. "A question arises here," remarks Calvin, "about the word 'created.' For we have before contended that the world was made of nothing because it was 'created': but now Moses says the things formed from other matter were 'created.' Those who assert that the fishes were truly and properly 'created' because the waters were in no way suitable (idoneae) or adapted (aptae) to their production, only resort to a subterfuge; for the fact would remain, meanwhile, that the material of which they were made existed before, which, in strict propriety, the word does not admit. I therefore do not restrict 'creation' [here] to the work of the fifth day, but rather say it[s use] refers to (hangs from, pendet) that shapeless and confused mass which was, as it were, the fountain of the whole world. God, then, is said to have 'created' the seamonsters and other fishes, because the beginning of their 'creation' is not to be reckoned from the moment in which they received their form, but they are comprehended in the universal matter (corpus, corpore) which was made out of nothing. So that with respect to their kind, form only was then added to them; 'creation' is nevertheless a term used truly with respect to the whole and the parts."

Calvin's motive in thus repudiating the notion of "Mediate Creation" is not at all chariness on his part with respect to the supernatural. It is not the supernaturalness of the production of the creatures which the waters and earth brought forth which he disallows; but only the applicability to their production of the term "creation." On verse 24, he comments thus: "There is in this respect a miracle as great as if God had begun to create out of nothing these things which He commanded to proceed from the earth." Calvin's sole motive seems to be to preserve to the great word "create" the precise significance of to "make out of nothing," and he will not admit that it can be applied to any production in which preÃ«xistent material is employed.41 This might appear to involve the view that after the creation of the world-stuff recorded in Genesis i. 1, there was never anything specifically new produced by the divine power. And this might be expressed by saying that, from that point on, the divine works were purely works of providence, since the very differentia of a providential work is that it is the product proximately of second causes. Probably this would press Calvin's contention, however, a little too far: he would scarcely say there was no immediacy in the divine action in the productions of the five days of "creation," or indeed in the working of miracles. But we must bear in mind that his view of providence was a very high one, and he was particularly insistent that God acted through means, when He did act through means, through no necessity but purely at His own volition. Second causes, in his view, are nothing more than "instruments into which God infuses as much of efficiency as He wishes," and which He employs or not at His will (I. xvi. 2). "The power of no created thing," says Calvin, "is more wonderful or evident than that of the sun. . . . But the Lord . . . willed that light should exist . . . before the sun was created. A pious man will not make the sun, then, either the principal or the necessary cause of the things which existed before the sun was created, but only an instrument which God uses because He wishes to; since He could without any difficulty at all do without the sun and act of Himself."42 The facility with which Calvin sets aside the notion of "mediate creation" is then due in no sense to desire to remove the productions of the five days of "creation" out of the category of divine products, but is itself mediated by the height of his doctrine of providence.43

It is important further that we should not suppose that Calvin removed the production of the human soul out of the category of immediate creation, in the strictest sense of that term. When he insists that the works of the days subsequent to the first, when "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," were not strictly speaking "creations," because they were not productions ex nihilo, he is thinking only of the lower creation, inclusive, no doubt, of the human body; all this is made out of that primal "indigested mass" which sprang into being at the initial command of God. The soul is a different matter; and not only in the first instance, but in every succeeding instance, throughout the whole course of human propagation, is an immediate creation ex nihilo. Moses, he tells us, perfectly understood that the soul was created from nothing;44 and he announces with emphasis ("Institutes," I. xv. 5), that it is certain that the souls of men are "no less created than the angels," adding the decisive definition: "now, creation is the origination of essence ex nihilo." It is thus with the lower creation alone in his mind that Calvin insists that all that can justly be called by the high name of "creation" was wrought by God on the first day, in that one act by which He created, that is called into being out of nothing, the heavens and the earth.

It should scarcely be passed without remark that Calvin's doctrine of creation is, if we have understood it aright, for all except the souls of men, an evolutionary one. The "indigested mass," including the "promise and potency" of all that was yet to be, was called into being by the simple fiat of God. But all that has come into being since - except the souls of men alone - has arisen as a modification of this original world-stuff by means of the interaction of its intrinsic forces. Not these forces apart from God, of course: Calvin is a high theist, that is, supernaturalist, in his ontology of the universe and in his conception of the whole movement of the universe. To him God is the prima causa omnium and that not merely in the sense that all things ultimately - in the world-stuff - owe their existence to God; but in the sense that all the modifications of the world-stuff have taken place under the directly upholding and governing hand of God, and find their account ultimately in His will. But they find their account proximately in "second causes"; and this is not only evolutionism but pure evolutionism. What account we give of these second causes is a matter of ontology; how we account for their existence, their persistence, their action - the relation we conceive them to stand in to God, the upholder and director as well as creator of them. Calvin's ontology of second causes was, briefly stated, a very pure and complete doctrine of concursus, by virtue of which he ascribed all that comes to pass to God's purpose and directive government. But that does not concern us here. What concerns us here is that he ascribed the entire series of modifications by which the primal "indigested mass," called "heaven and earth," has passed into the form of the ordered world which we see, including the origination of all forms of life, vegetable and animal alike, inclusive doubtless of the bodily form of man, to second causes as their proximate account. And this, we say, is a very pure evolutionary scheme. He does not discuss, of course, the factors of the evolutionary process, nor does he attempt to trace the course of the evolutionary advance, nor even expound the nature of the secondary causes by which it was wrought. It is enough for him to say that God said, "Let the waters bring forth. . . . Let the earth bring forth," and they brought forth. Of the interaction of forces by which the actual production of forms was accomplished, he had doubtless no conception: he certainly ventures no assertions in this field. How he pictured the process in his imagination (if he pictured it in his imagination) we do not know. But these are subordinate matters. Calvin doubtless had no theory whatever of evolution; but he teaches a doctrine of evolution. He has no object in so teaching except to preserve to the creative act, properly so called, its purity as an immediate production out of nothing. All that is not immediately produced out of nothing is therefore not created - but evolved. Accordingly his doctrine of evolution is entirely unfruitful. The whole process takes place in the limits of six natural days. That the doctrine should be of use as an explanation of the mode of production of the ordered world, it was requisite that these six days should be lengthened out into six periods - six ages of the growth of the world. Had that been done Calvin would have been a precursor of the modern evolutionary theorists. As it is, he only forms a point of departure for them to this extent - that he teaches, as they teach, the modification of the original world-stuff into the varied forms which constitute the ordered world, by the instrumentality of second causes - or as a modern would put it, of its intrinsic forces. This is his account of the origin of the entire lower creation.45

Of this lower creation he has, however, as has already been pointed out, very little to say in the discussion of the creature which he has incorporated in the "Institutes" (I. xiv. 20-22). And what he does say is chiefly devoted to the practical end of quickening in our hearts a sense of the glory and perfections of its Maker, whose wisdom, power, justice and goodness are illustrated by it, and of raising our hearts in gratitude to Him for His benefits to us. These are the two things, he says, which a contemplation of what is meant by God being the Creator of heaven and earth should work in us: an apprehension of His greatness as the Creator (Â§ 21) and an appreciation of His care for us His creatures, in the manner in which He has created us (Â§ 22). More than to suggest this, the scope of his treatise does not appear to him to demand of him; as it does not permit him to dwell on the details of the history of creation - for which he therefore contents himself with referring his readers to the narrative of Genesis, with the comments of Basil and Ambrose. He pauses, therefore, only to insert the comprehensive statement of the elements of the matter which has already been cited, and which asserts that "God by the power of His Word and Spirit created out of nothing the heavens and the earth" and afterwards moulded this created material into the ordered world we see around us, which also He sustains and governs; in which, then, He has placed man, up to whom all the rest has tended and in whom He has afforded the culminating manifestation of His creative power (Â§ 20). The main items of his teaching as to the physical universe may therefore be summed up in the propositions that it owes its existence absolutely to the Divine power;46 that it was created out of nothing; that it was perfected through a process of formation which extended through six days; that it was made and adorned for the sake of man, and has been subjected to him; and that it illustrates in its structure and in all its movements the perfections of its Maker.

It is to the spiritual universe that Calvin turns with predilection, and the greater portion of the fourteenth chapter is devoted accordingly to a thoroughly Biblical account of angelic beings, good and bad (Â§Â§ 3-19). The careful Scripturalness of this account deserves emphasis. Calvin himself emphasizes it, and even permits himself to fall into a digression here, in order to expound at some length the proper attitude of the theological teacher to Scripture (I. xiv. 4). His design is to transmit plainly and clearly what the Scriptures teach,47 and not to pass beyond the simple doctrine of Scripture in anything.48 He therefore warns his readers against speculations as to "the orders" of angels, asking them to consider carefully the meagreness of the Scriptural foundation these have;49 and holds the Pseudo-Dionysius up as a terrible example of misplaced subtlety and acuteness in such matters (I. xiv. 4). Whereas Paul, who was actually rapt beyond the third heavens sealed his lips and declared it not lawful for a man to speak of the hidden things which he saw, Dionysius who never had such an experience writes with a fulness and confidence of detail which could be justified only if he had come down from heaven and was recounting what he had had the privilege of observing carefully with his own eyes. Such prating of things of which we can really know nothing is unworthy of a theologian, says Calvin; "for it is the part of the theologian not to amuse the ear with empty words, but to confirm the conscience by teaching what is true, certain, profitable."50 And, "since the teaching of the Spirit is invariably profitable (utiliter), but in matters which are of less moment for edification, either He is altogether silent or touches on them only lightly and cursorily, it is our business cheerfully to remain ignorant of what is of no advantage to us."51 There are two rules therefore which the modest and sober man will certainly bear in mind in the whole business of teaching religion. One is, in obscure matters, neither to speak nor to think, nor even to desire to know, anything more than what has been given us in the Word of God. The other is, in reading Scripture, to tarry for prolonged investigation and meditation only on what conduces to edification, and not to indulge curiosity or fondness for useless things.52 Practising what he preaches, Calvin endeavors therefore in all he has to say of angels to hold to the limit which the rule of piety prescribes, lest by indulging in speculation beyond measure he should lead the reader astray from the simplicity of the faith (I. xiv. 3, end). There are many things about angels, indeed, which it may be a matter of regret to some that the Scriptures have not told us (I. xiv. 16). But surely we ought to be content with the knowledge which the Lord has given us, especially as, passing by frivolous questions, His wish has been to instruct us in what conduces to solid piety, the fear of His name, true confidence and the duties of holiness (I. xiv. 4). If we are not ashamed to be His disciples, how can we be ashamed to follow the method He has prescribed (Â§ 4)? Nay, will we not even abhor those unprofitable speculations from which He recalls us, and rest in comfort in the simple Scriptural teaching, which with respect to good angels consoles us and confirms our faith by making us see in them the dispensers and administrators of the Divine goodness towards us, guarding our safety, assuring our defence, directing our ways, and protecting us by their care from evil (Â§ 6, ad init.) - with respect to evil angels, warns us against their artifices and contrivances and provides us with firm and strong weapons to repel their attacks (Â§ 13, ad init.)?

In accordance with these views of our relation to Scripture as a source of and guide to knowledge, Calvin's whole discussion of angels is not only kept close to Scripture, but is marked by the strongest practical tendency. Perhaps what strikes the reader most forcibly upon the surface of the discussion is the completeness of the faith which it exhibits in the real existence of angelic beings and the concernment of man with them. We will recall the vividness of Luther's similar faith. Perhaps we may say that the supernaturalistic tone of the conceptions of the Reformers is in nothing more visible than in their vital sense of the spiritual environment in which human life is cast. To them angels and demons were actual factors in men's lives, to be counted upon and considered in our arrangement and adjustments as truly as our fellow men.53 Denial of their reality as substantial existences was indeed prevalent enough to require notice and refutation. Calvin's refutation of it is, of course, derived entirely, however, from Scripture, and he recognizes that, therefore, it can have no force for those who do not believe in the Scriptures. He does not consider that it is on that account useless. He designs it to fortify pious minds against such madness and to call back the slothful and incautious to a more sober and better regulated mode of life. For those who believe in the Scriptural revelation, it must be confessed that his argument is complete and final, adducing as it does in the clearest way the chief Biblical evidence for the actual existence and activity of these superhuman intelligences (I. xiv. 9 and 19).

Calvin, then, teaches in accordance with Scripture, that angels are not "qualities or inspirations without substance, but real spirits."54 He calls them "spirits," "minds," and as such defines them as beings whose characterizing qualities are "perception and intelligence."55 His intention is to represent them as purely spiritual beings; and therefore he incidentally remarks that "it is certain" that they "have no form."56 As "celestial spirits" (I. xiv. 5), they are of higher powers than man, and receive in Scripture designations by which their dignity is indicated: Hosts, Powers, Principalities, Dominions, Thrones, even "Gods" - not of course as if they were really "Gods" or ought to be worshipped, but "because in their ministry, as in a glass, they represent in some degree divinity to us."57 "The preÃ«minence (praestantia) of the angelic nature has," to be sure, "so impressed the minds of many" that they have felt it would be an injury to angels to degrade them, as it were, under the control of the One only God; and thus there has been invented for them a certain kind of divinity (I. xiv. 3). They are of course like God: for they were made in the image of God.58 They are, however, just creatures of God, His servants who execute His commands.59 Moses, it is true, in the history of creation, does not give any account of their creation: but that history does not pretend to be complete, but limits itself to the visible creation, and it is easy to collect from his subsequent introduction of angels as God's ministers that He is their maker.60 So a matter of course does this seem to Calvin, that he does not stop here to adduce specific Scriptural assertions of the origination of angels by creation. These however he emphasizes elsewhere. Thus for example, in his commentary on the passage, he expounds Col. i. 16 as follows: "Because Paul wished to make this assertion" - that all things were created in the Son - "particularly of angels, he now mentions the invisible things: not only, then, the heavenly creatures visible to our eyes, but also the spiritual ones (spirituales) have been made (conditae) by the Son of God." The inferiority of angels to Christ, he proceeds to remark (in his commentary on the next verse), is manifested in the four points: First, "because they were created (creati) by Him; secondly, because their creation (creatio) is referred to Him as its legitimate end; thirdly, because He always existed before they were created (crearentur); fourthly, because it is He who sustains them by His power and conserves them in their condition."61 Creation in and of itself means with Calvin, as we have seen, absolute origination of essence, and he therefore teaches that the angels have been, like all other creatures, created out of nothing. It is to be held, he says, as a thing certain that the souls of men and angels alike "have been created" - adding at once: "Now creation is not transfusion but the origination out of nothing of essence."62

The questions of when they were created and how their creation is to be related to Moses' narrative Calvin puts aside as frivolous. Moses narrates that the earth was perfected, and the heavens were perfected with all their hosts (Gen. ii. 1): that is certainly broad enough to cover the fact of their creation - why make anxious inquisition as to the day, in which besides the stars and planets, these other more hidden (reconditi) celestial hosts began to be?63 The very language in which he repels the question, however, as it certainly suggests that Calvin conceived of the entire creation, inclusive of the angelic hosts, as a systematized whole, seems also to hint that he himself thought of the creation of this unitary whole as taking place at the one creative epoch, if such language can be pardoned. If so, then in his instinctive thought on this subjecton which, however, he laid no stress - he followed the scholastic opinion, as expounded, say, by Thomas Aquinas rather than that of the Greek Fathers, who interposed an immense interval between the creation of the spiritual and the subsequent creation of the corporeal universe.64 It is doubtless, however, a mistake to press his language to imply that he thought of the creation of the angels as taking place on the same day with the stars and planets, that is to say, on the fourth day. More probably he thought of them as produced as part of the general creation of the "heavens and earth," that is to say on the first day,65 and this became the traditional view in the Reformed Churches. "When were the angels created?" asks Bucanus, and answers, "Not before the ages, for the Son of God alone was existent before the ages: whence it follows that they were made in the beginning of all things. On what day, however, cannot certainly be defined, though it may be gathered with probability from the history of Moses that they were created on the first day, in which the heavens, the inhabitants of which they are, were created; wherefrom they are called the 'angels of heaven.'"66 "The first day of the creation," says Wollebius,67 "is illustrious for three works," the first of which is "the creation of the angels with the highest heaven (the heaven called that of the blessed)"; for, he argues, "the creation of the angels can be referred to no better time than the first day, because when God laid the foundations of the earth, it was already celebrated by them (Job xxxviii. 7)" - an argument which is repeated by others, as for example by Van Mastricht,68 who reasons in general that "it is certain that they were not created before the first day of creation since before that there was nothing but eternity, . . . and it is equally certain that they were not created after man, whom they seduced."69 Doubtless some such reasoning as this was before Calvin's mind also, although it is clear that he did not take it so seriously.

On another matter of speculative construction, however, he was not so much inclined to an attitude of indifference. This concerned the distribution of angels into ranks and orders. We have already had occasion to note his reprobation of the Pseudo-Dionysius for his empty speculations on the "celestial hierarchy" (I. xiv. 4). He returns to the general matter later (I. xiv. 8) to express the opinion that data are lacking in Scripture to justify an attempt "to determine degrees of honor among angels, to distinguish the respective classes by their insignia, or to assign its place and station to each." His positive attitude here is due, of course, to the comparison instituted by the Romanists between the celestial and the ecclesiastical hierarchies,70 which he wishes to discredit. Here too he set the fashion for the Reformed theology. Quite in this sense Van Mastricht 71 remarks that "the Reformed recognize, indeed, that there is some order among the angels, not only because God their Maker is a God of order . . . but because the various names of the angels seem to suggest an order to us (Col. i. 16, Eph. iii. 10, cf. Ezek. ix. 3, Is. vi. 2, I Thes. iv. 16, Gen. iii. 24, Jud 1:9) while the disjunctive particle, ei;te qro,noi( ei;te kurio,thtej (Col. i. 16), seems especially to confirm some order among angels, to say nothing of the existence of some order among the evil spirits themselves (Mat. xii. 24). But they believe it is not possible for men in this imperfection to determine what the order among the angels is." If this seems to allow a little more than Calvin does, it is to go a little further than he does in denial on the other hand, to contend with Hyperius that there are no permanent distinctions among angels "by virtue of which some angels are always preÃ«minent, others always subordinate," or even with Bucanus, that there are no distinctions in nature among the angels but only differences in office. Surely these determinations are open to Calvin's rebuke of pretensions to knowledge which we do not possess, and contrast sharply with the sobriety with which Calvin abides by the simple statements of Scripture, allowing that there are some hints in Scripture of ranks among angels (I. xiv. 8; cf. 14) and contending only that these hints are insufficient to enable us to develop a complete theory of their organization.

In holding back from the temptation to speculate on the organization of the angelic hosts, however, Calvin betrays no tendency to minify their numbers, and he of course recognizes the great distinction between good and bad angels. The numbers of both are very great. Of the good angels, he tells us, "we hear from the mouth of Christ of many legions (Mat. xxvi. 53), from Daniel of many myriads (Dan. vii. 10); Elisha's servant saw numerous chariots; and when it is said that they encamp around about those that fear God (Ps. xxxiv. 8), a great multitude is suggested" (I. xiv. 8). When he comes to speak of evil angels his language takes on an even increased energy. He speaks of "great crowds" (magnas copias) of them, and even with the exaggerating emphasis of deep conviction of the "infinite multitude" of them (I. xiv. 14). Though these two hosts stand now arrayed against each other they are in origin and nature one; for the evil spirits are just good spirits gone wrong. The fundamental facts which Calvin most insists upon with respect to what he calls "devils" (diaboli) are that they are creatures of God and were therefore once good - "for it is impious (nefas) to ascribe to the good God the creation of any evil thing"72 - and that they have become evil by corrupting the good nature with which God endowed them.73 Their evil, says he crisply, is "not from creation but from depravation."74 "At their original creation they were angels of God, but they destroyed themselves through degeneration."75 To ascribe to God, their Creator, the evil they have acquired by their defection and lapse, would be to ascribe to Him what above all things is most alien from Him;76 and thus far the Manichaeans are right - for the good God cannot have created any evil thing (I. xiv. 3, as above). The Scriptural evidence of the fall of the "devils" Calvin states with great brevity but with sufficient point. He adduces II Peter ii. and Jud 1:6 as a clear statement: and I Timothy v. 21 as a tacit implication; and he argues that when our Lord (Jno. viii. 44) declares that when Satan "speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own," and adds as a reason "because he abode not in the truth," He implies that he had once been in the truth and issued from it by an act of his own (I, xiv. 16). In his other writings he returns repeatedly to these conceptions and always with the greatest directness and force of statement. "The devils," says he, " have been angels of God but they did not retain the condition in which they were created but have fallen by a horrible fall, so as to become the examples of perdition."77 "The devils were created by God as well as the angels, but not as they now are. We must always reserve this, - that the evil which is in the devils proceeds from themselves. . . ."78 "For we know that the devil is evil not by nature, nor from his original creation (creationis origine), but by the fault of his own defection."79

It is worth while to dwell on these deliverances, because they contain not merely Calvin's doctrine of devils, but also, so far, his doctrine of the origin of evil. This includes, we already perceive, a vigorous repudiation of the notion that God can be in any way the author of evil. The Augustinian doctrine that omne esse est bonum is explicitly reaffirmed. God is good and it is impious to suppose that He may have created anything evil (malum). But as God is the author of all that is, everything that has come into being is in its nature good. There is, therefore, no such thing in the universe as an evil nature (mala natura). All that is evil arises (I. xiv. 3) not from nature (ex natura) but from corruption of nature (ex naturae corruptione). This corruption has been introduced by the free action of the creature: it is (I. xiv. 16) not "of creation" but "of depravation," - a depravation of which the creature itself is the cause (cuius ipse sibi causa). To put it all in a nutshell, - evil according to Calvin has its source not in the creative act of God but in the deflected action of the creaturely will. Such an assertion takes us, of course, only a little way towards a theodicy: but it is important that as we pass we should note as a first step in Calvin's theodicy that he very energetically repudiates the notion that God, who is good, can be, as Creator, the author of any evil thing. All that comes from His hands is "very good."

As the angels owe their existence to God, so of course they subsist in Him. They were not brought into being to stand, deistically, over against God, sufficient to themselves: like all the rest of His creatures their dependence on God is absolute. Nothing can be ascribed to them as if it belonged to them apart from Him. They are, indeed, immortal: but this is so far from meaning that it is beyond the power of God to destroy them, that it rather means merely that it is the will of God to sustain them in endless being. In themselves considered, like all other creaturely existences, they are mortal.80 "We know," remarks Calvin,81 "that angels are immortal spirits, for God has created them for this condition, that they shall never be destroyed any more than the souls of men shall perish. . . . The angels are immortal because they are sustained by power from on high, and God maintains them - He who is immortal by nature and the fountain of life is in Him, as says the Psalmist (xxxvi. 10). . . . The angels are not stable save as God holds their hand. They are no doubt called Mights and Powers; but this is because God executes His power by them and guides them. Briefly, the angels have nothing in themselves by reason of which they may glory in themselves. For all that they have of power and stability they possess from God. . . ." In all their activities, accordingly, angels are but the instruments of God, although, to be sure, they are "the instruments in which God especially (specialiter) exhibits the presence of His divinity (numinis)" (I. xiv. 5). We must not think of them, then, as interposed between us and God, so as to obscure His glory; nor must we transfer to them what belongs to God and Christ alone (I. xiv. 10) - worshipping them, perchance,82 or at least attributing to them independent activities. The splendor of the divine majesty is indeed reflected in them;83 but the glory by which they shine is a derived glory, and it would be preposterous to allow their borrowed brightness to blind us to its source. In all their varied activities they must be considered merely "the hands of God, which move themselves to no work except under His direction." 84

Some question may arise as to the wideness of the sphere of activity in which angels are employed as "the hands of God." There is at least a prima facie appearance that Calvin thought of them as the instruments through which the entirety of God's providential work is administered. He dwells especially, to be sure, on their employment as "the dispensers and administrators of the divine beneficence" towards His people (I. xiv. 6); but he appears to look upon this as only the culminating instance of a universal activity. When he says that they are "God's ministers ordained for the execution of His laws,"85 we may indeed hesitate to press the language. But three several spheres of activity of increasing comprehensiveness seem to be distinguished, when he tells us God "uses their service for the protection of His people, and by means of them both dispenses His benefits among men and executes also the rest of His works."86 And the whole seems summed up in a phrase when he tells us again that God "exercises and administers His government in the world through them."87 The universal reach of their activities appears to be explicitly asserted in the comprehensive statement that God "uses their ministry and service for executing all that He has decreed."88 It certainly would appear from such broad statements that Calvin looked upon the angels as agents through which God carries on His entire providential government.

The question is not unnaturally raised whether by this conception Calvin does not remove God too far from His works, interposing between Him and His operations a body of intermediaries by which He is separated from the universe after the fashion of a false transcendenceism.89 It is quite plain that Calvin did not so conceive the matter. So far from supposing that the execution of the works of providence through the medium of angels involves the absence of God from these works, he insists that they are only the channels of the presence of God. "How preposterous it is," he exclaims, "that we should be separated from God by the angels when they have been constituted for the express purpose of testifying the completer presence of His aid to us" (I. xiv. 12). Are we separated from the works of our hands because it is by our hands that they are wrought? And the angels, if rightly conceived, must be thought of just as the hands of God - the appropriate instruments, not which work instead of Him, but by which He works (I. xiv. 12). He, therefore, once for all dismisses "that Platonic philosophy" which interposes angels between God and His world, and even asks us to seek access to God through the angels, as if we had not immediacy of access to Him. "For this is the reason they are called Angels of Power or Powers," he remarks in another place;90 "not that God, resigning His power to them, sits idle in heaven, but because, by acting powerfully in them, He magnificently manifests His power to us. They therefore act ill and perversely who assign anything to angels as of themselves, or who so make them intermediaries between us and God that they obscure the glory of God as if it were removed to a distance; since rather it manifests itself as present in them. Accordingly the mad speculations of Plato are to be shunned as instituting too great a distance between us and God. . . ." In his view, therefore, the angels do not stand between God and the world to hold them apart but to draw them together as channels of operation through which God's power flows into His works.

If he were asked whether he does not, by this interposition of angels between God and His works, infringe on the conception of the Divine immanence and raise doubt as to God's immanent activity, Calvin would doubtless reply that he does not "interpose" the angels between God and His works, but conceives them as just "the hands of God" working; and that he, of course, conceives God as immanent in the angels themselves, so that their working is just His working through them, as His instruments. We must not confuse the question of the method of God's immanent activity with that of the fact of that activity. The suggestion that God carries on His providential government through the agency of angels is only a suggestion of the method of His immanent working and can raise doubt of the reality of His immanent working only on the supposition that these angels stand so over against God in their independence as to break - so to speak - His contact with His works. This is Deism, and is therefore of course inconsistent with the Divine immanence; but it has nothing to do with the question whether He employs angels in which He is immanent in His operations. In any event God executes His works of providence through the intermediation of second causes; for this is the very definition of a work of providence. The discovery that among these second causes there are always personal as well as impersonal agencies to be taken into account, can raise no question as between immanence and transcendence in God's modes of action - unless personal agents are conceived to be, as such, so independent of God as to exclude in all that is performed by their agency the conception of His immanent working. And in that case what shall we say of the Divine immanence in the sphere of human life and activity? In a word, Calvin's conception that all the works of God's providence are wrought through the intermediation of angels excludes the immanence of God in His world as little as the recognition of human activities excludes the immanence of God in history.

The real interest of his conception does not lie, therefore, in any bearing it may be supposed to have on his view of the relation of God to the universe - it leaves his view on that point unaffected - but in the insight it gives us into Calvin's pneumatology. We have already had occasion to note the vividness of his sense of the spiritual environment in which our life is cast. We see here that he conceived the universe as in all its operations moving on under the guiding hand of these superhuman intelligences. This is as much as to say that there was no dualism in his conception of the universe: he did not set the spiritual and physical worlds, or the earthly and supramundane worlds, over against one another as separate and unrelated entities. He conceived them as all working together in one unitary system, acting and interacting on one another. And he accustomed himself to perceive beneath the events of human history - whether corporate or individual - and beneath the very operations of physical nature - not merely the hand of God, upholding and governing; but the activities of those "hands of God" who hearken to His voice and fulfil His word, and whom He not only charges with the care of His "little ones," and the direction of the movements of the peoples, but makes even "winds" and a "flaming fire."

To the question why God thus universally operates through the instrumentality of subordinate intelligences, Calvin has no answer, in its general aspects, except a negative one. It cannot be that God needs their aid or is unable to accomplish without them what He actually does through them. If He employs them, "He certainly does not do this from necessity, as if He were unable to do without them; for whenever He pleases, He passes them by and accomplishes His work by nothing but His mere will; so far are they from relieving Him of any difficulty by their aid" (I. xiv. 11). These words have their application to the whole sphere of angelical activities, as indeed they have to the entire body of second causes (I. xvi. 2), but they are spoken directly only of the employment of angels as ministers to the heirs of salvation. It is characteristic of Calvin that he confines his discussion of the subject to this highest function of angelic service, as that which was of special religious value to his readers, and that to which as a practical man seeking practical ends it behooved him particularly to address himself. In this highest sphere of angelic operation he is not without even a positive response to the query why God uses angels to perform His will. It is not for His sake but for the sake of His people; it is, in fact, a concession to their weakness. God is able, certainly, to protect His people by the mere nod of His power; and surely it ought to be enough for them and more than enough that God declares Himself their protector.91 To look around for further aid after we have received the promise of God that He will protect us, is undeniably wrong in us.92 Is not the simple promise of the great God of heaven and earth sufficient safeguard against all dangers? But we are weak;93 and God is good - full of leniency and indulgence94 -and He wishes to give us not only His protection but the sense of His protection. Dealing with us as we are, not as we ought to be, He is willing to appeal to our imagination and to comfort us in our feeling of danger or despair by enabling us to apprehend, in our own way, the presence of His grace. He, therefore, has added to His promise that He will Himself care for us, the further one that "we shall have innumerable escorts to whom He has given charge to secure our safety" (Â§ 11). Like Elisha, then, who, when he was oppressed by the numerous army of the Syrians, was shown the multitude of the angels sent to guard him, we, when terrified by the thought of the multitude of our enemies, may find refuge in that discovery of Elisha's: "There are more for us than against us."

In insisting upon this particular function of angels above all others, Calvin feels himself to be, as a Biblical theologian, simply following the lead of Scripture. For, intent especially on what may most make for our consolation and the confirmation of our faith, the Scripture lays its stress, he tells us, on angels as the dispensers and administrators of the Divine beneficence towards God's people; and " reminds us that they guard our safety, undertake our defence, direct our ways, and exercise solicitude that no harm shall befall us" (I. xiv. 6). These great provisions are universal, he tells us, and belong "to all believers" without exception. Every follower of Christ has, therefore, pledged to his protection the whole host of the angels of God. In the interests of the greatness of this pledge, Calvin enters the lists against the idea of "guardian angels," which had become the settled doctrine of the old Church (I. xiv. 7), not indeed with the sharpness and decision which afterwards obtained in the Reformed Churches,95 but yet with an obvious feeling that this notion lacks Scriptural basis and offers less than what the Scriptures provide for the consolation and support of God's people. If it is to be accepted at all, Calvin wishes it to be accepted not instead of, but alongside of, what he feels to be the much greater assurance that the whole body of angels is concerned with the protection and salvation of everyone of the saints. "Of this indeed," he remarks, "we may be sure - that the case of each one of us is not committed to one angel alone, but that all of them with one consent watch over our salvation" (I. xiv. 7). This being a settled fact, he does not consider the question of "guardian angels" worth considering: if "all the orders of the celestial army stand guard over our salvation," he asks, what difference does it make to us whether one particular angel is also told off to act as our particular guardian or not? But if any one wishes to restrict the protection granted us by God to this one angel - why that is a different matter: that would be to do a great injury to himself and to all the members of the Church, by depriving them of the encouragement they receive from the divine assurance that they are compassed about and defended on all sides in their conflict by the forces of heaven.96

What Calvin has to say about the evil spirits - the "devils" as he calls them - is determined by the same practical purpose which dominates his discussion of the good angels. He begins, therefore, with the remark that "almost everything which Scripture transmits concerning devils, has as its end that we should be solicitous to guard against their snares and machinations, and may provide ourselves with such arms as are firm and strong enough to repel the most powerful enemies" (Â§ 13, ad init.). He proceeds by laying stress on the numbers, the malice, and the subtlety of these devils; and by striving in every way to awaken the reader to a realizing sense of the desperation of the conflict in which he is engaged with them (Â§Â§ 13-15). The effect is to paint a very vivid picture of the world of evil, set over against the world of good as in some sense its counterfeit,97 determined upon overturning the good, and to that end waging a perpetual war against God and His people.98 He then points out that the evil of these dreadful beings is of themselves, not of God - coming not from creation but from corruption (Â§ 16) - and closes with two sections upon the relation they sustain to God's providential government. To these closing sections (Â§Â§ 17 and 18), it will repay us to devote careful attention. In them Calvin resolves the dualism which is introduced into the universe by the intrusion of evil into it, by showing that this evil itself is held under the control of God and is employed for His divine purposes; and he does this in such a manner that we scarcely know whether to admire most the justice of the conceptions or the precision and clearness of the language in which they are given expression.99

The first of these sections asserts the completeness of the control which God exercises over the devils. It is true that Satan is at discord and strife with God:100 he is by nature - that is, acquired nature - wicked (improbus) and every propension of his will is to contumacy and rebellion; of his own accord he does nothing, therefore, which he does not mean to be in opposition to God (Â§ 17). But he is, after all, but a creature of God's and God holds him in with the bridle of His power and controls his every act. Although, therefore, every impulse of his will is in conflict with God, he can do nothing except by God's will and approval.101 So it is uniformly represented in Scripture. Thus we read that Satan could not assault Job until he had obtained permission so to do;102 that the lying spirit by which Ahab was deceived was commissioned from the Lord;103 that the evil spirit which punished Saul for his sins was from the Lord;104 that the plagues of Egypt, sent by God as they were, were wrought, nevertheless, by evil angels.105 And thus Paul, generalizing, speaks of the blinding of unbelievers both as the "work of God" and the "operation of Satan," meaning of course that Satan does it only under the government of God.106 "It stands fast, therefore," Calvinconcludes, "that Satan is under God's power, and is so governed by God's will (nutu) that he is compelled to render God obedience. We may say certainly that Satan resists God, and his works are contrary to God's works; but we at the same time assert that this repugnancy and this strife are dependent on God's permission. I am not now speaking of his will (voluntate), nor yet of his efforts (conatu), but only of the results(effectu). For the devil is wicked by nature and has not the least propension towards obedience to the divine will, but is wholly bent on contumacy and rebellion. What he has from his own iniquity, therefore, is that he desires and purposes to oppose God: by this depravity he is stimulated to try to do those things which he thinks in the highest degree inimical to God. But God holds him bound and curbed by the bridle of His power, so that he can carry out only those things which are divinely permitted to him, and thus, will he nill he, he obeys his Creator, seeing that he is compelled to perform whatever service God impels him to" (Â§ 17, end).

This important passage appears first in the edition of the "Institutes" published in 1543; but its entire substance was in Calvin's mind from the beginning. It is given expression, first, in the course of the broader discussion of the relation of God's providence to the evil acts of men and devils incorporated into the second chapter (De Fide) of the first edition of the "Institutes" (1536).107 "Thus, the affliction of Job," Calvin there declares, "was the work of God and of the devil; and yet the wickedness of the devil must be distinguished from the righteousness of God; for the devil was endeavoring to destroy Job, God was testing him (Job i. and ii.). So Assur was the rod of the Lord's anger, Sennacherib the axe in His hand (Is. x.); all called, raised up, impelled by Him, in a word His ministers. But how? While they were obeying their unbridled lust, they were unconsciously serving the righteousness of God (Jer. xxvii.). Behold God and them, the authors of the same work, but in the same work the righteousness of God and their iniquity manifested!" The same line of thought is much more completely worked out, and very fully illustrated from the instance of Job, as a part of the discussion of man's sinfulness in the presence of the machinations of evil and the providence of God, which was incorporated into the second edition of the "Institutes" (1539) and retained from it throughout all the subsequent editions - in the final edition forming the opening sections of the discussion of "How God works in the hearts of men" (II. iv. 1-2).108

Much the same line of thought is developed again in the full discussion of the providence of God which appears in the tract against the Libertines, which was published in 1545. Speaking here of the particular providence of God, Calvin proceeds as follows:109 "It is furthermore to be noted that not only does God serve Himself thus with the insensible creatures, to work and execute His will through them; but also with men and even with devils. So that Satan and the wicked are executors of His will. Thus He used the Egyptians to afflict His people, and subsequently raised up the Assyrians to chastise them, when they had sinned; and others in like manner. As for the devil, we see that he was employed to torment Saul (I Sam. xvi. 14, xviii. 10), to deceive Ahab (I Kings xxii. 22), and to execute judgment upon all the wicked whenever they require it (Ps. lxxviii. 49); and on the other hand to test the constancy of God's people, as we see in the case of Job. The Libertines, now, meeting with these passages, are dumfounded by them and without due consideration conclude that, therefore, the creatures do nothing at all. Thus they fall into a terrible error. For not only do they confound heaven and earth together but God and the devil. This comes from not observing two limitations which are very necessary. The first is that Satan and wicked men are not such instruments of God that they do not act also of their own accord. For we must not imagine that God makes use of a wicked man precisely as He does of a stone or of a piece of wood. He employs him rather as a reasonable creature according to the quality of the nature He has given him. When, then, we say that God works by means of the wicked, this does not forbid that the wicked work also on their own account. This Scripture shows us with even remarkable clearness. For while, on the one hand, it declares that God shall hiss (Is. v. 26), and as it were sound the drum to call the infidels to arms and shall harden or inflame their hearts - yet, on the other, it does not leave out of account their own thought and will, and attributes to them the work they do by the appointment of God. The second limitation which these unhappy men disregard is that there is a very real distinction between the work of God and that of a wicked man when he serves as the instrument of God. For it is by his own avarice, or his own ambition, or his own jealousy, or his own cruelty, that a wicked man is incited to do what he does; and he has no regard to any other end. And it is according to the root, which is the affection of the heart, and to the end which it seeks, that the work is qualified; and so it is rightly accounted wicked. But God has an entirely contrary purpose. It is to execute His righteousness, to save and conserve the good, to employ His goodness and grace towards the faithful, to chastise the ill-deserving. Here, then, lies the necessity of distinguishing between God and men, so as to contemplate in the same work God's righteousness, goodness, judgment, and, on the other side, the malice of the devil or of the wicked. Let us take a good and clear mirror in which to see all that I am saying. When Job heard the news of the loss of his goods, of the death of his children, of the many calamities which had fallen on him, he recognized that it was God who was visiting him, and said, 'The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away.' And, in truth, it was so. But was it not also the devil who had brewed this pottage? Was it not the Chaldeans who had spoiled his goods? Did he commend the thieves and brigands, and excuse the devil, because his affliction had come to him from God? Certainly not. He well knew there was an important distinction to be observed here. And so he condemns the evil, and says 'Blessed be the name of the Lord.' Similarly David, when he was persecuted by Shimei, no doubt said that he had received this from the Lord (II Sam. xvi. 11), and saw that this wretch was a rod by which God was chastising him. But while he praised God, he did not omit to condemn Shimei (I Kings ii. 9). We shall return to this at another place. For the present let it suffice to hear this: that God so uses His creatures and makes them serve His providence, that the instrument which He employs may often be bad; that His turning the malice of Satan or of bad men to good does not in the least excuse their evil or make their work other than bad and to be condemned, seeing that every work receives its quality from the intention with which it is done. . . . On the contrary, we must needs observe that the creatures do their works here in their own degree, and these are to be estimated as good or bad according as they are done in obedience to God or to offend Him. All the time, God is above, directing everything to a good end, and turning the evil into good, or, at least, drawing good out of what is evil, acting according to His nature, that is in righteousness and equity; and making use of the devil in such a manner as in no way to mix Himself with him so as to have anything in common with him, or to entangle Himself in any evil association, or to efface the nature of what is evil by His righteousness. It is just like the sun which, shining on a piece of carrion and causing putrefaction in it, contracts no taint whatever from the corruption, and does not by its purity destroy the foulness and infection of the carrion. So God deals in such a manner with the deeds of the wicked that the holiness which is in Him does not justify the infection which is in them, nor is contaminated by it."

We have thought it desirable to quote at some length one of the more extended passages in which Calvin develops the doctrine announced in the section before us, although it leads us somewhat away from the single point here to be emphasized, into the mysteries of the divine providence. This broader view once before us, however, we may return to emphasize the single point which now concerns us - Calvin's teaching of the absolute control of the evil spirits by God. This seemed to Calvin to lie so close to the center of Christian hope and life that he endlessly repeats it in his occasional writings, and has even incorporated an assertion of it in his Catechism (1545).110 "But what shall we think of the wicked and of devils," he there asks - "are they, too, subject to God?" And he answers: "Although God does not lead them by His Spirit, He nevertheless holds them in check as with a bridle, so that they cannot move save as He permits them. And He even makes them ministers of His will, so that He compels them to execute unwillingly and against their determination what seems good to Him." The recognition of this fact seemed to him essential even to an intelligent theism, which, he urges, certainly requires that God should be conceived not less as Governor than as Creator of all things - as, indeed, the two things go together. "If, then, we imagine," he writes,111 "that God does not govern all, but that some things come about by fortune, it follows that this fortune is a goddess who has created part of the world, and that the praise is not due to God alone. And it is an execrable blasphemy if we think that the devil can do anything without the permission of God: that is all one with making him creator of the world in part." "Now Satan," says he again,112 "is also subject to God, so that we are not to imagine that Satan has any principality except what is given him by God; and there is good reason why he should be subject to Him since he proceeds from Him. The devils were created by God as well as the angels, but not such as they are. It is necessary that we always reserve this, - that the evil which is in the devils proceeds from themselves."113

Calvin was not the man, however, to insist on the control of the devils by God without consideration of the ends for which this control was exercised. He therefore follows up his assertion of this control (Â§ 17) with a discussion of the use God makes of "unclean spirits" (immundi spiritus) (Â§ 18). This use, he tells us, is twofold. They are employed to test, try, exercise and develop the faithful. And they are employed to punish the wicked. On the latter of these he dwells as little as its faithful presentation permitted. Those whom God "does not design to enroll in His own flock," he tells us, He delivers over to the control of Satan as the minister of the divine vengeance; and he pictures in a few burning words the terribleness of their fate. On the employment of Satan and his angels for the profit of God's people he dwells more at length and with evident reminiscence of his own Christian experience. "They exercise the faithful with fighting," he tells us, "they assail them with snares, harass them with assaults, push them in combat, even fatigue them often, confuse, terrify, and sometimes wound them." Yet they never, he adds, "conquer or overcome them." God's children may often be filled with consternation, but they are never so disheartened that they cannot recover themselves; they may be struck down by the violence of the blows they receive, but they always rise again; they may be wounded, but they cannot be slain; they may be made to labor through their whole lives, but in the end they obtain the victory.

There are several things that are thrown out into a high light in this discussion which it will repay us to take notice of. We observe, first of all, Calvin's view of the Christian life as a conflict with the powers of evil. "This exercise," he says, or we might perhaps almost translate it "this drill" (exercitium) - it is the word for military training - "is common to all the children of God." We observe, next, his absolute confidence in the victory of God's children. The promise that the seed of the woman shall crush the head of Satan belongs not only to Christ, but to all His members; and, therefore, he can categorically deny that it is possible for the faithful ever to be conquered or overcome of evil. The dominion of Satan is over the wicked alone, and shall never be extended to the soul of a single one of the faithful. We observe again that Calvin conceives the victory as therefore complete already in principle for every one who is in Christ. "In our Head indeed," he declares, "this victory has always been full and complete (ad plenum exstitit); because the prince of the world had nothing in Him." And we observe, finally, that he holds with clear conviction that it will never be complete for any of us in this life. We labor here throughout the whole course of life (toto vitae curriculo) and obtain the victory only in the end (in fine). The fulfilment of the promise of crushing the head of Satan is only "begun in this life," the characteristic of which is that it is the period of conflict (ubi luctandum est): it is only after this period of conflict is over (post luctam) that it shall be completely fulfilled. It is only in our Head that the victory is now complete: in us who are members, it appears as yet only in part: and it is only when we put off our flesh, according to which we are liable to infirmity, that we shall be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. In these several considerations we have outlined for us very vividly Calvin's conception of the life which we now live in the flesh, a life of faith and hope, not of full attainment: a life filled with conflict, but with the sure promise of victory.

The preoccupation of Calvin's mind with man throughout his whole discussion of creation is very strikingly illustrated by his absorption, even while discussing angels and devils, with human relations and human problems. What he is apparently chiefly concerned about is that men shall understand and take their comfort out of the assurance that angelic hosts encamp about them for their protection, and angelic messengers are busied continually with their direction; that men shall understand and take their admonition from the certainty that numerous most subtle and malignant unseen foes lie in wait continually for their souls. We have pointed out that Calvin's conception of the universe was frankly anthropocentric. We see that this anthropocentrism of thought embraced in it the spiritual as well as the physical universe. He does not say, indeed, that these higher spiritual existences exist purely for man: he only says that for our consolation and the confirmation of our faith the Scriptures insist principally on their employment for the dispensing and administering of God's kindness to His people. Here is no speculative investigation into the final cause of angels. Here is only a practical reference to those functions of angels which it most concerns us to know. But he does teach of course (on the basis of Col. i. 16) that the very creation of angels is referred to Christ as its end: and it might be contended that in this declaration there lie the beginnings of a "gospel of creation" by which all things without exception which have been brought into being are set forth as ancillary to the great end of the redemption of the human race. A certain amount of confirmation may be found for this contention in the unitary conception which, as has been pointed out, Calvin cherished of the universe as a systematized whole. Meanwhile we have no formal discussion from him of the final cause of angels, and not even (at this place, at all events) any guiding hints of how he would resolve such a question. Least of all have we here any such discussion as meets us in many of his followers of the final cause of the devil,114 although the elements of such a discussion are involved in any theodicy, and cannot escape suggestion in any attempt to deal seriously with the great problem of evil. Calvin, therefore, has not failed to suggest them; but not directly in our present context, where he contents himself with assuming the existence of evil in the spiritual world, declaring its origination by the creature and asserting the divine control of it and utilization of it in God's government of the world.115 For what may penetrate into the problem more deeply than this, we shall have to go elsewhere.

Meanwhile, having expounded at some length the nature of the spiritual, and more briefly the nature of the physical, environment of man, Calvin is now able to turn definitely to the subject which had really been occupying his thoughts throughout the entire discussion of creation - man, considered as a creature of God. The ruin which has been wrought in man by sin, he postpones for a later discussion; here he concerns himself only with the nature of man as such. Not of course as if he were inviting an idle contemplation of something which no longer exists and therefore cannot deeply concern us. But with a twofold practical object in view. In the first place, that we may not attribute to God, the author of our nature, those natural evils which we perceive in ourselves, in our present condition. And next, that we may properly estimate the lamentable ruin into which we have fallen, by seeing it as it really is- as a corruption and deformity of our proper nature. With these ends in view he invites us to attend to a descriptio integrae naturae, that is to an account of the constitution and nature of man as such (I. xv. 1).

Man, in his view, owes his origin, of course, to the productive energy of God (I. xv. 5) and is spoken of by Calvin as among all the works of God, "the most noble and supremely admirable example of the Divine righteousness and wisdom and goodness."116 His peculiarity among the creatures of God is that he is of a duplex nature. For that man consists of two disparate elements - soul and body - ought, in Calvin's opinion, to be beyond controversy.117 On the one side, then, man takes hold of lower nature - "he was taken from earth and clay";118 and this surely ought to be a curb to our pride. On the other side - which is "the nobler part" of man119 - he is an immortal spirit dwelling in this earthly vessel as a domicile; and in this he may justly glory as a mark of the great goodness of his Maker.120 Calvin, we perceive then, is a dichotomist, and that not merely inadvertently but with an express rejection of the trichotomistic schematization. He recognizes some plausibility in the arguments advanced to distinguish between the sensitive and rational souls in man; but he finds that there is really no substance in them and advises that we draw off from such questions as frivolous and useless.121

Of the bodily nature of man, Calvin has (here at least) little to say. He is not insensible to the dignity of the human form and carriage, celebrating it in a familiar classical quotation;122 and he admits that by as much as it distinguishes and separates us from brute animals by that much it brings us nearer to God.123 Though he insists that the image of God is properly spiritual,124 and that even though it may be discerned sparkling in these external things it is only as they are informed by the spirit;125 he yet in this very statement seems in some sense to allow that it does "sparkle" at least in these external things, and indeed says plainly that "there is no part of man including the body itself, in which there is not some luminous spark of the divine image."126 What he objected to in Osiander's view accordingly was not. that he allowed to the body some share in the divine image but that he placed the image of God "promiscuously" and "equally" in the soul and body.127 Calvin might allow it to extend even to the body, but certainly he would not admit that it had its seat there in equal measure as in the soul. The only proper seat of the image of God was to him indeed precisely the soul itself,128 from which only it might shine into the body.129

He even, indeed, permits himself to speak of the body as a "prison" from which the soul is liberated at death;130 though this is doubtless merely a classical manner of speech, adhered to without intentional implication of its corollaries,131 whenever at least his mind is not consciously on "the body of this death," that is, specifically, the sinful body. In contrast with the soul, he never tires indeed of pouring contempt upon the body as a mere lump of clay, which is sustained and moved and impelled solely by the soul which dwells in it.132 Dust in its origin, it shall in accordance with its nature, in obedience to the curse of God, return to dust,133 although of course afterwards it shall be raised again in virtue of Christ's redemption; but here we are speaking again of the body, not as it is in itself, but as it is under sin, subject on the one hand to the death from which it was wholly free in the state of integrity134 and to the redemption by which it is recovered from the death incurred by sin. Though then our bodies are in themselves, under sin, mere carcasses, yet as "members of Christ" they cannot "sink into putrefaction without hope of resurrection" (III. xxv. 7). They may be "wretched corpses," but they do not cease to be "temples of the Holy Ghost," and God "wishes to be adored in them." "We are the altars at which He is worshipped, in our bodies and in our souls."135 Hence, as well as for other reasons, Calvin has much to say of the duty of a proper care of the body - of its health and even of its cleanliness. If God deigns to dwell in us we should endeavor to walk in purity of body as well as of soul, to keep our bodies in decency, not to afflict them with austerities, or to neglect them in disease, but so to regulate our lives that we shall be able to serve God, and be in suitable condition to do good.136

Even the body, it must be borne in mind, was not according to Calvin created to be the prey of death. In his commentary on Gen. ii. 16 he tells us that had man not sinned, his earthly life indeed would have ceased but only to give way to a heavenly life for the whole man.137 That man dies is due therefore entirely to sin. Without sin the body itself would have been immortal. Its exinanitio is as much due to sin as the maledictio which falls on the soul.138 By Adam's sin death entered into the world139 and thus alienation from God for the soul, and return to dust for the body. And therefore by the redemption in Christ there is purchased for the soul restoration to communion with God and for the body return from the dust, in order that the whole man, soul and body, may live forever in the enjoyment of the Divine favor. The body is not in and of itself therefore, although the lower part of man and uniting him with the lower creation, an unworthy element of human nature. All that is unworthy in it comes from sin.140

The "nobler part"141 of man, the "soul," or as it is alternatively called, the "spirit,"142 differs from the body not merely in nature but in origin. In its nature, Calvin conceives it as distinctively percipient substance: whose "very nature, without which it cannot by any means exist, is movement, feeling, activity, understanding."143 From the metaphysical point of view Calvin defines it as "an immortal, yet created essence,"144 and he is at considerable pains to justify each element of this definition.

In opposition to the notion that the soul is but a breath (flatus) or power (vis) divinely infused into bodies, but itself lacking essence (quae tamen essentia careat),145 he affirms that it is a substantial entity distinct from the body, incorporeal in its own nature (substantia incorporea),146 and therefore incapable of occupying space, and yet inhabiting the body as its domicile "not only that it may quicken all its parts,147 and render its organs fit (apta) and useful for their activities, but also that it may hold the primacy (primatum) in the government of the life of man," whether in concerns of this life or in those of the life to come (Â§ 6). The substantiality of the soul as an essence distinct from the body he considers to be clear on its own account, and on the testimony of Scripture as well.148 The powers with which the soul is endowed, he urges, transcend the capacities of physical substance, and themselves afford therefore ample proof that there is "hidden in man something which is distinct from the body."149 Here is conscience, for example, which, discriminating between good and evil, responds to the judgment of God. "How shall an affection without essence150 penetrate to the tribunal of God and strike terror into itself from its guilt"; or fear of a purely spiritual punishment afflict the body? Here is the knowledge of God itself. How should an evanescent activity (evanidus vigor) rise to the fountain of life? Here is the marvelous agility of the human mind, traversing heaven and earth, and all the secret places of nature; here are the intellect and memory gathering into themselves all the ages, arranging everything in proper order and even forecasting the future from the past; here is the intellect, conceiving the invisible God and the angels, which have nothing in common with the body, apprehending what is right, and just, and honest, things to which no bodily sense is related: must there not be something essentially distinct. from the body which is the seat of such intelligence (Â§ 2)? It is upon the Scriptural argument for the distinctness of the soul, however, that Calvin especially dwells; and he has, of course, no difficulty in making it perfectly plain that from beginning to end the Scriptures go on the assumption of the distinctness and even the separability of the soul from the body (Â§ 2, ad fin.).

This whole argument was inserted into the "Institutes" for the first time in the preparation of the last edition (1559). But it is old ground for Calvin. It was already traversed by him with great fulness in his youthful tract against the advocates of Soul-Sleep (1534), the main contention of which is that the soul "is a substance and lives after the death of the body, endowed with sense and intelligence."151 Ten years later (1544) it was gone over again somewhat more concisely in his "Brief Instructions to arm all good Christians against the errors of the common sect of the Anabaptists," among whose errors was the contention that "souls, departed from the body, do not live until the resurrection," whether because the soul was conceived, not as "a substance or as a creation having essence, but only as the power which man has to breathe, move and perform the other acts of life, while he is living," or because, while it was conceived as "an essential creature," it was thought to sleep "without feeling or knowledge" until the judgment day. As over against the former and extremer type of Anabaptism he undertakes to demonstrate that "souls have an essence of their own"152 "given to them by God."153 The richness of the Scriptural material at Calvin's disposal is fairly illustrated by the fact that in these three Scriptural arguments, although some of it is employed more than once, yet much of it is in each case drawn from different passages.

It is interesting to observe that Calvin conceives himself to establish the immortality of the soul in establishing its distinct substantiality. In the argument in the "Institutes," the two topics of the essentiality and the immortality of the soul are treated so completely as one, that the reader is apt to be a little confused by what seems their confusion (I. xv. 2). Calvin's idea seems to be that if it be clear that there is "something in man essentially distinct from the body," the subject of all these great powers of intellect, sensibility and will, it will go of itself that this wonderful somewhat will survive death. This point of view is perhaps already present to his mind in the "Psychopannychia," although there he more clearly distinguishes between the proof "that the soul or spirit of man is a substance distinct from the body," and the proof that the soul remains in existence after the death of the body, representing the latter specifically as the question of the immortality of the soul154 - although it does not seem obvious that even the question of the survival of the crisis of death is quite the same question as that of immortality. His method seems in point of fact to be the result of a more fundamental conception. This fundamental conception which underlies his whole point of view seems to be that a spiritual substance is, as uncompounded, naturally immortal. On that presupposition the proof that there is a spiritual substance in man is the proof of his immortality. Of course this assumption is not to be understood to mean that Calvin imagined that any creatures of God whether men or angels are so immortal in and of themselves, that God cannot destroy them or that they exist otherwise than "in Him," and by virtue not only of His purpose in constituting them as He has constituted them, but of His constant upholding power.155 It means only that Calvin supposed that in constituting them spirits God has constituted them for immortality and given them natures adapted for and implicating their endless existence. The proof that there is an uncompounded spirit in man, therefore, is in his view already a proof of immortality.

It must not be inferred, however, that Calvin always relies solely on this indirect proof of the immortality of the soul. More direct proofs are found elsewhere in the "Institutes" as for example, in the chapter on the witness of the works and deeds of God to Him (I. v. 10), where a digression is made to point out that the apparent inequality of the moral government of the world suggests the hypothesis of a further life for its rectification. But the simplicity with which he as a Biblical theologian relies on the Scriptures precluded the development by Calvin of an extended or a complete argument for immortality on general considerations. On his view of the disabilities of the human mind induced by sin, he would not look for such an argument among the heathen. The heathen philosophers, he tells us accordingly, having no knowledge of the Scriptures, scarcely attained to a knowledge of immortality. Almost no one of them, except Plato, roundly asserts the soul to be an immortal essence. Certain other Socratics reach out towards such a conception indeed; but they are all in more or less doubt and cannot teach clearly what they only half believe. Nevertheless Calvin is persuaded that there is ineradicably imprinted on the heart of man a desire for the celestial life, and also some knowledge of it (I. xv. 6). No man can escape then from some intimations of immortality. And after the heart has been quickened by grace and the intellect illuminated by the workings of the Spirit, proofs of it will abundantly suggest themselves.156

Now, this immortal substance, alternately called soul and spirit, which constitutes the animating or governing principle in the human constitution, Calvin is insistent, is an immediate creation of God. He insists upon this, not merely in opposition to the notion that it is no thing at all, but a mere "breath" or "power," but with equal strenuousness in opposition to that "diabolical error" which considers the soul a derivative (traducem) of the substance of God- seeing that this would make "the divine nature not only subject to change and passions, but to ignorance also, to depraved desires, to weakness and every kind of vice" (I. xv. 5) . . . "rending the essence of the Creator that every one may possess a part of it." No, says he, "it is to be held as certain that souls are created" and "creation is not transfusion of essence, but the origination of it from nothing" (Â§ 5). This "origination of the soul out of nothing," which alone can be called "creation," he insists on, again, not merely with reference to the origin of the first soul,157 but also with reference to every soul which has come into existence since. It is horrible, says he, that it should be thrown into doubt by men who call themselves Christians, whether the souls of men are a true created substance.158 Calvin's doctrine of the creation of the soul is thrown up into contrast, therefore, on the one side with his view that all else which was brought into being during the creative week, after the primal creation of the indigested mass of the world-stuff on the first day, was proximately the product of second causes; and on the other side, with his belief in the production of the body by ordinary generation in the case of all the descendants of Adam. The soul of the first man stands out as an exception in the midst of mediately produced effects, as the one product of God's direct creative power in the process of the perfecting of the creative scheme. And the souls of the descendants of this first man stand out in contrast with their bodily forms, as in every case also products of God's direct creative activity. In creating souls (in creandis animabus), he says, "God does not use the instrumentality of man (non adhibet hominum operam)."159 "There is no need," he says again, "to resort to that old figment of some (figmentum), that souls come into being (oriantur) ex traduce."160 "We have not come of the race of Adam," he says yet again, "except as regards the body."161 And not only does he thus over and over again through his writings sharply assert creationism as over against traducianism, but he devotes a whole section of the "Institutes" to the question and formally rejects the whole traducian conception.162

In its nature, as we have seen, this "immortal and yet created essence" which vitalizes and governs the human frame, is defined by Calvin as percipient substance, whose very nature it is to move, feel, act, understand; which is, in a word, characteristically sensibility.163 When we attend to Calvin's conception of the soul from this point of view we are in effect observing his psychology: and, of course, he develops his psychology with his eye primarily upon the nature of man in his state of integrity - or rather, let us say, in his uncorrupted condition (I. xv. 1). "When definitions are to be given," he remarks in another place,164 "the nature of the soul is accustomed to be considered in its integrity." He develops it also, however, under the influence of a strong desire to be clear and simple. Subtleties in such matters he gladly leaves to the philosophers, whose speculations he has no desire to gainsay as to either their truth or their usefulness; for his purposes, however, which look to building up piety, a simple definition will suffice.165 It is naturally upon the questions which cluster around the Will that Calvin's chief psychological interest focuses. We must, however, leave the whole matter of Calvin's psychology and his doctrine of the Will to another occasion. We must postpone also an exposition of his doctrine of the image of God. A survey of these two topics remains in order to complete our exposition of his doctrine of the creature.

Endnotes:

From The Princeton Theologial Review, xiii. 1915, pp. 190-255, continuing the series of articles published in the Review during 1909 (pp. 27-284 of this volume).

Cf. P. J. Muller, "De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn," 1883, pp. 50-51: "Although the importance of the doctrine of creation is felt by the two reformers, yet we seek in vain in Zwingli as well as in Calvin for a definite theory of creation.... The reason why the doctrine of creation was not developed by them in the same degree as that of providence, must no doubt be sought in the fact that this dogma did not at the time give occasion to any polemic."Also, "De Godsleer van Calvijn," 1881, p. 51: "We cannot think it strange that Calvin, as a Biblical theologian, will know nothing of any other theory of creation than that which is given us in the Scriptures."

I. xiv. 20: He refers his readers to Moses, as expounded particularly by Basil and Ambrose, "since it is not my design to treat at large of the creation of the world."

Cf. I. xiv. 3, where he inveighs against "Manichaeus and his sect," who attributed to God the origin of good things only, but referred evil natures to the devil. The sole foundation of this heresy, he remarks, is that it is nefarious to ascribe to the good God the creation of any evil thing: but this is inoperative as "there is nothing in the universe which has an evil nature," - "since neither the pravity nor the malice of either man or devil, or the sins that are born from them, are of nature, but rather of corruption of nature."

Cf. I. xv. 5 : "To rend the essence of the Creator so that everything should possess a part, is the extremity of madness."

I. xv. 5, med.: creatio autem non transfusio est, sed essentiae ex nihilo exordium.

I. xiv. 20: Deum verbi ac Spiritua sui potentia ex nihilo creasse coelum et terram. Cf. Genevan Catechism, 1545, Opp. vi. 15, 16: Per coelum et terram an non quidquid praeterea creaturarum exatat, intelligis? Imo vero; sed his duobus nominibus continentur omnes, quod aut coelestes sint omnes aut terrenae.

Cf. P. J. Muller, "De Godsleer van Calvijn," 1881, p. 53: "Calvin's doctrine of creation is in brief, this: God created the world out of nothing in six days through His Word, i.e. through His Son."

In his Commentary on Gen. i. 1, however, he does argue that the Bible teaches that creation is ex nihilo, the weight of the argument being made to rest on the use of arb, which he sharply discriminates from rcy. Cf. Baumgartner, "Calvin HebraÃ¯sant," 1889, pp. 50, 51: "Richard Simon has pointed, as a proof that Calvin was not strong in Hebrew, to the fact that he understands the ar'B' of Gen. i. 1 in the sense of 'creation ex nihilo.' But here again R. Simon has been misled by his party-spirit, for the modern lexicographers are far from pronouncing Calvin's interpretation wrong (e.g. Gesenius, "Thesaurus," i. p. 236). The most recent view will scarcely allow that the specific idea of creation ex nihilo is expressed inarb but recognizes that the ideas of novelty, extraordinariness, effortlessness are expressed in it, and that thus it may be said to lay a basis for the doctrine in question: cf. Franz Bohl, "Alttestamentliche Studien Rudolf Kittel zum 60. Geburtatag dargebracht," 1913, pp. 42-60, and Skinner, "Genesis," 1910, pp. 14, 15. Calvin does not understand Heb. xi. 3 of creation ex nihilo, but interprets it as the manifestation of the Invisible God in the visible works of His hands, "that we have in this visible world a conspicuous image of God"; "thus the same truth is taught here as in Rom. i. 20, where it is said that the invisible things of God are made known to us by the creation of the world, they being seen by His works." This is the burden of the Argument to the Commentary on Gen. i. and its echoes are heard in "Institutes," I. xiv. 1.

"Opera" (Schuler u. Schulthess), iv. pp. 86 sq.: Zwingli argues that, if the preÃ«xisting stuff is the same in kind as the thing created, we have an infinite series of worlds: if of a different kind, we have an infinite series of materials. Hence the world is not ex materia, but ex causa, which is as much as to say ex nihilo.

Ibid., iv. p. 87: he defines creation as "esse e nihilo; vel: esse quod prius non fuit; attamen non ex alio tamquam ex materia."

I. xiii. 24; I. xiii. 7; cf. Commentary on Heb. i. 2: "By Him ... the world was created, since He is the eternal Wisdom of God, which was the director of all His works from the beginning. Hence too we gather that Christ is eternal, for He must needs be before the world has been made by Him." Cf. also Commentary on Gen. i. 3: "Since He is the Word of God, all things have been created by Him." And see especially the passage in the first edition of the "Institutes" (1536), at the beginning of the comment on the "second part of the Symbol" (Opp. i. 64), where, after declaring on the basis of Heb. i. that "since God the Son is the same God with the Father" He is "the creator of the heavens and the earth," he proceeds to explain that the habit of alluding to the Father nevertheless peculiarly as the "creator of the heavens and the earth" is due to "that distinction of properties, already stated, by which there is referred to the Father the principium agendi, so that He Himself is indeed properly said to act (agere), yet through His Word and Wisdom - yet in His Power." "But," he adds, "that the action in the creation of the world was common to the three Persons is made clear by that word (Gen. i.): 'Let us make man in our image and likeness' by which there is not expressed a deliberation with angels, nor a colloquy with Himself, but a summoning of His Wisdom and Power." Cf. P. J. Muller, "De Godsleer van Calvijn," 1881, pp. 51-52; "De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn," 1883, p. 53.

I. xiv. 3, med.: nefas esse adscribi bono Deo ullius rei malae creationem.

Do.: aliquam esse in mundi universitate malam naturam.

I. xiv. 16 and I. xv. 1: Quidquid damnabile ... est a Deo alienissimum: Cuius in contumeliam recideret, si quid vitii inesse naturae probaretur.

I. xiv. 20, ad fin.: creationem enarrare.

I. xiv. 3, ad init.: vulgi ruditati se accommodans ... populariter loquens.

I. xiv. 1: certe quantumvis late pateat coelorum circuitus, est tamen aliqua eius dimensio.

Cf. the Argt. to the Commentary on Gen. i.: "The circle of the heavens is finite, and the earth, like a little globe, is placed in the center."

I. xiv. 22: omnia se hominis causa condere. Cf. Commentary on Gen. iii. 1: "the whole world which had been created for the sake of man."

"Compendium Theologiae Christ.," Oxford, 1657, p. 36 (I. v.).

This point is very fully elaborated in the Argument to the Commentary on Gen. i. and in the comment on Heb. xi. 3.

"City of God," xi. 5.

"Confessions," XI. xii. 14: "Behold, I answer to him who asks 'What was God doing before He made heaven and earth' - I answer not, as a certain person is reported to have done facetiously (avoiding the pressure of the question), 'He was preparing hell,' saith he, 'for those who pry into mysteries.' It is one thing to perceive, another to laugh-these things I answer not. Far more willingly would I have answered, 'I know not what I know not',than that I should make him a laughing-stock who asks deep things, and gain praise as one who answers false things." The Argument to the Commentary on Genesis i. runs parallel to the opening paragraphs of this chapter in the "Institutes"; and we are there told that Calvin borrows this anecdote immediately, not from Augustine, but from "The Tripartite History," - that is to say, the "Historiae Ecclesiasticae Tripartitae Epitome," Cassiodorus' revision of the translation made at his instance of the histories of Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret by Epiphanius Scholasticus (for whom see Smith and Wace, "Dict. of Christ. Biography," ii. 1880, p. 159). This book supplied the mediaeval Church with its knowledge of post-Eusebian church history.

Ac scite pius ille senex quum protervus quispiam ... per ludibrium quaeriret.

See above, p. 210.

E.g., xi. 321 (iocari quam serio conqueri).

xii. 578.

In his youthful work as a humanist -the Commentary on Seneca's "De clementia" - he betrays the readiness of his laughter by his comments on the amusing matters that come before him. In the comment on I. vii. (Opp. v. 62) he expresses his sense of the ridiculousness of the soothsayer's solemn mummery and quotes Cato's remark "that it was wonderful that every soothsayer did not laugh whenever he met a fellow soothsayer." On I. x. (Opp. v. 84), speaking of the apotheoses of the Roman emperors, he adds: "The rites and ceremonies by which the emperors were consecrated are set forth by Herodianus in his iv. Book; and I am never able to refrain from laughter when I read that passage. The religion of the Romans was as ridiculous as this . . ." Calvin enjoyed his reading and responded to the matter he read with an emotional movement.

Doumergue, "Jean Calvin," iii. 1905, pp. 535-540, where the whole subject is admirably illustrated. See also Doumergue, " L'art et le sentiment dans l'oeuvre de Calvin," Geneva, 1902, the third Conference, pp. 61-67. On Calvin's use of satire, see C. Lenient, "La Satire en France, ou la LittÃ©rature militante au XVIe siÃ¨cle," 1877, i. pp. 107 sq., especially pp. 175 sq. Cf. also the first article in this volume, pp. 11 sqq.

xii. 348: non posse negari omnia oblectamenta.

Opp. xb. 441.

I. xiv. 2: Hic etiam obstrepit humana ratio, quasi a Dei potentia alieni fuerint tales progressus.

I. xiv. 2: a Dei potentia alieni.

I. xiv. 22: quum nihilo difficilius esset, uno momento totum opus simul omnibus numeris complere, quam eiusmodi progressione sensim ad complementum pervenire.

I. xvi. 1. Cf. the Genevan Catechism of 1545 (Opp. vi. 15-16, 1718) where the question is asked why God is called in the Creed only Creator of heaven and earth, when "tueri conservareque in suo statu creaturas," is "multo praestantius" than just to have once created them. The answer is that by this particularizing of creation, it is not intended to imply that "God so created His works at one time (semel) that He afterwards rejects the care of them." On the contrary, He upholds and governs all He made; and this is included in the idea of His creation of them all. Cf. also the "Confession des Escholiers" of 1559 (Opp. ix. 721-722) where we read: "I confess that God created the world at once (semel), in such a manner as to be its perpetual governor. . . ."

It is worth while to observe here how Calvin betrays his sensibility to the glory and beauty of nature (cf. also I. v. 6; Opp. xxix. 300). See the remarks of E. Doumergue, "Jean Calvin," iv. 1910, p. 105.

These phrases occur in the Commentary on Genesis i.

Joannes Wollebius, op. cit., p. 35.

Amand. Polanus, "Syntagma theologiae christianae," Hanov., 1525, v. 2. Cf. Gisb. Voetius, "Disp.," i. 1648, p. 554: "Creation may be distinguished ... into first and second. The first is the production of a thing ex nihilo, and in this manner were produced the heavens, the elements, light; and every day there are so produced human souls, so far as they are spiritual in essence. The second is the production of the essential or accidental form, in praesubjecta sed indisposita plane materia, and that by the immediate operation of the divine power; and in this manner were produced the works of the five days as also many miraculous works in the order of nature as now constituted."

See above, note 9.

I. xvi. 2; cf. also the Commentary on Gen. i. 3.

Cf. KÃ¶stlin, TSK, 1868, p. 427: "In the section of edition 2b (vol. xxix. 510) on God as the Almighty Creator there should be particularly noted the emphasis with which Calvin maintains, in spite of the mediation of the divine activity through creaturely instruments, yet the dependence of these instruments, and the absolute independence of God with respect to them. And in ed. 3 (vol. xxx. 145 sq., 150; Lib. I. c. xvi. Â§Â§ 2, 7) there are given still stronger expositions of this. God, says Calvin, bestows on the instruments powers purely in accordance with His own will, and governs them; and God could work what He works through them, say through the sun, just as easily without them, purely by Himself. God, he says, in ed. 3, lets us be nourished ordinarily by bread; and yet according to Scripture, man does not live by bread alone, for it is not the abundance of food but the divine blessing which nourishes us; and on the other hand (Isaiah iii. 1) He threatens to break the staff of bread." "We have here already," adds KÃ¶stlin, "the general premises for the special use which God, according to Calvin, makes of the Word and of the Sacraments for His saving work." Would anybody but a Lutheran have ever thought of the "means of Grace" in this connection? Nevertheless it is not bad to be reminded that the Reformed doctrine of the "means of Grace" has its analogue in the Reformed doctrine of providence: it is a corollary of the fundamental notion of God as the Independent One.

Commentary on Malachi i. 2-6 (Opp. xliv. 401).

H. Bavinck in the first of his Stone Lectures ("The Philosophy of Revelation," 1909, pp. 9-10) remarks: "The idea of development is not a production of modern times. It was already familiar to Greek philosophy. More particularly Aristotle raised it to the rank of the leading principle of his entire system by his significant distinction between potentia and actus. . . . This idea of development aroused no objection whatever in Christian theology and philosophy. On the contrary, it received extension and enrichment by being linked with the principle of theism." Calvin accordingly very naturally thought along the lines of a theistic evolutionism.

Commenting on Ps. cxlviii. 5 (Opp. xxxii. 434), he remarks: "The pronoun He is therefore emphatic, as if the prophet would say that the world is not eternal as profane men dream, nor is produced by some concurring atoms, but this beautiful order which we see suddenly stood forth (exstitisse) on the mandate of God." Cf. also Opp. xxxi. 327.

I. xiv. 3: diserte et explicate . . . tradamus quae . . . docet scriptura.

I. xiv. 4, end: ex simplici scripturae doctrina.

I. xiv. 8, ad init.: viderint quale habeant fundamentum.

I, xiv. 4: Theologo autem non garriendo aurea oblectare, sed vera, certa, utilia docendo, conscientias confirmare propositum est.

I. xiv. 3: Et certe, quum utiliter semper nos doceat Spiritus, in quibus vero parum est momenti ad aedificationem, vel subticeat prorsus, vel leviter tantum et cursim attingat: nostri quoque officii est, libenter ignorare quae non conducunt.

I. xiv. 4: Ne longior sim, meminerimus hic, ut in tota religionis doctrina, tenendam esse unam modestiae et sobrietatis regulam, ne de rebus obscuris aliud vel loquamur, vel sentiamus, vel scire etiam appetamua quam quod Dei verbo fuerit nobis traditum. Alterum, ut in lectione acripturae, iis continenter quaerendis ac meditandis immoremur quae ad aedificationem pertinent, non curiositati aut rerum inutilium studio indulgeamus.

Zwingli seems to have been an exception, and to have looked upon the ascription of all events to the action of angels and especially to that of devils as inconsistent with the doctrine of providence: he twits Luther with ascribing everything to "the poor devil" and asks what then becomes of universal providence ("Opera," Schuler u. Schulthess, iib. p. 27). Cf. P. J. Muller, "De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn, 1883, p. 77, note. But Luther, remarks Muller, could believe in the determining providence of God, "und wenn die welt voll teufel wÃ¤r." How it strikes a modern of the moderns may be learned from William Wrede's remark ("Paul," E. T. 1907, p. 95): "Angels, in our time, belong to children and to poets; to Paul and his age they were a real and serious quantity."

I. xiv. 9: ex quibus [Scripturis] clarissime evincitur re vera esse spiritus naturae subsistentis; . . . non qualitates aut inspirationes sine substantia sed veros spiritus. Note also Â§ 19: non motiones aut affectiones mentium, sed magis revera, quod dicuntur, mentes, vel spiritus sensu et intelligentia praeditos. Cf. Opp. xlv. 271.

I. xiv, 19: sensu et intelligentia praeditos.

I. xiv. 8: forma spiritus carere certum est. Cf. Opp. xl. 659: quoniam angeli carent corporibus.

I. xiv. 5. Cf. Opp. xlii. 455; Iii. 86.

I. xv. 3, end: "Neither is it to be denied angelos ad Dei similitudinem creatos esse, since our highest perfection, as Christ testifies (Mat. xxii. 30), will be to become like them."

I. xiv. 3; [Moses] angelos Dei ministros inducit, colligere facile licet eorum esse conditorem, cui suam operam et officia impendunt. Cf. 4: angelos sane, quum Dei sint ministri ad iussa eius exsequenda ordinati, esse quoque illius creaturas, extra controversiam esse debet. Again 16: quum a Deo conditus sit diabolus. Cf. Opp. xxxiii. 206; lv. 334.

I. xiv. 3: eorum conditor. Cf. Opp. xxxv. 466, to the same effect.

Opp. Iii. 85--86. The assertion of Psalm cxlviii. 5 (Opp. xxxii. 434) he apparently confines to "creaturia sensu carentibus": but on the first verse he incidentally remarks of the angels that "they were created (conditi sunt)." Cf. the assertions of the creation of the angels, good and bad, Opp. xxx. 316; xxxiii. 206. In the exposition of the Symbol, in the "Institutes," of 1543, he comments on the words "Creator of heaven and earth" thus (chap. vi. $Â§28 and 29): "Under the names of heaven and earth all celestial and terrestial things are comprehended, as if God were said to be the Creator of all things without exception. This is found more clearly expressed in the Nicene Creed, where He is called the Maker of all things visible and invisible. That was done probably on account of the Manichees, who imagined two principles, God and the Devil; and attributed to God the creation of good things, indeed, but referred evil natures to the Devil as their author," - and so on as in the "Institutes" of 1559, I. xiv. 3. Then in Â§ 29: "God then is in the first place said to have created the heavens and all that is contained in the heavens. But in that order are the celestial spirits, as well those who have persisted by obedience in their integrity, as those who by defection have fallen into ruin," etc.-explaining that the fact that Moses does not mention this in the history of creation in no respect throws it into doubt. Cf. the "Confession des Escholiers," 1559 (Opp. ix. 721-722): "I confess that God created not only the visible world, that is the heaven and the earth, and whatever is contained in them, but also the invisible spirits, some of whom have persisted in obedience to God, and some by their own sin have been precipitated into destruction."

I. xv. 5: animas ergo ... creatas esse non minus quam angelos, certo statuendum est. Creatio autem non transfusio eat, sed essentiae ex nihilo exordium.

I. xiv. 4: terram esse perfectam, et coelos perfectos cum omni exercitu eorum, narrat Moses (Gen. ii. 1). Quid attinet anxie precontari quoto die, praeter astra et planetas, alii quoque magis reconditi coelestes exercitus esse coeperint?

Aquinas, "Summa," Pars I. qu. lxi. art. 3, argues: "Angels are a part of the universe. For they do not constitute in themselves a universe; but unite along with the corporeal creation in a universe. This appears from the relation of one creature to another. For the mutual relation of things is the good of the universe. But no part is perfect, when separated off into a whole by itself. It is not therefore probable that God, 'whose works are perfect,' as is said in Deut. xxxii, created the angelic creation off to itself before the other creatures." Jerome, on the other hand, following the Greeks, exclaims on the multitudinous ages which intervened between the creation of the angels and that of man. It is interesting to observe Dante following Aquinas and making the creation of the angels simultaneous with that of the universe at large, the fall of the evil angels being delayed but twenty seconds after their creation (cf. Maria Rossetti's "Shadow of Dante," 1886, pp. 14, 15), and Milton following Jerome and putting the creation of angels aeons before that of man.

So he seems to say explicitly in the middle editions of the "Institutes" (first in 1543), vi.Â§ 29 (Opp. i. 497): "First then God is said to have created the heavens and all that the heavens contain. But in this order are the celestial spirits, whether those who by obedience remained in their integrity, or those who by defection fell into ruin."

"Instit. Theolog.," Geneva, 1625, Loc. vi. 4, p. 61.

"Compend. Theolog. Christ.," ed. Oxford, 1657, p. 36.

"Theoretico-practica theol.," Amstel., 1724, III. vii. 4, p. 340.

Heppe, "Dog. d. ev.-ref. Kirche," 1861, p. 149, adds that this is also the teaching of the Leiden Synopsis, Riissen, Wendelinus and of the Reformed in general. Cocceius ("Summa Theol.," xvi. 12) thought of the day when the waters above and below the firmament were separated.

Cf. a similar rejection of the efforts to determine the numbers and orders of angels in Opp. li. 158.

As cited, III. vii. 30 (p. 348).

I. xiv. 3: nefas esse adscribi bono Deo ullius rei malae creationem.

I. xiv. 3: "The orthodox faith ... does not admit that any evil nature exists in the universe of the world; since neither the pravity and malice whether of man or devil or the sins which proceed from them, came from nature but from the corruption of nature; nor has anything at all come into being from the beginning in which God has not given a specimen of His wisdom and righteousness."

I. xiv. 16: quum a Deo conditus sit diabolus, bane malitiam quam eius naturae tribuimus, non ex creatione sed ex depravatione esse meminerimus.

Do.: contenti simus hoc breviter habere de diabolorum natura: fuisse prima creatione angelos Dei, sed degenerando se perdidisse et aliis factos esse instrumenta perditionis.

I. xiv. 16: quod est ab eo alienissimum.

Sermon xvi. on Job iv. (Opp. xxxiii. 206).

Sermon iv. on Job i. (Opp. xxxiii. 60).

Commentary on I Jno. iii. 8 (Opp. Iv. 334). Cf. farther Opp. xxx. 316 ("Hom. 71 on I Sam. xix."): "Just as when we call the good angels spirits of God, not because they have the same essence with God, but because they were formed and created (formati et creati sunt) by Him, so also it is to be thought of devils whose origin was the same with the good angels. For they were not created evil as we see them today, and with that evil with which the Scriptures depict them, but they were corrupted and alienated from God by their departure from their original state; just as, we know, man too fell away from his purity into his present misery."

Opp. xlviii. 594: "As they have not always existed, so they are capable of reaching their end." Cf. Opp. xxxiii. 365, and xxxviii. 152.

Opp. xxxiii. 206-207 (Sermon xvi. on Job iv.). Cf. Opp. xxxiii. 365, and liii. 92.

I. xiv. 10: the cult of angels in the Church of Rome led Calvin to be particularly insistent against their worship. Cf. Opp. vi. 83, vii. 653.

I. xiv. 10: in eis fulgor divini numinis refulgeat.

I. xiv. 12: si non ut eius manus a nobis considerantur, quae nullum ad opus nisi ipso dirigente se moveant.

I. xiv. 4: Dei ministri ad iussa eius exsequenda ordinati.

I. xiv. 9: quorum obsequio utitur Deus ad suorum protectionem, et per quos turn sua beneficia inter homines dispensat, tum reliqua etiam opera exsequitur.

I. xiv. 5: imperium suum in mundo.

I. xiv. 5, ad init.: ad exsequenda omnia quae decrevit. Cf. Heidegger's threefold distribution of angelic functions: in praeconio laudum eius, necnon in regimine mundi, ecclesiae imprimis ministrant (as cited by Heppe: "Dogmat. d. ev.-ref. Kirche," 1861, p. 146).

"It deserves remark," says P. J. Muller ("De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn," 1883, p. 77), "that Calvin answers the question why God makes use of angels, after a fashion which more or less affects the immanence of God. He points to the multiplicity of our dangers, to our weakness, and to our liability to trepidatio and desperatio. Now God not merely promises us His care; but He even appoints an 'innumerable multitude of protectors, whom He has commissioned to keep watch over us'; so that we may 'feel ourselves without danger, no matter what evil threatens, so long as we are under this protection and care' (I. xiv. 11), - a mode of conception to which he does not, however, hold, since he looks upon all things and man as well rather as immediately dependent on God Himself and on His care alone." Muller quotes Zwingli ("Opera," iib. p. 27) as complaining of Luther's attribution of all evils to the devil as if there were no such thing as the providence of God. "How is it," asks Zwingli, "that to you the poor devil must have done everything, as no man can do in my house? I thought the devil was already overcome and judged. If the devil is now a powerful lord in the world, as you have just said, how can it be that all things shall be worked out through God's providence?" In both Zwingli's and Muller's cases the antithesis is not exact. All things can be worked out by God's providence and yet the Devil be the author of all that is evil; because the Devil himself may be - and is - an instrument of God's providence. God's use of angels in His providence is no injury to His immanent working, because they are the instruments of His immanent working; and Calvin does not depart from the one notion while emphasizing the other, because they are not mutually exclusive notions but two sides of one idea.

Commentary on Jno. v. 4 (Opp. xlvii. 105-106).

I. xiv. 11: illud quidem unum satis superque esse deberet, quod Dominus asserit se nostrum esse protectorem.

Do.: perperam id quidem fieri a nobis fateor, quod post illam simplicem promissionem de unius Dei protectione, adhuc circumspectamus unde veniat nobis suxilium.

Do.: imbecilitas, mollities, fragilitas, vitium.

Do.: pro immensa sua clementia et facilitate.

Cf. Voetius, "Disput.," i. 1648, p. 900, who remarks that most of the Reformed (including himself) deny the existence of guardian angels, adding: "We embrace the opinion of Calvin in Instit. I. xiv. 7, and Com. on Psalms (91) and on Matthew (18), and of the other Reformers, who reject this opinion as vain and curious, and we think that something in this matter has adhered to the ancient fathers from the Platonic theology and the mythological theology of the Gentiles."

This last sentence is new to the latest edition of the "Institutes." We may note in passing that Calvin both in the "Institutes" and in his commentary on the passage, understands Mat. xviii. 10 of "the angels oflittle children" (cf. "Institutes," I. xiv. 7, 9), which seems certainly wrong. Cf. art. "Little Ones" in Hastings' "Dict. of Christ and the Gospels."

I. xiv. 14, end: "For just as the Church and the Society of the Saints have Christ as head, so the faction of the impious and impiety itself is depicted to us with its prince, who holds there supreme dominion." Cf. Opp. xxxv. 35; liii. 339.

I. xiv. 15, beginning: Hoc quoque ad perpetuum cum diabolo certamen accendere nos debet, quod adversarius Dei et noster ubique dicitur. Cf. the whole paragraph and especially its closing words.

Cf. the definition given of demons by Voetius, "Disp.," i. 1648, p. 911,summing up what is more broadly taught by Calvin in the brevity of a definition. A demon, says he, "is an angel, created in integrity, who, subjected on account of his own defection to endless evil and misery, serves, even though unwillingly, the providence and glory of God."

I. xiv. 17: discordia et pugna cum Deo.

nisi volente et annuente Deo, nihil facere posse.

nisi impetrata facultate.

a Domino amandatus.

spiritus Domini malus.

per angelos malos.

opus Dei - operatio Satanae.

Opp. i. 61.

Opp. i, 351; ii. 225.

Opp. vii. 188-190.

Opp. vi. 17, 18; cf. vii. 188 sq.

Opp. xxxv. 152 (Sermon cxxx. on Job xxxiv.).

Opp. xxxiii. 60 (Sermon iv. on Job i.).

Cf. also Opp. xxx. 178; xxxvi. 338; xl. 309; xlv. 269; xlviii. 594, where it is the ascended Christ who is affirmed (as God of providence) to hold the devils in check so that they do nothing save by His will. Also the statement in the "Confession des Escholiers" of 1559 (Opp. ix. 723-724): "And although Satan and the reprobate endeavor to throw everything into confusion to such an extent that the faithful themselves doubt the right order of their sins, I recognize nevertheless that God; as the Supreme Prince and Lord of All, turns the evil into good, and governs all things by a certain secret curb, and moderates them in a wonderful way, which we ought with all submission of mind to adore, since we are not able to comprehend it."

Few of them, however, have been able to say so much so well in such few words as Voetius, "Disp.," i. 1648, p. 922: "Final causes of the devil as such ought not to be assigned, because evil has no end. But although the opus (as we say) in and of itself has no end, the opcrans Deus has - who has made everything for Himself (propter seipsum, Prov. xvi. 4). For to a fixed end He both created him in the state of integrity, and permitted his fall, and left him in his fallen state, and ordained his malice to multiplex good. His ultimate end is therefore the glory of God; the subordinate use of the devil is as an instrument of divine providence, in this life for plaguing men, the pious for their discipline only, the impious for their punishment and undoing; after this life, for torturing the impious. Thus God in both raises a trophy to the honor of His blameless glory."

A brief statement of how Calvin habitually thought of devils may be found in his tract against the Libertines (xii.: Opp. vii. 181-182): "The Scriptures teach us that the devils are evil spirits who continually make war on us, to draw us to perdition. And as they are destined to eternal damnation, they continually strive to involve us in the same ruin. Likewise that they are instruments of the wrath of God, and executioners for the punishment ofunbelievers and rebels, blinding them and tyrannizing over them, to incite them to evil (Job i. 6, 12; ii. 1, 7; Zech. iii. 1; Mat. iv. 1; Lk. viii. 29, xxii. 31; Acts vii. 51, xxvi. 18; II Cor. ii. 11; I Thes. ii. 18; Jno. viii. 44; xiii. 2; I Jno. iii. 8)."

I. xv. 1, ad init.: inter omnia Dei opera nobilissimum ac maxime speotabile est iustitiae eius, et sapientiae, et bonitatis specimen. Cf. Commentary on Gen. i. 26: "If you rightly weigh all circumstances man is among other creatures a certain preÃ«minent specimen of divine wisdom, justice and goodness, so that he is deservedly called by the ancients mikro>kosmov, 'a world in minature."' Calvin seems to be speaking with regard only to the other visible creatures.

I. xv. 2, ad init.: porro hominem constare anima et corpore, extra controversiam esse debet. Cf. Opp. vii. 113-114 (1544): "We hold then, in conformity with the whole teaching of God that man is composed and consists of two parts: that is to say of body and soul."

I. xv. 1, end: ex terra et luto sumptus fuit.

I. xv. 2: quae nobilior eius pars est.

I. xv. 1, end: fictoris sui.

I. xv. 6: qui plures volunt esse animas in homine, hoc est sensitivam et rationalem, . . . repudiandi nobis sunt.

From Ovid, "Metam.," Lib. i.

I, xv. 3. Cf. Commentary on Genesis ii. 7 where he finds in the very way in which man was formed, gradually and not by a simple fiat, a mark of his excellence above the brutes. "Three stages," he says, "are to be noted in the creation of man: that his dead body was formed out of the dust of the earth; that it was endued with a soul whence it should receive vital motion; and that on this soul God engraved His own image, to which immortality is annexed."

In accordance with Augustine's declaration ("De Trinitate," xii. 7 [12]): Non secundum formam corporis homo factus est ad imaginem Dei, sed secundum rationalem mentem. (Cf. "De Gen. ad lit.," vi. 27 (38): imaginem [Dei] in spiritu mentis impressam. . . .)

I. xv. 3: modo fixum illum maneat, imaginem Dei, quae in his externis notis conspicitur vel emicat, spiritualem esse.

"Institutes," I. xv. 3. Cf. A. S. E. Talma, "De Anthropologie van Calvijn," 1882, who thinks Calvin speaks somewhat waveringly about the body.

Promiscue tam ad corpus quam ad animam.

So he says in the "Psychopannychia" (Opp. v. 180) that in the body, mirabile opus Dei, prae caeteris corporibus creatis, apparet, nulla tamen eius imago (in eo) effulget, and reasons out the matter at length in Opp. vii. 112 (1544): "Now where will it be that we shall find this image of God, if there is no spiritual essence in man on which it may be impressed? For as to man's body it is not there that the image of God resides. It is true that Moses afterwards adds (Gen. ii. 7) that man was made a living soul, - a thing said also of beasts. But to denote a special excellence, he says that God inspired the power of life into the body He had formed of dust. Thus, though the human soul has some qualities common to those of beasts, nevertheless as it bears the image and likeness of God it is certainly of a different kind. As it has an origin apart, it has also another preeminence and this is what Solomon means when he says that at death the body returns to the dust from which it is taken, and the soul returns to God who gave it (Eccl. xii. 7). For this reason it is said in the Book of Wisdom (ii. 23) that man is immortal, seeing that he was created in the image of God. This is not an authentic book of Holy Scripture but it is not improper to avail ourselves of its testimony as of an ancient teacher (Docteur ancien) - although the single reason ought to be enough for us that the image of God, as it has been placed in man, can reside only in an immortal soul, if we understand its contents as Paul expounds it, that is to say, that we are like God in righteousness and true holiness."

Sermons on Daniel, Opp. xli. 459.

I, xv. 2: ubi soluta est a carnis ergastulo anima; nisi animae corporum ergastulis solutae manerent superstites. In his early tract (1534) against soul-sleeping, he rings the changes on this idea: ex hoc corporis ergastulo ; corpus animae est career; terrena habitatio compedes sunt; post dissolutam compagem corporis; exuta his vinculis, etc. (Opp. v. 195-196).

This is clearly the case in his early tract, "Psychopannychia," 1534, Opp. v. 195-196, where the body is "a lump of clay," "a weight of earth, which presses us down and so separates us as by a wall from God": and it is only when the load of the body is put off that "the soul set free from impurities is truly spiritual (vere spiritualis) so as to consent to the will of God and no longer to yield to the tyranny of the flesh rebelling against Him."

Opp. v. 195: tanta est vis animae, in massa terrae sustinenda, movenda, impellenda; the soul is on the contrary by nature agile (natura agilis).

Opp. v. 204: Is vero pulvis est, qui formatus est de limo terrae: ille in pulverem revertitur, non spiritus, quem aliunde quam e terra acceptum Deus homini dedit.

Commentary on Gen. ii. 17: "He was wholly free from death; his earthly life no doubt would have been only for a time; yet he would have passed into heaven without death." On Gen. iii. 19: "When he had been raised to so great a dignity that the glory of the divine image shone in him, the earthly origin of the body was almost obliterated. Now however, despoiled of his divine and heavenly excellence, what remains but that by his very departure out of life, he should recognize himself to be earth? Hence it is that we dread death, because dissolution, which is contrary to nature, cannot naturally be desired. The first man, to be sure, would have passed to a better life had he remained upright; but there would have been no separation of the soul from the body, no corruption, no kind of destruction, in short, no violent change."

Sermons on Deuteronomy, Opp. xxvii. 19, 20.

Sermons on Deut., Opp. xxviii. 101; Sermons on I Tim., Opp. liii. 533-536. Cf. in general on Calvin's doctrine of the body, E. Doumergue, Princeton Theological Review, Jan., 1909 (vii. 1), pp. 93-96, where he brings out the salient points in opposition to the representations of Martin Schulze's "Meditatio Futurae Vitae, ihr Begriff und ihre herrschende Stellung im System Calvins," 1901, pp. 7 sq. In his address on "Calvin le prÃ©dicateur de GenÃ¨ve," delivered at the celebration at Geneva of the 400th anniversary of Calvin's birth (July 2, 1909), Doumergue briefly sums up his contentions here: "Oh! no doubt the body is a tent, a prison and worse still in the vehement language of our preacher. But at the same time, 'there is no part of the body in which some sparkle of the divine image is not to be found shining.' It is the 'temple of the Holy Spirit,' 'the altar' on which God would be adored.... And it is in a sort of canticle that Calvin celebrates its resurrection.... 'What madness it would be to reduce this body to dust without hope. No, the body of St. Paul, which has borne the marks of Jesus Christ, which has magnificently glorified Him, will not be deprived of the reward of the crown.' - Accordingly what care we should take of this body! Care for the health is a religious duty: 'God does not wish that men should kill themselves,' and to abstain from the remedies which are offered is a 'diabolical pride.' - Health and cleanliness: here is the whole of modern hygiene, which is to be nowhere more scrupulous or splendid than with the peoples which have been most strictly taught in the school of the preacher of Geneva, - the Scotch and Dutch " (p. 21).

terrena quidem vita illi fuisset tempoialis; but, in coelum tamen sine interitu et illaesus migrasset.

Nunc mors ideo horrori nobis est: primum quia quaedam est exinanitio, quoad corpus: deinde quia Dei maledictionem sentit anima.

On Rom. v. 12.

Cf. Talma, as cited, pp. 37-40.

I. xv. 2: nobilior pars: praecipua pars.

Anima ... interdum spiritus vocatur (I. xv. 2, ad init.). He repeatedly investigates in his occasional works the Biblical usage of the terms "soul" and "spirit." E.g. in his early work, "Psychopannychia," ad init. (Opp. v. 178 sq.), and towards the end of the tract against the Anabaptists (Opp. vii. 111). Cf. Talma, as cited, p. 34.

"Psychopannychia," Opp. v. 184: "If any confess that the soul lives, and deprive it at the same time of all sensation (sensu), they just imagine a soul with nothing of soul about it; or they tear away the soul from itself; quum eius natura, sine qua consistere ullo modo nequit, sit moveri, sentire, vigere, intelligere; and (as Tertullian says) animae anima, sensus sit."

I. xv. 2, ad init.: animae nomine essentiam immortalem, creatam tamen intelligo, quae nobilior eius pars est.

I. xv. 2.

I. xv. 6.

Cf. "Psychopannychia," Opp. v. 180: essentiam immortalem, quae in homine vitae causa est.

I. xv. 2: et res ipsa et tota scriptura ostendit.

I. xv. 2: clare demonstrat latere in homine aliquid a corpore separatum.

I. xv. 2: motus sine essentia - the expression is just in view of modern phenomenalistic psychology.

Opp. v. 177.

Opp. vii. 111-112: que les ames ont une essense propre.

Opp. vii. 112: l'ame humaine a une essense propre qui luy soit donnÃ©e de Dieu.

Opp. v. 184.

Accordingly Calvin in his "Psychopannychia" (Opp. v. 222) says plainly: "when we say that the spirit of man is immortal we do not affirm that it is able to stand against the hand of God or to subsist apart from His power." In his Commentary on I Tim. vi. 16 he explains the declaration that God alone has immortality to refer not to His having immortality a seipso but to His having it in potestate: accordingly, he says, immortality does not belong to creatures save as it is planted in them by the inspiration of God: nam si vim Dei quae indita est hominis animae tollas, statim evanescet: naturae immortalitas does not belong to souls or angels. Similarly in his "Responsiocontra Pighium de Libero Arbitrio" (Opp. vi. 361) he denies that the soul of man is in this sense per se immortal: nam et eo modo neque animam per se immortalem esse concedimus. The exception however proves the rule, and the use of this as an argument against Pighius ex concessu, suggests that there is a sense in which otherwise than eo modo, the soul is per se immortal. Pighius had asserted that "mortality and corruption are ex conditione, non vitio naturae."

"What is his proof?" asks Calvin, and supplies it thus: "Since the body is thus from its principia out of which it is compounded and from the nature of composition." "But by that argument," rejoins Calvin, "it might be proved that the body would be obnoxious to death even after the resurrection; and that the soul is now mortal. For from what principium has the soul sprung except nothing?" "No doubt," he adds, "if we should say that that perfection which God conferred on man from the beginning did not so belong to nature that he had it per se and ex se, I would freely accept this opinion. For not even do we concede that the soul is after that fashion per se immortal. And this is what Paul teaches when he attributes immortality to God alone (I Tim. vi. 16). Nevertheless we do not on that account confess the soul to be mortal: for we do not estimate its nature from the first power (virtute) of the essence, but from the perpetual condition which God has imparted to His creatures." Cf. the tract against the Libertines (Opp. vii. 180): "St. Paul, they say, calls God alone immortal (I Tim. vi. 16). I fully agree with St. Paul. But he means that God alone has this privilege of Himself and of His own nature, so that He is the source of immortality. But what He has of Himself He communicated to our souls by His grace, when He formed them in His image."

Cf. the remarks of Talma, as cited, p. 35: "But still all men, according to Calvin too, have a certain sense of their immortality. By their alienation from the Father of lights, the light in men is not so wholly extinguished that they are incapable of this sense. . . " Talma sums up: "It is very certain that Calvin has not fully and finally proved the existence and immortality of the human soul. But this is not his purpose. His object was not so much to refute the error of those who denied these two things, as to strengthen his believing readers in their faith. And for this end the popular presentation of the grounds on which the two things rest was sufficient." On the difference between the human soul and the souls of animals according to Calvin, see Talma, p. 36.

Cf. e.g. Commentary on Mal. i. 2-6 (Opp. xliv. 401): "Moses understands that man's soul was created from nothing. We are born by generation, and yet our origin is clay, and the chief thing in us, the soul, is created from nothing."

Opp. vii. 180.

On Heb. xii. 9.

On Gen. iii. 6 (Opp. xxiii. 62).

Sermon on Job xiv. 4 (Opp. xxxiii. 660).

II, i. 7. Two subordinate points in Calvin's doctrine of creation may be worth noting here. He remarks in passing while commenting on Numbers xvi. 22 (Opp. xxv. 222) that it may be collected from that passage that each man has his separate soul: and that by this "is refuted the prodigious delusion of the Manichaeans that all souls are so infused ex traduce by the Spirit of God that there should still be one spirit." He returns often to this. Commenting on Job iii. 16 (Opp. xxxiii. 162) he teaches that God breathes the soul into the creature at the moment when it is conceived in its mother's womb.

Opp. v, 184: sensus.

"Responsio contra Pighium de Libero Arbitrio" (Opp. vi. 285): "It is sufficiently clear that [in Basil's remarks here under consideration] the nature of the soul is considered in its integrity; as it is accustomed to be in giving definitions."

Talma, as cited, p. 43, remarks: "The whole manner in which Calvin deals here (Inst., I. xv. 6) with the ... faculties of the soul is remarkable. The style loses the liveliness, the progress of thought its regularity; and the whole makes the impression that Calvin did not feel fully at home in this field. . . ." Talma notes that the discussion of the faculties of the soul is not found in the "Institutes" of 1536, but is already very full inthe edition of 1539. (Cf. Doumergue, "Jean Calvin," iv. 1910, p. 109, for Calvin's psychology.)

÷ 06 Calvinism:

by Benjamin B. Warfield

The Meaning and Uses of the Term

CALVINISM is an ambiguous term in so far as it is currently employed in two or three senses, closely related indeed, and passing insensibly into one another, but of varying latitudes of connotation. Sometimes it designates merely the individual teaching of John Calvin. Sometimes it designates, more broadly, the doctrinal system confessed by that body of Protestant Churches known historically, in distinction from the Lutheran Churches, as ‘the Reformed Churches’; but also quite commonly called ‘the Calvinistic Churches’ because the greatest scientific exposition of their faith in the Reformation age, and perhaps the most influential of any age, was given by John Calvin. Sometimes it designates, more broadly still, the entire body of conceptions, theological, ethical, philosophical, social, political, which, under the influence of the master mind of John Calvin, raised itself to dominance in the Protestant lands of the post-Reformation age, and has left a permanent mark not only upon the thought of mankind, but upon the life-history of men, the social order of civilized peoples, and even the political organization of states.

In the present article, the term will be taken, for obvious reasons, in the second of these senses. Fortunately this is also its central sense; and there is little danger that its other connotations will fall out of mind while attention is concentrated upon this. On the one hand, John Calvin, though always looked upon by the Reformed Churches as an exponent rather than as the creator of their doctrinal system, has nevertheless been both reverenced as one of their founders, and deferred to as that particular one of their founders to whose formative hand and systematizing talent their doctrinal system has perhaps owed most. In any exposition of the Reformed theology, therefore, the teaching of John Calvin must always take a high, and, indeed, determinative place. On the other hand, although Calvinism has dug a channel through which not merely flows a stream of theological thought, but also surges a great wave of human life -filling the heart with fresh ideals and conceptions which have revolutionized the conditions of existence â€” yet its fountain-head lies in its theological system; or rather, to be perfectly exact, one step behind even that, in its religious consciousness. For the roots of Calvinism are planted in a specific religious attitude, out of which is unfolded first a particular theology, from which springs on the one hand a special church organization, and on the other a social order, involving a given political arrangement. The whole outworking of Calvinism in life is thus but the efflorescence of its fundamental religious consciousness, which finds its scientific statement in its theological system.

2. FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE

The exact formulation of the fundamental principle of Calvinism has indeed taxed the acumen of a long series of thinkers for the last hundred years (e.g., Ullmann, Semisch, Hagenbach, Ebrard, Herzog, Schweizer, Baur, Schneckenburger, Guder, Schenkel, Schoberlein, Stahl, Hundeshagen; for a discussion of the several views cf. H. Voigt, ‘Fundamentaldogmatik,’ Gotha, 1874, pp. 397-480; W. Hastie, ‘The Theology of the Reformed Church in its Fundamental Principles,’ Edinburgh, 1904, pp. 129-177). Perhaps the simplest statement of it is the best: that it lies in a profound apprehension of God in His majesty, with the inevitably accompanying poignant realization of the exact nature of the relation sustained to Him by the creature as such, and particularly by the sinful creature. He who believes in God without reserve, and is determined that God shall be God to him in all his thinking, feeling, willing â€” in the entire compass of his lifeactivities, intellectual, moral, spiritual, throughout all his individual, social, religious relations â€“ - is, by the force of that strictest of all logic which presides over the outworking of principles into thought and life, by the very necessity of the case, a Calvinist. In Calvinism, then, objectively speaking, theism comes to its rights; subjectively speaking, the religious relation attains its purity; soteriologically speaking, evangelical religion finds at length its full expression and its secure stability. Theism comes to its rights only in a teleological conception of the universe, which perceives in the entire course of events the orderly outworking of the plan of God, who is the author, preserver, and governor of all things, whose will is consequently the ultimate cause of all. The religious relation attains its purity only when an attitude of absolute dependence on God is not merely temporarily assumed in the act, say, of prayer, but is sustained through all the activities of life, intellectual, emotional, executive. And evangelical religion reaches stability only when the sinful soul rests in humble, self-emptying trust purely on the God of grace as the immediate and sole source of all the efficiency which enters into its salvation. And these things are the formative principles of Calvinism.

3. RELATION TO OTHER SYSTEMS

The difference between Calvinism and other forms of theistic thought, religious experience, evangelical theology is a difference not of kind but of degree. Calvinism is not a specific variety of theism, religion, evangelicalism, set over against other specific varieties, which along with it constitute these several genera, and which possess equal rights of existence with it and make similar claims to perfection, each after its own kind. It differs from them not as one species differs from other species; but as a perfectly developed representative differs from an imperfectly developed representative of the same species. There are not many kinds of theism, religion, evangelicalism among which men are at liberty to choose to suit at will their individual taste or meet their special need, all of which may be presumed to serve each its own specific uses equally worthily. There is but one kind of theism, religion, evangelicalism; and the several constructions laying claim to these names differ from each other not as correlative species of a broader class, but as more or less perfect, or more or less defective, exemplifications of a single species.

Calvinism conceives of itself as simply the more pure theism, religion, evangelicalism, superseding as such the less pure. It has no difficulty, therefore, in recognizing the theistic character of all truly theistic thought, the religious note in all actual religious activity, the evangelical quality of all really evangelical faith. It refuses to be set antagonistically over against any of these things, wherever or in whatever degree of imperfection they may be manifested; it claims them in every instance of their emergence as its own, and essays only to point out the way in which they may be given their just place in thought and life. Whoever believes in God; whoever recognizes in the recesses of his soul his utter dependence on God; whoever in all his thought of salvation hears in his heart of hearts the, echo of the soli Deo gloria of the evangelical profession -by whatever name he may call himself, or by whatever intellectual puzzles his logical understanding may be confused â€“ Calvinism recognizes as implicitly a Calvinist, and as only requiring to permit these fundamental principles -which underlie and give its body to all true religion â€” to work themselves freely and fully out in thought and feeling and action, to become explicitly a Calvinist.

4. CALVINISM AND LUTHERANISM

It is unfortunate that a great body of the scientific discussion which, since Max Goebel (‘Die religiose Eigenthumlichkeit der lutherischen und der reformirten Kirchen,’ Bonn, 1837) first clearly posited the problem, has been carried on somewhat vigorously with a view to determining the fundamental principle of Calvinism, has sought particularly to bring out its contrast with some other theological tendency, commonly with the sister Protestant tendency of Lutheranism. Undoubtedly somewhat different spirits inform Calvinism and Lutheranism. And undoubtedly the distinguishing spirit of Calvinism is rooted not in some extraneous circumstance of its antecedents or origin â€” as, for example, Zwingli’s tendency to intellectualism, or the superior humanistic culture and predilections of Zwingli and Calvin, or the democratic instincts of the Swiss, or the radical rationalism of the Reformed leaders as distinguished from the merely modified traditionalism of the Lutherans â€” but in its formative principle. But it is misleading to find the formative principle of either type of Protestantism in its difference from the other; they have infinitely more in common than in distinction. And certainly nothing could be more misleading than to represent them (as is often done) as owing their differences to their more pure embodiment respectively of the principle of predestination and that of justification by faith.

The doctrine of predestination is not the formative principle of Calvinism, the root from which it springs. It is one of its logical consequences, one of the branches which it has inevitably thrown out. It has been firmly embraced and consistently proclaimed by Calvinists because it is an implicate of theism, is directly given in the religious consciousness, and is an absolutely essential element in evangelical religion, without which its central truth of complete dependence upon the free mercy of a saving God can not be maintained. And so little is it a peculiarity of the Reformed theology, that it underlay and gave its form and power to the whole Reformation movement; which was, as from the spiritual point of view, a great revival of religion, so, from the doctrinal point of view, a great revival of Augustinianism. There was accordingly no difference among the Reformers on this point: Luther and Melanchthon and the compromising Butzer were no less jealous for absolute predestination than Zwingli and Calvin. Even Zwingli could not surpass Luther in sharp and unqualified assertion of it: and it was not Calvin but Melanchthon who gave it a formal place in his primary scientific statement of the elements of the Protestant faith (cf. Schaff, ‘Creeds,’ i. 1877, p. 451; E. F. Karl Miller, ‘Symbolik,’ Erlangen and Leipzig, 1896, p. 75; C. J. Niemijer, ‘De Strijd over de Leer der Praedestinatie in de IXde Eeuw,’ Groningen, 1889, p. 21; H. Voigt, ‘Fundamentaldogmatik,’ Gotha, 1874, pp. 469-470). Just as little can the doctrine of justification by faith be represented as specifically Lutheran. Not merely has it from the beginning been a substantial element in the Reformed faith, but it is only among the Reformed that it has retained or can retain its purity, free from the tendency to become a doctrine of justification on account of faith (cf. E. Bohl, ‘Von der Rechtfertigung durch den Glauben,’ Leipzig, 1890). Here, too, the difference between the two types of Protestantism is one of degree, not of kind (cf. C. P. Krauth, ‘The Conservative Reformation and its Theology,’ Philadelphia, 1872). Lutheranism, the product of a poignant sense of sin, born from the throes of a guilt-burdened soul which can not be stilled until it finds peace in God’s decree of justification, is apt to rest in this peace; while Calvinism, the product of an overwhelming vision of God, born from the reflection in the heart of man of the majesty of a God who will not give His glory to another, can not pause until it places the scheme of salvation itself in relation to a complete world-view, in which it becomes subsidiary to the glory of the Lord God Almighty.

Calvinism asks with Lutheranism, indeed, that most poignant of all questions,

What shall I do to be saved? and answers it as Lutheranism answers it. But the great question which presses upon it is, How shall God be glorified? It is the contemplation of God and zeal for His honor which in it draws out the emotions and absorbs endeavor; and the end of human as of all other existence, of salvation as of all other attainment, is to it the glory of the Lord of all. Full justice is done in it to the scheme of redemption and the experience of salvation, because full justice is done in it to religion itself which underlies these elements of it. It begins, it centers, it ends with the vision of God in His glory: and it sets itself before all things to render to God His rights in every sphere of life- activity.

5. SOTERIOLOGY OF CALVINISM

One of the consequences flowing from this fundamental attitude of Calvinistic feeling and thought is the high supernaturalism which informs alike its religious consciousness and its doctrinal construction. Calvinism would not be badly defined, indeed, as the tendency which is determined to do justice to the immediately supernatural, as in the first, so also in the second creation. The strength and purity of its belief in the supernatural Fact (which is God) saves it from all embarrassment in the face of the supernatural act (which is miracle). In everything which enters into the process of redemption it is impelled by the force of its first principle to place the initiative in God. A supernatural revelation, in which God makes known to man His will and His purposes of grace; a supernatural record of this revelation in a supernaturally given book, in which God gives His revelation permanency and extension â€“ such things are to the Calvinist almost matters of course. And, above all, he can but insist with the utmost strenuousness on the immediate supernaturalness of the actual work of redemption itself, and that no less in its application than in its impetration.

Thus it comes about that the doctrine of monergistic regeneration â€” or as it was phrased by the older theologians, of ‘irresistible grace’ or ‘effectual calling’ â€” is the hinge of the Calvinistic soteriology, and lies much more deeply embedded in the system than the doctrine of predestination itself which is popularly looked upon as its hall-mark. Indeed, the soteriological significance of predestination to the Calvinist consists in the safeguard it affords to monergistic regeneration â€” to purely supernatural salvation. What lies at the heart of his soteriology is the absolute exclusion of the creaturely element in the initiation of the saving process, that so the pure grace of God may be magnified. Only so could he express his sense of man’s complete dependence as sinner on the free mercy of a saving God; or extrude the evil leaven of Synergism (q.v.) by which, as he clearly sees, God is robbed of His glory and man is encouraged to think that he owes to some power, some act of choice, some initiative of his own, his participation in that salvation which is in reality all of grace.

There is accordingly nothing against which Calvinism sets its face with more firmness than every form and degree of autosoterism. Above everything else, it is determined that God, in His Son Jesus Christ, acting through the Holy Spirit whom He has sent, shall be recognized as our veritable Saviour. To it sinful man stands in need not of inducements or assistance to save himself, but of actual saving; and Jesus Christ has come not to advise, or urge, or induce, or aid him to save himself, but to save him. This is the root of Calvinistic soteriology; and it is because this deep sense of human helplessness and this profound consciousness of indebtedness for all that enters into salvation to the free grace of God is the root of its soteriology that to it the doctrine of election becomes the cor cordis of the Gospel. He who knows that it is God who has chosen him and not he who has chosen God, and that he owes his entire salvation in all its processes and in every one of its stages to this choice of God, would be an ingrate indeed if he gave not the glory of his salvation solely to the inexplicable elective love of God.

6. CONSISTENT DEVELOPMENT OF CALVINISM

Historically the Reformed theology finds its origin in the reforming movement begun in Switzerland under the leadership of Zwingli (1516). Its fundamental principles are already present in Zwingli’s teaching, though it was not until Calvin’s profound and penetrating genius was called to their exposition that they took their ultimate form or received systematic development. From Switzerland Calvinism spread outward to France, and along the Rhine through Germany to Holland, eastward to Bohemia and Hungary, and westward, across the Channel, to Great Britain. In this broad expansion through so many lands its voice was raised in a multitude of confessions; and in the course of the four hundred years which have elapsed since its first formulation, it has been expounded in a vast body of dogmatic treatises. Its development has naturally been much richer and far more many-sided than that of the sister system of Lutheranism in its more confined and homogeneous environment; and yet it has retained its distinctive character and preserved its fundamental features with marvelous consistency throughout its entire history

It may be possible to distinguish among the Reformed confessions, between those which bear more and those which bear less strongly the stamp of Calvin’s personal influence; and they part into two broad classes, according as they were composed before or after the Arminian defection (ca. 1618) and demanded sharper definitions on the points of controversy raised by that movement (see ‘ Arminius, Jacobus, and Arminianism’; ‘Remonstrants’). A few of them written on German soil also bear traces of the influence of Lutheran conceptions. And, of course, no more among the Reformed than elsewhere have all the professed expounders of the system of doctrine been true to the faith they professed to expound. Nevertheless, it is precisely the same system of truth which is embodied in all the great historic Reformed confessions; it matters not whether the document emanates from Zurich or Bern or Basel or Geneva, whether it sums up the Swiss development as in the second Helvetic Confession, or publishes the faith of the National Reformed Churches of France, or Scotland, or Holland, or the Palatinate, or Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, or England; or republishes the established Reformed doctrine in opposition to new contradictions, as in the Canons of Dort (in which the entire Reformed world concurred), or the Westminster Confession (to which the whole of Puritan Britain gave its assent), or the Swiss Form of Consent (which represents the mature judgment of Switzerland upon the recently proposed novelties of doctrine). And despite the inevitable variety of individual points of view, as well as the unavoidable differences in ability, learning, grasp, in the multitude of writers who have sought to expound the Reformed faith through these four centuries â€” and the grave departures from that faith made here and there among them â€” the great stream of Reformed dogmatics has flowed essentially unsullied, straight from its origin in Zwingli and Calvin to its debouchure, say, in Chalmers and Cunningham and Crawford, in Hodge and Thornwell and Shedd.

7. VARIETIES OF CALVINISM

It is true an attempt has been made to distinguish two types of Reformed teaching from the beginning; a more radical type developed under the influence of the peculiar teachings of Calvin, and a (so-called) more moderate type, chiefly propagating itself in Germany, which exhibits rather the influence, as was at first said (Hofstede de Groot, Ebrard, Heppe), of Melanchthon, or, in its more recent statement (Gooszen), of Bullinger. In all that concerns the essence of Calvinism, however, there was no difference between Bullinger and Calvin, German and Swiss: the Heidelberg Catechism is no doubt a catechism and not a confession, but in its presuppositions and inculcations it is as purely Calvinistic as the Genevan Catechism or the catechisms of the Westminster Assembly. Nor was the substance of doctrine touched by the peculiarities of method which marked such schools as the so-called Scholastics (showing themselves already in Zanchius, d. 1590, and culminating in theologians like Alsted, d. 1638, and Voetius, d. 1676); or by the special modes of statement which were developed by such schools as the so-called Federalists (e.g., Cocceius, d. 1669, Burman, d. 1679, Wittsius, d. 1708; cf. Diestel, ‘Studien zur Foderaltheologie,’ in Jahrbucher fur deutsche Theologie, x. 1865, pp. 209-276; G. Vos, ‘De Verbondsleer in de Gereformeerde Theologie,’ Grand Rapids, 1891; W. Hastie, ‘The Theology of the Reformed Church,’ Edinburgh, 1904, pp. 189-210).

The first serious defection from the fundamental conceptions of the Reformed system came with the rise of Arminianism in the early years of the seventeenth century (Arminius, Uytenbogaert, Episcopius, Limborch, Curcellaeus); and the Arminian party was quickly sloughed off under the condemnation of the whole Reformed world. The five points of its ‘ Remonstrance’ against the Calvinistic system (see ‘Remonstrants’) were met by the reassertion of the fundamental doctrines of absolute predestination, particular redemption, total depravity, irresistible grace, and the perseverance. of the saints (Canons of the Synod of Dort). The first important modification of the Calvinistic system which has retained a position within its limits was made in the middle of the seventeenth century by the professors of the French school at Saumur, and is hence called Salmurianism; otherwise Amyraldism, or hypothetical universalism (Cameron, d. 1625, Amyraut, d. 1664, Placaeus, d. 1655, Testardus, d. ca. 1650; see ‘Amyraut, Moise’). This modification also received the condemnation of the contemporary Reformed world, which reasserted with emphasis the importance of the doctrine that Christ actually saves by His spirit all for whom He offers the sacrifice of His blood (e.g., Westminster Confession, Swiss Form of Consent).

8. SUPRALAPSARIANISM AND INFRALAPSARIANISM

If ‘ varieties of Calvinism ‘ are to be spoken of with reference to anything more than details, of importance in themselves no doubt, but of little significance for the systematic development of the type of doctrine, there seem not more than three which require mention: supralapsarianism, infralapsarianism, and what may perhaps be called in this reference, postredemptionism; all of which (as indeed their very names import) take their start from a fundamental agreement in the principles which govern the system. The difference between these various tendencies of thought within the limits of the system turns on the place given by each to the decree of election, in the logical ordering of the ‘ decrees of God.’

The supralapsarians suppose that election underlies the decree of the fall itself ; and conceive the decree of the fall as a means for carrying out the decree of election. The infralapsarians, on the other hand, consider that election presupposes the decree of the fall, and hold, therefore, that in electing some to life God has mankind as a massa perditionis in mind. The extent of thedifference between these parties is often, indeed usually, grossly exaggerated: and even historians of repute are found representing infralapsarianism as involving, or at least permitting, denial that the fall has a place in the decree of God at all: as if election could be postposited in the ordo decretorum to the dedecree of the fall, while it was doubted whether there were any decree of the fall; or as if indeed God could be held to conceive men, in His electing decree, as fallen, without by that very act fixing the presupposed fall in His eternal decree. In point of fact there is and can be no difference among Calvinists as to the inclusion of the fall in the decree of God: to doubt this inclusion is to place oneself at once at variance with the fundamental Calvinistic principle which conceives all that comes to pass teleologically and ascribes everything that actually occurs ultimately to the will of God.

9. POSTREDEMPTIONISM

Accordingly even the postredemptionists (that is to say the Salmurians or Amyraldians) find no difficulty at this point. Their peculiarity consists in insisting that election succeeds, in the order of thought, not merely the decree of the fall but that of redemption as well, taking the term redemption here in the narrower sense of the impetration of redemption by Christ. They thus suppose that in His electing decree God conceived man not merely as fallen but as already redeemed. This involves a modified doctrine of the atonement from which the party has received the name of Hypothetical Universalism, holding as it does that Christ died to make satisfaction for the sins of all men without exception if â€” if, that is, they believe: but that, foreseeing that none would believe, God elected some to be granted faith through the effectual operation of the Holy Spirit. The indifferent standing of the postredemptionists in historical Calvinism is indicated by the treatment accorded it in the historical confessions. It alone of the ‘ varieties of Calvinism ‘ here mentioned has been made the object of formal confessional condemnation; and it received condemnation in every important Reformed confession written after its development.

There are, it is true, no supralapsarian confessions: many, however, leave the

questions which divide supralapsarian and infralapsarian wholly to one side and thus avoid pronouncing for either; and none is polemically directed against supralapsarianism. On the other hand, not only does no confession close the door to infralapsarianism, but a considerable number explicitly teach infralapsarianism which thus emerges as the typical form of Calvinism. That, despite its confessional condemnation, postredemptionism has remained a recognized form of Calvinism and has worked out a history for itself in the Calvinistic Churches (especially in America) may be taken as evidence that its advocates, while departing, in some important particulars, from typical Calvinism, have nevertheless remained, in the main, true to the fundamental postulates of the system. There is another variety of postredemptionism, however, of which this can scarcely be said. This variety, which became dominant among the New England Congregationalist churches about the second third of the nineteenth century (e.g., N. W. Taylor, d. 1858; C. G. Finney, d. 1875; E. A. Park, d. 1900; see ‘New England Theology’), attempted, much after the manner of the ‘Congruists’ of the Church of Rome, to unite a Pelagian doctrine of the will with the Calvinistic doctrine of absolute predestination. The result was, of course, to destroy the Calvinistic doctrine of ‘irresistible grace,’ and as the Calvinistic doctrine of the ‘satisfaction of Christ’ was also set aside in favor of the Grotian or governmental theory of atonement, little was left of Calvinism except the bare doctrine of predestination. Perhaps it is not strange, therefore, that this ‘improved Calvinism’ has crumbled away and given place to newer and explicitly anti- Calvinistic constructions of doctrine (cf. Williston Walker, in AJT, April, 1906, pp. 204 sqq.).

It is only with such a universal conception of God, established in a living way, that we can face, with hope of complete conquest, all the spiritual dangers and terrors of our time. . . . But it is deep enough and large enough and divine enough, rightly understood, to confront them and do battle with them all in vindication of the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of the world, and of the Justice and Love of the Divine Personality.’

----

This essay originally appeared in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, edited by Samuel Macauley Jackson, D.D., LL.D., ii. pp. 359-364 (Funk and Wagnalls Company, New York, 1908). This edition, however, was derived from volume five of The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991, pp. 353-366). The electronic edition of this article was scanned and edited by Shane Rosenthal for Reformation Ink. It is in the public domain and may be freely copied and distributed.

÷ 07 On the Literary History of Calvin's Institutes

By Professor Benjamin B. Warfield, D.D., LL.D.

John Calvin was born on the tenth of July, 1509. The Institutes of the Christian Religion was thrown off in the first draft in 1534 or 1535, but did not finally leave its author's hands in its definitive edition until a quarter of a century afterwards, in the late summer of 1559. The four hundredth anniversary of Calvin's birth is, therefore, also the three hundred and fiftieth of the completion of the Institutes, and may be fitly marked by the issue of a new edition of the Institutes in English.

Certainly the publication of this great work in its completed shape is well worth commemorating on its own account. It was the first serious attempt to cast into systematic form that body of truth to which the Reformed churches adhered as taught in the Holy Scriptures; and as such it met a crisis and created an epoch in the history of those churches. In the immense upheaval of the Reformation movement, the foundations of the faith seemed to many to be broken up, and the most important questions to be set adrift; extravagances of all sorts sprang up on every side; and we can scarcely wonder that a feeling of uneasiness was abroad, and men were asking with concern for some firm standing-ground for their feet. It was Calvin's Institutes which, with its calm, clear, positive exposition of the evangelical faith on the irrefragable authority of the Holy Scriptures, gave stability to wavering minds, and confidence to sinking hearts, and placed upon the lips of all a brilliant apology in the face of the calumnies of the enemies of the Reformation.

As the fundamental treatise in the development of a truly evangelical theology its mission has stretched, however, far beyond its "own day. All subsequent attempts to state and defend that theology necessarily go back to it as their starting point, and its impress upon the history of evangelical thinking is ineffaceable. Even from the point of view of mere literature, it holds a position so supreme in its class that every one who would fain know the world's best books, must make himself familiar with it. What Thucydides is among Greek, or Gibbon among eighteenth-century English historians, what Plato is among philosophers, or the Iliad among epics, or Shakespeare among dramatists, that Calvin's Institutes is among theological treatises. "The Institutes of Calvin," says Dr. William Cunningham, to whom will be conceded the right to an opinion on such a matter, "is the most important work in the history of theological science, that which is more than any other creditable to its author, and has exerted, directly or indirectly, the greatest and most beneficial influence upon the opinions of intelligent men on theological subjects. It may be said to occupy in the science of theology the place which it requires both the Novum Organum of Bacon and the Principia of Newton to fill up in physical science, — at once conveying, though not in formal didactic precepts and rules, the finest idea of the way and manner in which the truths of God's Word ought to be classified and systematized, and at the same time actually classifying and systematizing them, in a way that has not yet received any very material or essential improvement."* We should indeed be scarcely flying beyond the mark if we gave enthusiasm itself the reins and adopted as sober criticism the famous distich of the Hungarian reformer and poet, Paul Thuri, which — so the editors of the great Brunswick edition tell usf — many of the old owners and readers of the Institutes have written lovingly on its front :

Praeter apostolicas post Christi tempora chartas, Huic perperere libro ssecula nulla parem.

This famous distich was first mentioned by Thuri's countryman and fellow-student at the feet of Stephen Szegedin, Matthew Skaricza, in his Vita et Obitus Stephani Szegedini, prefixed to Szegedin's Loci Communes Theologice Sincerce, published at Basle, 1585, and at least four times subsequently. Skaricza, who was Reformed pastor at Keri, visited Geneva and wrote before 1571. He tells how, at his request, Beza "showed him, under the simple sod, the grave of the great Calvin, who had commanded that he should be buried thus without any monument" — and, after praising Calvin's doctrine of the Lord's Supper and the general adamantine character of his reasoning, proceeds: "And especially what work was ever more vigorous, more acute, more exact than the Institutes, whether it be the language or the matter that you consider and weigh? So that our Paul Thuri has not unjustly said, Prceter," etc. Thence probably the distich was derived by Gerdesius (Smmuwi Antiquarium, II, i, 451) and Du Buc (Institutiones TheoloQica, 1630, prsef.). Du Buc, in apologizing for writing, enumerates his predecessors in the field of Protestant dogmatics: such as, he says, the works of those great theologians, Melanchthon, Musculus and Peter Martyr, and "that truly golden Institutes of the Christian Religion of John Calvin's concerning which Paul Thuri said

It is this, in effect, which the greatest scholar of Calvin's own age did — that Joseph Scaliger (1520-1609) whose caustic criticisms have made so many scholars writhe. " Oh, what a good book Calvin's Institutes is," he exclaims; "Oh, what a great man! There is none of the ancients to compare with him. . . Calvin stands alone among theologians."* And, indeed, it is none other than this that the Strassburg editors of Calvin's works have done. Certainly among the most widely learned and least extravagant of the scholars of our day, they yet do not scruple to adopt Thuri's expression into the well-weighed language of their prolegomena, and to repeat it as their deliberate judgment upon the merits of the Institutes. Among the other reasons which have led them to devote their time and labor to an edition of Calvin's works, they tell us, is the unique preeminence and high authority enjoyed by this Lycurgus of the Reformed churches. They continue:

"For, though Luther was supremely great as a man and Zwingli was , second to none as a Christian citizen, and Melanchthon well deserves the appellation of the most learned of teachers, Calvin may justly be called the leader and standard-bearer of theologians. For who will not marvel at his command of language and letters, at his control of the entire sphere of learning? The abundance of his learning, the admirable disposition of his material, the force and validity of his reasoning in dogmatics, the acuteness and subtlety of his mind, and the alternating gay and biting saltness of his polemics, the felicitous perspicuity, sobriety and sagacity of his exegetics, the nervous eloquence and freedom of his paraenetics, his incomparable legislative prudence and wisdom in the constitution, ordering and governing of the churches — all this is fully recognized among men of learning and candor. Even among Romish controversialists themselves, there is none to-day possessed of even a moderate knowledge of these matters or endowed with the least fairness in judgment, who does not admire the richness of his reasoning and ideas, the precision of his language, the weight and clearness of his diction, whether in Latin or French. All these qualities are, of course, present in his other writings, but they are especially striking in that immortal Institutes of the Christian Religion, which beyond all controversy far excels all expositions of the kind that have been written from the days of the apostles down, including, of course, Melanchthon's Loci Theologici; and which captivates most timely, Prater," etc. The essential facts concerning Thuri (one of five of the name who achieved fame in Hungary in the sixteenth century) are summed up in the epitaph written by his son, the learned poet, George Thuri: even to-day the learned and candid reader, even though he may be committed to different opinions, and wrests from him an unwilling admiration."*

So estimating the Institutes, it is no wonder that these learned editors wished to begin their edition with this work. This is how they explain their procedure:

"In undertaking a new collection of the works of John Calvin, of immortal memory— a body of writings worthy of his great name — we have determined to begin with the Institutes of the Christian Religion. That work does not, to be sure, hold the first place among his writings in the order of composition, though very few of them preceded it: but none of them is superior to it in the fame it enjoys. It has often happened that a book distinguished by the great applause of men has afterwards fallen into neglect through the harsher judgment or the careless indifference of a later time; often, too, that one which reached few minds at first, and almost escaped notice, has, as time proceeded, emerged from obscurity and is daily celebrated with increasing praise. But with regard to this book, seized upon from its very cradle with great and widespread avidity, and scrutinized by its very adversaries with a zeal born of envy, its glory has abided the same, intact now through three centuries, without the least diminution or fading, despite the frequent changes which successive schools of theology have introduced into the treatment of Christian doctrine. If it were the custom of our time, as it was formerly, to collect at the beginning of volumes eulogies pronounced on their writers by various authors, we could gather here a great harvest of laudations, and time and paper would fail us before the material at our disposal would be exhausted,"

One of the marvels connected with this remarkable book is the youth of its author when it was written. It is true we do not know with certainty precisely when it was written. But, as the colophon of the first edition tells us, it was published 'at Basle in March, 1536, and the Prefatory Letter to the King of France, which was written, as we know, some time after the book itself, is dated on the 23d of the preceding August. In the opening words of this preface, Calvin explicitly declares that when the work was written he had no thought of presenting it to Francis. 'When I first put hand to this work," he says, "nothing was less in my thoughts, most illustrious king, than to write a book which should be presented to j^our Majesty. My intention was only to inculcate some elementary truths, by which those interested in religion might be trained to true piety — and at this task I toiled chiefly for our French, multitudes of whom I saw to be hungering and thirsting after Christ, but very few to be possessed of even a slight knowledge of Him. That this was my purpose, the book itself shows by its simple and elementary manner of teaching." It would seem natural to suppose, therefore, that the book was composed some weeks or possibly even months before the middle of 1535 — perhaps even in 1534.

There are not lacking some further considerations which support this supposition. A direct statement to this effect is made, indeed, by an almost contemporary author — Florimond de Raemond (1540-1602), counsellor of the Parlement of Bordeaux, who wrote from the Romish point of view a Histoire de la Naissance, Progrez et Decadence de VHeresie de ce Steele (Paris, 1605, and again 1623). His statements are, to be sure, scarcely worthy of credence when unsupported; but when, as in the present case, they are corroborative of what is otherwise probable, they may be worth attention. He represents Calvin as, on leaving Paris, sojourning three years at Angouleme — a manifest error* — and continues as follows:

"Angouleme was the forge where this new Vulcan beat out the strange opinions which he afterwards published; for it was there that he wove to the astonishment of Christendom the fabric of his Institutes, which may be called the Koran or rather the Talmud of heresy, being, as it is, a mass of all the errors that have ever existed in the past, or ever will exist, I verily believe, in the future He was commonly called the Greek of Claix, from the name of his patron, the cure of Claix, because he made a constant parade of his Greek, without, to be sure, knowing very much of it This Greek of Claix, then, held in high esteem and reputation, and loved by all who loved letters, would weave into his speech remarks about religion and continually drop piquant words against the authority and traditions of the church. He enjoyed the favor of many persons of authority, especially of Anthony Chaitoux, Prior of Bouteville, who has since been called the Pope of the Lutherans, and of the Abbe de Bassac, two men of letters, eager to gather together all the good books they could meet with, and of the Sieur de Torsac, brother of President la Place, who afterwards became the historian of Calvinism. Calvin was often with these two, in the company of du Tillet also. Their rendezvous was in a house outside the town of Angouleme, named Girac, where the Prior of Bouteville ordinarily made his dwelling There he entertained them with the sketches for his Institutes, laying open to them all the secrets of his theology, and read to them the chapters of his book as he composed them, laboring so assiduously on it that he often passed entire nights without sleeping and whole days without eating. It is a pleasure to me to follow step by step the course of this man fatal to our France, and to touch upon all the details of his training, because no one has written it down before. And as I have taken the trouble to inform myself of the truth, I make no complaint of the trouble of writing it."t

This picture of Calvin working out his treatise in his retirement at Angouleme seems rather overdrawn. It is quite clear, moreover, not only that the author has wrongly given to Angouleme the whole three years that extended between Calvin's flight from Paris late in 1533 and his arrival in Geneva late in July, 1536, but also that he has in mind the Institutes, not as first published in the spring of 1536, but in the elaborated form which it took only later. That the book may have been written at Angouleme, where Calvin seems to have spent the greater part of the year from the autumn of 1533 to the autumn of 1534, !in the house of his wealthy friend, Louis du Tillet, is in itself, however, certainly possible. And such a supposition may account for Beza's placing it, in the chronological list of Calvin's works which he published immediately after Calvin's death, directly after his first work, the commentary on Seneca's de dementia, which was published in April, 1532, and before his next book, the Psychopannychia, which was written in 1534.* It may, indeed, be said that Beza was certainly laboring under a misapprehension as to the date of the publication of the Institutes, and that it is due to this error that he so places it in his catalogue, and not to the influence of knowledge on his part that the book was written earlier than the date of its publication He certainly says in the first edition of his Life of Calvin that Calvin "left France in 1534, and had his first Institutes printed that same year at Basle, as an apology addressed to King Francis, first of the name, in behalf of the poor persecuted believers upon whom the name of Anabaptists was imposed in order to excuse the persecution of the Gospel in the eyes of the Protestant princes." And he was certainly wrong in so saying — as is evident, were there nothing else to show it, from the fact that the persecutions in question did not b6gin until early in 1535. Nevertheless, it is not clear that knowledge on Beza's part that the Institutes was written in 1534 may not be rather the cause of his error here as to the date of its publication; an error of which he seems subsequently to have become aware, as he suppressed the whole passage in the second edition of his book.

Whatever support may come from these doubtful passages, however, the main ground for supposing that the Institutes was composed at some point earlier than the middle of 1535, when the Introductory Epistle was written, must be drawn from the pointed discrimination that is made by both Calvin and Beza between the writing and the publishing of the book — as determined by wholly different motives, arising out of changing circumstances, and, therefore, arguing different times. As we have seen, this is plainly asserted in the opening words of the Epistle itself, where his motives in writing his Institutes are declared by Calvin himself. This account is supplemented by the full account of his motives in publishing the book, given in that precious autobiographical fragment which is included in the Preface to his Commentary on the Psalms. It will be wise to have this pretty fully before us, as it will be of use in the discussion of more than one point in the history of the Institutes.

"Leaving my native country, France," says Calvin, "I in fact retired into Germany, expressly for the purpose of being able there to enjoy in some obscure corner the repose which I had always desired, and which had been so long denied me. But lo! whilst I lay hidden at Basle and known only to a few people, many faithful and holy people were burnt alive in France; and the report of these burnings having reached foreign nations, they excited the strongest disapprobation among a great part of the Germans, whose indignation was kindled against the authors of such tyranny. In order to allay this indignation, certain wicked and lying pamphlets were circulated, stating that none were treated with such cruelty but Anabaptists and seditious persons, who, by their perverse railings and false opinions, were overthrowing not only religion, but also all civil order. Observing that the object which these instruments of the court aimed at by their disguises was not only that the disgrace of shedding so much innocent blood might remain buried under the false charges and calumnies which they brought against the holy martyrs after their death, but also that afterwards they might be able to proceed to the utmost extremity in murdering the poor saints without exciting compassion toward them in the breasts of any, it appeared to me, that, unless I opposed them to the uttermost of my ability, my silence could not be vindicated from the charge of cowardice and treachery. This was the consideration which induced me to publish my Institutes of the Christian Religion. My objects were, first, to prove that these reports were false and calumnious, and thus to vindicate my brethren, whose death was so precious in the sight of the Lord; and next, that as the same cruelties might very soon after be exercised against many unhappy individuals, foreign nations might be touched with at least some compassion toward them and solicitude about them. When it was then published, it was not that copious and labored work which it now is, but only a small treatise, containing a summary of the principal truths of the Christian religion; and it was published with no other design but that men might know what was the faith held by those whom I saw basely and wickedly defamed by those flagitious and perfidious flatterers. That my object was not to acquire fame, appeared from this, that immediately afterwards I left Basle, and particularly from the fact that nobody there knew that I was the author. Wherever else I have gone, I have taken care to conceal that I was the author of that performance; and I had resolved to continue in the same privacy and obscurity, until at length William Farel detained me at Geneva, not so much by counsel and exhortation, as by a dreadful imprecation, which I felt to be as if God had from heaven laid His mighty hand upon me to arrest me."*

The plain implication of this passage is that Calvin had the manuscript of his Institutes by him, and was led to publish it as an apologetical document by the malignant aspersions on the character of the saints slain in France as if they were a body of mere fanatics; by reading it the world would know the sort of doctrine held by the French martyrs. How long he had had it by him we have no means of certainly divining; but the persecutions in France had begun early in 1535, and it does not seem as if the book could have been so spoken of if it had been written subsequently to this. Whether, however, it was written in Angoul^me in 1534 or in Basle in 1535 makes little difference. Calvin was born July 10, 1509. His dedicator^" letter to Francis I is dated August 23, 1535 — twenty-six years afterwards. The Institutes was beyond question written,. then, before he had completed his twenty-sixth year, and possibly before he had completed his twenty-fifth year. It was in the hands of the public before he had completed his twenty-seventh year.

II

In estimating the nature of this performance, there are two other facts which we should take into consideration, one of an enhancing, the other of a moderating character. We must bear in mind, on the one hand, that the young Calvin's book had practically no predecessors, but broke out a new path for itself; but also, on the other hand, that when it was first given to the public it was far from being the complete treatise in dogmatic theology which we know, but was, as he himself describes it, in the extract already quoted from the Preface to his Commentary on the Psalms, doubtless with some exaggeration of its unimportance, not "densum hoc et laboriosum opus, quale nunc exstat, sed breve duntaxat enchiridion" — "seulement un petit livret contenant sommairement les principales matieres" — "a brief handbook," a "little booklet." From that small beginning it ^grew under his hand from edition to edition, and was transformed from a short handbook on religion for the people into a scientific treatise in dogmatic theology for students of theology.

When we say it had "practically no predecessors," we do not mean to obscure the fact that before it certain attempts had been made to set forth the fundamental articles of the Christian religion as the Protestants conceived them. As a matter of fact, Calvin's Institutes was preceded by three such earlier attempts, two of which at least were of considerable importance. The very nature of the Reformed movement imposed on the Protestant party the necessity of giving a definite account of itself. As Reuss admirably puts it,* such a declaration of principles was necessary in the face of adversaries armed with an authority consecrated by ten centuries, and charging the new movement with blasphemy, with the destruction of all order, human and divine, with the overthrow of the whole social fabric; it was necessary in the face of troubled friends who gave the reform their sympathy, but were frightened at the uproar it caused and the very efforts which were required to sustain it; it was necessary, above all, in the face of the radical party which always accompanies the advance of the great movements which agitate humanity, and is always ready to compromise the good cause and to alienate those who judge things according to their first results. It was inevitable, therefore, that even the very first steps of the Reformation should produce attempts to state in some methodical way the recovered truths of the Gospel.

The first Protestant Dogmatics accordingly saw the light scarcely four years after Luther nailed up his theses on indulgences (1521). It did not, indeed, come from the hand of Luther himself; but it came from the hand of his chief helper in the Gospel, the saintly and learned Melanchthon. Thus, as Reuss says, "the first attempt to formulate the evangelical doctrine according to the methods of the schools was the work of a young professor of the humanities scarcely twenty-three years old, who by this publication laid the foundations of Lutheran dogmatics and impressed on them the direction which they did not cease to follow for a whole century." The Loci Theologici of Melanchthon in its first form scarcely exceeded in size one of our catechisms, and, owing its composition to a course of lectures on the Epistle to the Romans given to a private class, followed in its order the emergence of the topics in that epistle, and thus lacked all systematic arrangement.! But it was written in a classic style of great simplicity, which deserved its great popularity, and was gradually wrought by its author into an ever-improving arrangement of topics. Four years after the publication of Melanchthon's Loci Theologici, the far better ordered and more penetrating work of Zwingli appeared (1525), entitled Commentarius de vera et falsa relijione, written at the solicitation of the Italian and French refugees, and, like Calvin's Institutes, introduced with a noble dedicatory letter to Francis I. Of much less importance than either of these is the manual of William Farel — the first theological treatise written in the French language — entitled Summaire hriefue declaration daucuns lieux fort necessaires a ung chascun Chrestien pour mettre sa confiance en Dieu et ayder son prochain, etc., a treatise distinguished by simplicity of language, a truly Biblical popularity and a pervasive application to the Christian life.* Whether Calvin was acquainted with these works or not, we have no direct evidence to show. It may be assumed. But in any event he wrote with independence, and with an unexcelled command of this special field which showed itself ever greater with each new edition.

Were indeed the comparison with his predecessors made only with the first edition of Calvin's Institutes, his superiority, though marked, would be less great. But the first edition of the Institutes was, as we have said, only the first stage in a development,! and was a less satisfactory stage to its author than to any of his readers. He himself speaks almost with contempt of his own production. In the Preface to the second edition, which was published in 1539, he says: "In the first edition of this work of ours, because I had not the least expectation of that success which God in His goodness has given it, I had', for the greater part, performed my office perfunctorily, as is customary in trivial undertakings (in minutis operibus)." Accordingly the title of this second edition, on which he had bestowed much labor and for the late appearance of which he apologizes, is made to run: Institutio Christiance Religionis nunc vers demum suo titulo respondens. In it the text is swelled to something more than double its original bulk; and its character is so changed that the reworked volume is put forth as a totally new book with a different purpose from that had in view when it was first composed. The book was written, as we are told in the dedicatory letter to Francis I, solely to supply rudimentary instruction in religion to the neglected multitudes, and was, therefore, " composed in a simple and elementary form, suitable for instruction." It was published, as we are told in the Preface to the Psalms, to exhibit to the world what the French Protestants really believed, and to render incredible the calumnies by which their judicial murder was excused. It was now revised or rather elaborated, in order to fit it to be a text-book in theolog5^ "I may add," continues Calvin in his Preface, "that my object in this labor" of re-working the Institutes " was this: so to prepare and train candidates in sound theology for the reading of the divine Word that they might both have an easy introduction to it and proceed in it with unfaltering step, seeing I have endeavored to give such a summary of religion in all its parts, and have digested it into such an order as to make it not difficult for any one who is rightly acquainted with it, to ascertain what he ought properly to look for in Scripture, and also to what head he ought to refer whatever is contained in it." In other words, Calvin now designed his Institutes to be a doctrinal introduction to the study of the Scriptures; and he goes on to explain that the fact that this book was accessible would enable him, when commenting on Scripture, to pass over doctrinal points without long discussion. To this conception he kept, throughout the labor of subsequent revision. For not even the enlarged Institutes of 1539 satisfied him. Six additional revisions were made by him before what we may call the definitive edition of 1559 was reached. In this the Institutes appears not only once more doubled in length — now about five times the size of the "booklet" of 1536* — but entirely altered in arrangement, and presenting, at last, that excellent disposition of its material in which it has come down to us, and by which it has won the unalloyed admiration of subsequent ages.

In the Preface to this edition, Calvin, speaking of the labor he had expended in bringing the book as first published to a worthier form, says: "This I attempted not only in the second edition, but in every subsequent one the work has received some improvement. But though I do not regret the labor previously expended, I never felt satisfied until the work was arranged in the order in which it now appears," On the title-page, accordingly, we read: " Institutio Christiance Religionis, in libros quatuor nunc primum digesta, certisque distincta capitibus ad aptissimam methodum: aucta etiam tam magna accessione ut propemodum opus novum haberi possit." The first edition was divided into six chapters — on the Law, Faith, Prayer, the Sacraments, Spurious Sacraments and Christian Liberty, the first three chapters being essentially expositions of the Decalogue, the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer, while the concluding three treated the matters chiefly in dispute at the time. As the material grew, these six chapters were increased partly by division, partly by insertion of additional topics, to seventeen in the second edition and twenty-one in subsequent editions, but remained somewhat artificially ordered. With the edition of 1559, however, a totally new arrangement was introduced, which reduced the whole to a simple and beautiful order — redacted into four books, each with its own chapter divisions (from seventeen to twenty-five), subdivided into sections. These four books treat in turn of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and the Holy Catholic Church — "of the knowledge of God the Creator," "of the knowledge of God the Redeemer," "of the mode of receiving the grace of Christ," and "of the external means of salvation." The order was suggested by the consecution of topics in the Apostles' Creed, and follows what is called the Trinitarian method of arrangement, or the order of God's revelation as Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The discovery of this simple principle of arrangement gave the final touch to the Institutes as a work of art and permitted it to make its due impression upon the mind of the reader. What kind of impression it makes on a spirit sensitive to form and artistic effect, Mr. Peter Bayne may teach us. "The Institutes,^' he says, "are in all, save material form, a great religious poem, as imaginative in general scheme, 'and as sustained in emotional heat, as Paradise Lost, though, of course, not to be compared, for beauty of language or picturesqueness of detail, with Milton's poem. Calvin treats, in four successive books, of Christ the Creator, Christ the Redeemer, Christ the Inspirer, and Christ the King; if he had written in verse, avoided argumentative discussion, and called his work The Christiad, it would have been the most symmetrical epic in existence."*

It was only, then, in 1559 that the Institutes as we know the book was finished. Throughout the whole quarter of a century from the stay in Angouleme in 1534 to the appearance of this, its eighth edition, it was in a true sense in the making, and not until its appearance in this form was it completed. The changes it had undergone since its composition were immense — quintupling its size, revolutionizing its arrangement, changing its very purpose and proposed audience. And yet through all these changes it remained in a true sense the same book, and bore in its bosom precisely the same message. In the case of others of the great writers of the Reformation period, Reuss strikingly remarks, their several publications may mark the stations of their gradual growth in knowledge or conviction; in Calvin's case the successive editions mark only stages in the perfection of his exposition of principles already firmly grasped and clearly stated:!

"The masterpiece of Calvin offers in this respect an interest altogether peculiar. We have seen how often it was reworked, how in each rewriting it was enriched and transformed, how from the little sketch it had been at first it ended by becoming a thick volume, how the simple popular outline was changed into a learned system, and nevertheless, through all these metamorphoses, which left no single page unaffected, the idea, the theological conception, remained the same, the principles never varied. Its adversaries, in whose eyes change was in itself the worst of errors, vainly strove to discover variations in the doctrine taught in this book. Calvin added, developed, defined — he did not retrench or retract anything. And it was before he had finished his twenty-sixth year that he found himself in full possession of all the productive truths of his theology and never afterwards, during a life of thought and of incessant mental labor, did he find in his work either principles to abjure or elements fundamentally to alter. "

III

I Another of the notable facts about the Institutes is that it was published by its author in two languages — Latin and French. The honor of priority has been a matter of perennial dispute between the two. The earliest French edition, copies of which have as yet come to light, however, is that of 1541; and it speaks of itself in such a manner as apparently to exclude an earlier French edition, and certainly to exclude a French original for the work. It bears on the title-page the declaration that the book was " composed in Latin by John Calvin and translated into French by the same." And in the Preface the following explicit statement occurs : " Seeing, then, how necessary it was in this manner to aid those who desire to be instructed in the doctrine of salvation, I have endeavored, according to the ability which God has given me, to employ myself in so doing, and with this view have composed the present book. And first I wrote it in Latin (et primierement I'ay mis en latin), that it might be serviceable to all studious persons, of what nation soever they might be; and afterwards (puis apres), desiring to communicate any fruit that might be in it to my French countrymen, I translated it into our own tongue (I'ay aussi translate en nostre langue)." It is, of course, true that the mere fact that no copy of an earlier French edition has as yet turned up does not in itself exclude the possibility that such a one may be some day chanced upon ; and it may even be allowed that the language just quoted may possibly be pressed to refer to the Latin edition of 1539 alone — which Calvin considered the first edition worthy of the name,* and of which the French is certainly a translation. But in the absence of any trace of an earlier French edition, we submit, the natural implication of the words is that the Latin Institutes is the fundamental and the French the derived Institutes.

We are pointed, indeed, to certain facts which are said to imply an earlier French edition. But these seem capable of plausible explanation without this assumption. The most important of them consist of passages from Calvin's own writings, notably the autobiographical passage in the Preface to his Commentary on the Psalms, where he says that when he published his Institutes nobody at Basle knew that he was the author of the book, and a sentence in a letter to Francis Daniel, written on the 13th October, 1536, in which he speaks of contemplating "a French edition of our little book," It is argued with respect to the former passage that it must mean that the first edition of the Institutes was published anonymously, and that this cannot be said of the Latin edition of 1536, since it bore Calvin's name conspicuously on its front; therefore the reference must be to a previous French issue, published without the name of its author appearing. A careful reading of the passage, however, will convince us that this explanation cannot stand. The ignorance ascribed to the people of Basle as to Calvin's authorship of the book is evidently represented as continuing until Calvin had left that city, and as shared by others outside the city at a later date; in any event, therefore, the Latin edition published before he left Basle comes into account, and it is plain that it is not anonymous publication that he is speaking of, but cautious conduct on the part of the author — perhaps with a reference to the further fact that he lived in Basle under an assumed name.* The statement in the letter to Daniel, on the other hand, does seem to show that already in the autumn of 1536 Calvin was contemplating a French version of "his little book;"t and this is a very interesting piece of information; but it is clear enough that, for some reason, the project was abandoned or perhaps we should better say was fulfilled only in the edition of 1541. In any event, the reference cannot point to an original edition of the Institutes in French, as it distinctly speaks of the project as of a French edition of an already existent Latin . It would seem, then, pretty certain that the French editions of the Institutes begin with that of 1541, which is a close rendering of the Latin of 1539.

The first French edition of the Institutes, then, that of 1541, is a careful translation by Calvin himself (as the title-page and Preface alike inform us) of the second Latin edition of 1539. The subsequent revisions of the Latin text repeat themselves in editions of the French — the Latin of 1543 (repeated in 1545) in the French of 1545; the Latin of 1550 (repeated in 1553 and 1554) in the French of 1551 (repeated in 1553 and 1554); and, finally, the definitive Latin of 1559 (repeated twice in 1561) in the French of 1560 (repeated twice in 1561, three times in 1562, and again in 1563 and 1564). There is a remarkable fact about the final, French edition, however, which requires notice. The former editions had repeated, with only the necessary revisions, the original translation of 1541. But the definitive edition of the Latin of 1559 evidently seemed to Calvin a new beginning — • increased as it was to nearly twice the bulk of its immediate predecessor; it announces itself, indeed, on its title-page, as " augmented by such additions that it could almost be considered a new work."* So looking upon it, Calvin began an entirely new translation of it — a translation corresponding to nothing in the previous editions even in the parts and phrases where the Latin had not been changed. This new translation was continued, however, only to the seventh chapter of the first book. The rest of the volume (except those portions of it merely taken over from the earlier editions — about half of the whole) is by another hand than Calvin's, as its frequent inexactitudes and even occasional misapprehensions of the Latin text show. It would seem that Calvin did not even oversee the proofs of this portion — nearly the whole — of the volume. The French translation of the completed Institutes cannot, therefore, be treated, as it often is treated, as a second original,! but, in large part, must take its secondary rank as a mere translation of the Institutes. Its primary value lies only, like other versions, in its giving the great book which it represents a wider circulation and a greater influence than it could have had in its Latin form alone.

The French Institutes being, of course, in contents, only a reproduction of the Latin Institutes, adds nothing to its significance for the history of thought, or for the development of [theology. It must not be rashly concluded, however, that it, therefore, possesses in itself little importance. It holds a very great place, for instance, in the history of French literature and even in the development of the French language as a literary vehicle. And, above all, it is the visible symbol and evidence of one of the greatest achievements of the Reformation movement — the popularization of religious thought. The Latin Institutes was for the learned; the French Institutes was made for the unlearned, and the marvel of marvels is that it found or made for itself apparently a great constituency.* Who could have believed that in the middle of the sixteenth century a body of vernacular readers could be created so numerous and so avid of theological instruction as to take up in the twenty five years between 1541, when the first French edition of the Institutes was published, and 1566, no less than twenty-one editions of this theological treatise? During Calvin's lifetime. we perceive, the publication of a new edition of the Institutes in French was almost an annual affair.

We require to add, however, that after his death, its publication stopped abruptly. Three editions were published, indeed, in 1565, and another in 1566; but then the series comes to an end. Only a single edition was published in the seventeenth century (1609), until as it drew near its close a French pastor at Bremen, Charles Icard by name, began the publication of a new French version, or, perhaps we should rather say, a renewed French version. t The first Book of this new version appeared in 16Q6, the second in 1697, the whole not until 1713, in a fine folio; it was reprinted at Geneva in three octavo volumes in 1818. The publication of Icard 's version in 1713 alone, however, breaks the barrenness of the eighteenth century. And the nineteenth has only a little better record. Icard's version was reissued, as we have seen, in 1818. The French Institutes was, of course, given a place, and that in the best of forms for the student, in the great Brunswick edition of Calvin's Opera prepared by the Strasburg theologians, Baiim, Cunitz and Reiiss (1865). But of hand editions for popular use, there seem to have been only three issues in the nineteenth century. The earliest of these, in two handsome octavo volumes, was printed at Paris by Charles Meyrueis and Company in 1859, with an interesting Introduction,* It has especial claims upon our attention, as it was frankly published not so much to meet a demand as to fulfill a duty of love, and partly by the aid of an appropriation for the purpose voted by "the Presbyterian Committee of Publication at Philadelphia."! In 1888 a new edition in two octavo volumes was published at Geneva, "revised and corrected from the edition of 1560 by Frank Baumgartner; " and later this has been placed on the market compacted into a single large volume.

Of course, it is possible, or rather altogether likely, that the early editions of the French Institutes, which followed one another so rapidly, were small editions, while the modern editions have been large editions. There may be less disparity in the number of copies issued in the nineteenth century as compared with the sixteenth, than in the number of editions. But, after all allowances of this sort are made, the appearance remains strong that Calvin's theology has found fewer eager readers among his compatriots — whether in France or Geneva— in the nineteenth than it did in the sixteenth century. Calvin's theology, we say, not Calvin's French; for we must bear in mind, as we have already pointed out, that the French of the Institutes as it has been circulated since 1560 is not Calvin's. There can confidently be attributed to Calvin himself only the French of the first French edition of 1541.

Even on the basis of the French Institutes of 1541 alone, however, Calvin takes his place in the first rank of French prose writers. t The Institutes of Calvin, says M. Ferdinand Brunetiere, is "one of the great books of French prose, and the first, in point of time, of which we can say that the proportions, the arrangement, and the construction are monumental;" in a word, it is" the first of our books which we can call classic." This position it achieves, he suggests, by virtue of the greatness of its conception, the dignity of its plan, the unity of its treatment, the close concatenation of its thought, its rhetorical grace, the sustained gravity of its style, rising even to majesty, and the purity of its language. To dwell only on the last-mentioned quality, in the purity of his French style Calvin was far in advance of his age. A Latinist of the severest taste, instead of carrying over his Latin into his French, as did most of the writers of the day, he carried over instead the purity of his taste.

"In the schools of that time," writes A. Bossert,* "either a barbarous Latin was spoken, or an unpolished French, or a mixture of the two, the type of which is given by Rabelais in the speeches of Janotus demanding in the name of the Parisians the restoration of the bells of Notre Dame. Those who wished to speak the mother-tongue correctly, affected to use only Frenchified Latin words, or as OUvetan puts it, 'obscure and unaccustomed barbarous terms, which are peeled off from the Latin.' Calvin writes in turn and with equal facility in Latin and in French, in Latin when he addresses himself to the learned, or the theologians, in French when he wishes to be read by all the world. But he keeps the two languages rigorously apart; he does not permit one to encroach on the other The French prose of his day, when it was applied to serious subjects, was modeled on the Latin period, and was naturally filled with Latin words of which it only gradually freed itself. Calvin, so pure a Latinist when he wrote in Latin, is in his French style the least Latinizing of the great prose writers of the Renaissance. Much more than his contemporary Rabelais, more even than Montaigne, who came forty years later, he approaches the prose of the seventeenth century. From the point of view of the development of the language, he rises out of the chronological sequence and takes his place immediately before Pascal.

IV

The French version, although addressed to a popular audience, had the disadvantage of appealing only to a single nationality. After all, the real extension of the influence of the Institutes lay in the hands of the Latin original, which made its appeal to every educated circle in the civilized world. Wings were given to it by the nobility of its form and the unwonted elegance of its language. For Calvin's Latin is as fine in its way as his French; and the Latin Institutes, too, deserves to be called a classic. Scaliger speaks of it as almost too good in its Latinity for a theologian;! and, indeed, its Latinity is not that of a theologian, but that of a humanist. Modeled, as all of the Latin of the day was, on Cicero, its basis is the Ciceronian period; but the Ciceronian period appears in it emancipated from its too carefully calculated balance, and given a new rapidity of movement and an energetic brevity to which all superfluity of words is alien. "To say that the language of Calvin is clear, sharp, precise, is not enough," remarks Bossert,* "it is striking and expressive; it abounds in original turns and happy forms." The demand for the book seems to have been from the first very large. Perhaps edition did not follow edition with quite the same rapidity as was the case with the French version, but the difference is not great, the editions were themselves, no doubt, larger — at least more copies of the Latin editions have survived until our day — and they continued to be published after the publication of the French version had ceased. Ten or twelve editions were issued in Calvin's lifetime,! the most beautiful of which were those of 1553 and 1559 from the press of Robert Stevens; and although his death did not cause a temporarily increased demand for them to spring up as it apparently did for the French — of which there were published no less than three editions in 1565 and another in 1566 — yet they went steadily on: 1568, 1569, 1576 (twice), 1577, 1585, 1586, 1590, 1592 (twice), 1602, 1607, 1609, 1612, 1617, 1618, 1637, 1654, 1667 — quite to the middle of the seventeenth century. We are struck, as we look over the list, by the completeness with which the Genevan presses monopolized the supply of the world. The first edition (1536) was, of course, printed at Basle, where Calvin had found refuge in his flight from France ; and the second, third and fourth (1539, 1543, 1545) were printed at Strasburg, whither Calvin had retired when driven from Geneva in 1538. But by 1550 the Institutes had come back to Geneva with Calvin and they had come to stay. One subsequent edition was printed at Strasburg (1561), but except that, none during Calvin's life were printed elsewhere than at Geneva (six editions). After his death, Geneva still remained the center whence the Institutes issued. Three editions were soon to be printed at Lausanne (1576, 1577, 1586); otherwise the whole series up to 1637, fifteen in all, was printed at Geneva — with one exception. This single exception interests us very much, for it is the only edition of the Institutes in Latin which has ever been printed on English-speaking soil. It was issued at London 'i^ in 1576 from the printing house of Thomas Vulturine, a learned Huguenot who had come to England from Paris or Rouen, and with many vicissitudes, in London or in Edinburgh, now basking in the royal favor, now suffering under the inquisition of the Star Chamber, carried on the printer's trade until his death, somewhere about 1587.* The last edition printed in Geneva came from the press in 1637. From that day to this, no edition of the Latin Institutes has been published on the scene of the author's life-work, where also the book was given its final form and sent out appropriately clothed in the splendid typography of Robert Stevens. From that day, to be sure, the Latin Institutes has been printed anywhere but seldom. In 1654 the splendid Elzevir edition appeared and this was reprinted in the ninth volume of the fine Amsterdam edition of Calvin's works (1667). After that no further editions were issued until the nineteenth century, when (1834, reprinted 1846) Tholuck published his admirable hand-edition which has supplied readers ever since. Last of all, in 1863-4, the great critical edition of Baum, Cunitz and Reuss, forming the first two volumes of their splendid edition of Calvin's works, was published at Brunswick, reprinted in a separate issue in 1869.

On the whole, Calvin's Institutes has been given a worthy external presentment. Even the first edition, though it was the work of an unknown man, is a very pretty little book, — a little book, for, though it is an octavo in the folding of the sheets, the block of type (excluding headline and catch-word) measures only 2f by 4^ inches. The type of the Epistola Nuncupatoria (pp. 5-41) is a really fine Roman; while that of the Institutes itself (pp. 42-514) is a sufficiently good italic, f The two fine folio editions published by Robert Stevens (the second Genevan edition, 1553, and the definitive edition — the fourth Genevan — 1559) are among the notable specimens of the printer's art. The former of these, Reuss praises as the most splendid of all, with its ample page, elegant type and wonderful accuracy in printing. But the latter is splendid enough worthily to close the career of the distinguished printer whose last work it was — for Robert Stevens died only a few days after this edition was finished. It is a beautiful folio, the block of type (exclusive of headline, there being no catchword) measuring 5f by10 inches, printed in an elegant, bold Roman character, with the notes in the outer side-margin.

Among the splendid editions of the Institutes must be mentioned also the great Leiden folio of 1654, which gathered into itself all the adventitious matter that — chiefly in the form of indices and arguments — had grown up gradually around the Institutes as aids to its more ready use, evidently intending itself to stand as the final edition of the book. This indeed it, in fact, remained for a hundred and sixty-seven years. The Institutes in the Amsterdam Opera of 1667 is a literal reprint of it — reproducing even its "admonition to the reader, about this edition" (but omitting Beza's life of Calvin which also is found in ed. 1654) — and no other edition was published until Tholuck's hand edition appeared in 1834. This great Leiden edition was the work of the famous printers, John and Daniel Elzevir, but it occurs also with no less than five other imprints, only the title page being changed and the dedication to Professor Heidanus omitted. The explanation of this odd circumstance is that it was a custom of the times to issue portions of an edition in the names of the several booksellers who handled it. Thus this noble edition was sent out not only in the name of its real printers, but also severally in those of Adrianus Wijngaerden, David Lopez de Haro, Franciscus Haack, Petrus Lefifen, and Franciscus Moyard.* There are few modern books which have received the honor of having had expended upon them all the art of two such printers as Stevens and Elzevir, And they merely stand at the head of a list which includes with them many another printer of note.

Calvin intended the Institutes (in its later form) as a text book in theology. It quickly took its place as such, not only among the students at Geneva, but throughout the Reformed world. Francis Junius, in commending it to his pupils at Leiden, used to tell them that he himself had devoted two entire years to its study. J Kaspar Olevianus at Heidelberg and Herborn based his theological lectures upon it, going over one book each year and thus completing the course in four years. What Olevianus was doing in Germany the professors at both Ojiford and Cambridge were doing in England. A no doubt somewhat hysterical Jesuit observer of the day, himself not altogether insensible to the excellences of the book, complains 'that predilections on the Institutes constituted the fundamental training in theology at both universities.* Even in far-away Hungary it was serving a similar purpose. It was by reading the first edition (1536) of the Institutes that Mathias Biro of Devaf was brought to the acceptance of the Reformed faith, and his summary of Christian doctrine — 'A Short Explanation of the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Seals of the Creed," — the first doctrinal treatise, written in Hungary (1538), seems to have been at least inspired by the Institutes; while the Catechism of the protagonist of the Reformed faith of the next generation, Peter Juhasz — or as he Graecised his name, Peter Melius,^ — published in 1562 (ed. 2, 1569) as a textbook for the use of schools, was expressly modeled upon and even drawn from the Institutes.

If we may look upon Juhasz 's Catechism as a sort of abridgment of the Institutes, it provides us with the earliest example of a type of literature which, in the interests of sound instruction in the fundamentals of religion, soon became quite common. Unless, indeed, we prefer to consider as the first abridgment of the Institutes Calvin's own earliest Catechism, so-called, which was published in its French form in 1537 and in its Latin form in 1538, to serve as a "book of instruction" for the infant church of Geneva. The first professed abridgment of the Institutes, formally set forth as such, was probably, however, the Institutionis Christiance Religionis a Jo. Calvino Conscriptce Compendium by Edmund Bunney,* published at London by the Huguenot printer Vautrollier in 1579 and reprinted at Antwerp in 1582, and in an English translation in 1580, as follows: Edm. Bunnie, his abridgtnent of Calvin's Institutes, translated by Edw. May: London, For William Norton, 1580. f This abridgment was, however, very soon superceded by another, also of English origin. This was the Institutionis Christianas Religionis a Joanne Calvino conscriptce Epitome, in qua adversariorum objectionibus responsiones annotantur, per G. Launceum, London, Vautrollerius, 1583, reprinted in 1584. The author, Guillaume Delaune, was a learned pastor of the French church in London, and his book was printed by the learned Huguenot printer, Vautrollier. As Delaune's object was to make the contents of the Institutes accessible to wider circles than would or could approach it in its original form, he was very eager to have his abridgment put into English, a task which he could not himself undertake as he was not "thoroughly acquainted with our language." It was, therefore, distributed into four hands to do the translating; but in the end the whole was rendered into English by Christopher Fetherstone, and published as An Abridgment of the Institution of Christian Religion written by M. John Calvin. By William Lawne, Minister of the Word of God. Faithfully translated out of Latine into English by Christopher Fetherstone, Minister of the Word of God. Edinburgh: Thomas Vautrollier, 1585 (8vo., pp. [32], 398 [30]). New editions of this English version were issued in 1686 and 1687 : it was even revived in the nineteenth century and republished by different printers in 1837, 1853, and in an undated edition. Delaune stood in close relations with Holland and had been vainly sought as a professor at Leiden. It is not surprising, therefore, that a Dutch version of his book was published in 1594, § the work of Joris \'7bi. e., George) de Raedt, pastor of the Hoedekenskerke in South Beveland, which was reprinted in 1611, 1650, 1739, 1837. Almost contemporaneously with Delaune's book (1586) Olevianus issued at Herborn his own Institutionis religionis Chr'istiance epitome ex Institutiones John Calvini excerpta to serve as a succinct handbook for his students*; and there appeared at the same place, the same year, the German Summa der wahren christlichen Religion. At about the same time must have appeared also the first issue of Johannes Piscator's Aphorismi dodrinoe Christianioe maximam portem ex Institutione Calvini excerpti, the earliest edition of which listed by Steubing was printed at Herborn in 1589, and the earliest edition of which listed by Erichson not until 1605.t Three editions of it at any rate had already appeared when Henry Holland J in 1596 issued his English version of it, Aphorismes of Christian religion or a verie compendious abridgement of M. J. Calvin's Institutions, set forth in short sentences methodically by M. J. Piscator, and now engleshed according to the author's third and last edition, (London, Field, 1596). A new edition of this version, to which was added Calvin's "letter to Francis I in defense of the Reformation" was published at London as late as 1844. Possibly, the little book in German which appeared at Herborn in 1600 may also be connected with Piscator's Aphorisms, Kurtzer Bericht von den filrnembsten Artikeln der wahren Christlichen Religion, auss den vier Bilchern der Institution J. Calvini in ein Biichlein zusamen gezogen. It is a new book, however, which Joh. Jezler, Rector and Pastor at Schafhausen, published in 1610 under the title, Schediasmus succinctus lemmatibus universum complectens Christianismum, desumpta ex solida Joh. Calvini de Relig. Chr. Instit., quo sublevari potest non tarn memoria quam intellectus eam legentium.

The abridgments of the Institutes reach their culmination in the admirable Analysis Paraphrastica of Daniel Colonius, rector of the Walloon College at Leiden, which was published, first, in quarto in 1628,* and then in a beautiful duodecimo from the Elzevir press in 1636. Colonius was born at Metz in 1566 and died of the plague at Leiden in 1635: his daughter Sara (Van Ceulen) was married in 1625 to Bonaventura Elsevier who, with his nephew Abraham, was head of the Elzevir firm at the time of Colonius' death, f The issue of this beautiful edition of his book the following year (1636) was thus apparently an act of pious commemoration of the dead author. In any event it affords as fine a specimen of the minute Elzevir typography as the edition of the Institutes of 1654 provides of the larger style. J The title-page • runs: Analysis Paraphrastica Institutionum Theologicarum. Joh. Calvini, Disputationibus XLI contexta auctore Daniels Colonio. Lugd. Batavorum. Ex Officina Elzeveriana. Anno MDCXXXVI. Cum Privilegio (12mo., pp. [8], 950). The text is apparently exactly reproduced from the edition of 1628. The dedication to Daniel Heinsius is repeated, as also the approbation of the Faculty of Theology at Leiden signed by Polyander as dean pro-tempore, and dated the 6 July, 1628. The character of the work itself is very well described by its title: it is an excellent paraphrastic analysis of the Institutes, and well adapted to aid the student in mastering the contents of the great work, to study which day and night Colonius advises him in some verses inscribed, In Calvini Institutiones :

Aureus hie liber est, hunc tu studiosa juventus, Si cupis optatam studiorum attingere metam, Noctes atque dies in succum verte legendo.

It was not for two hundred 5 years after the publication of Colonius' Paraphrastic Analysis that a fresh attempt was made to set forth the gist of the Institutes in condensed form. H. P. Kalthoffs' Christliche Unteriveisung in einem kernhaften Auszug, however, was pubhshed at Elberfeld in 1828, and was reprinted in 1858 (Barmen) under the title: Catichismus der Christlichen Lehre. In 1837 there appeared in London, Christian Theology, selected and systematically arranged by Samuel Dunn; reprinted in 1843 and translated into Welsh in 1840: Duwinyd diaeth Cristonogol, a ysgrifenwyd yn ureiddiol gan J. Calvin gan S. Dunn ac a gymreigiwyd gan Evan Meredith \'7blevan Grygg). Crughywel, Williams. In 1903 there appeared from the printing house of J. H. Kok, Kampen, Calvijn's Institutie of onderwijzing in den Christlijken Godsdienst. Ein uittreksel door G. Elzenga. These are the latest abridgments of the Institutes which have met our eye.

VI

The object of the abridgments of the Institutes was to bring the contents of the book within the reach of wider circles of students; and the zeal with which vernacular versions of these abridgments were published — in German, Dutch, most numerously in English, even in Welsh — bears witness to the eagerness with which the Institutes was sought by a constituency to which Latin was, at best, a difficult medium. The important task of diffusing the knowledge of the Institutes among this class of readers was not left, however, to versions of abridgments of it alone. The book itself was fortunate in securing translation almost at once into most of the languages of Europe.* And, we may add, it was fortunate in the translators it secured. Translations are not ordinarily undertaken by men of high powers of original expression. Such a task is usually left to literary talents of distinctly the second rank. Only when some other and deeper impulse than a literary one is present do men of great gifts of expression turn to such work. This deeper impulse was in operation in the case of the Institutes. Its earlier translators were all men of mark, seriously engaged in propagating the truths to which the Institutes gave such uniquely attractive expression; and their versions were not mere mechanical pieces of work but were informed with vitality and gave the book a place, therefore, in the literatures of the several tongues into which they transfused it.

These translations, we have said, began very early. The Italian version, indeed, did not wait even for the definitive edition of the Institutes (1559), but (depending mainly on the French) appeared as early as 1557. It was the work of Giulio Csesare Paschali, an excellent poet, who subsequently (1592) published a metrical Italian version of the Psalms.* It was introduced by a dedicatory letter addressed to Galeazzo Caraccioli, Marquis of Vico, one of the band of nobles who formed the nucleus of the Protestant church at Naples, f So soon, however, as the Institutes was completed and its definitive edition (1559) published, the rendering of it into the vernaculars of Europe began apace. The Dutch version was first in the field. In less than eighteen months after the publication of the definitive Latin edition (August, 1559) the Dutch version left the press (December 5, 1560, is the date of the preface), published in two forms, the one bearing no indication of place, but known to have been published at Emden, the other issued at Dort, by Verhaghen. The translator signs his preface by the initials " I. D.," and seems otherwise unknown. Next in turn to the Dutch comes the English version (1561 and five times repeated before 1600). It was the work of a very capable man, Thomas Norton (1532-1584), a ripe scholar, able jurist, wise statesman, ardent reformer and no miean poet, most generally known, doubtless, as co-author with his friend Thomas Sackville of The Tragedy of Gorbuduc, a piece which plays a part in the history of the English drama. § The theological faculty at Heidelberg gave its united care to the preparation of a German version, which was published at that place in 1572. In 1597 a Spanish version appeared from the pen of Cipriano de Valera, one of the most notable of the Spanish literary reformers, and the translator of the Spanish Bible which is still in use by Spanish-speaking Protestants. 1 1

* A brief account of him (by Escher) may be found in Ersch and Gruber, sub nom. (1840). The following is the notice in Bayle (English ed., London, 1737 sub nomine): "Paschali (Giulio Ccesare) was one of those Italians who left their country in the sixteenth century for the sake of the Protestant religion. He was a good poet in his mother-tongue, and published the Psalms in Italian verse at Geneva in the year 1592. He was then sixty-five years of age. He added to it a collection of Rime Spirituali, and the first canto of an epic poem entitled Universo. This poem was finished and contained in thirty-two cantos the whole history of Moses, from the creation of the world to the entry of the Israelites into the land of Canaan. I do not think he ought to be distinguished from the Giulio Ccesare P. who caused to be printed at Geneva in 1557 in 4to his Italian version of Calvin's Institutes, and dedicated it to Galeas Carraciol, Marqiiis del Vico. The epistle dedicatory is dated from Geneva, the 4th of August, 1558." Henry (Leben Calvins, Vol. iii, p. 185,) adds that his translation of the Institutes depends largely on the French and that he translated several others of the works of the Reformers into Italian — Viret's and others. For the suspicions of his orthodoxy and other details, see F. Buisson, Sebastien Castellion, 1892, ii, 125, not&amp; the century by the learned scholar and hymnologist Jirfk Strejc, or Georg Vetter in the Germanized form of his name (ordained priest in the Unitas Fratrum 1567, died 1599),* the manuscript of which is still preserved in the " Mahrisches Landesarchiv" at Briinow. It was not printed, however, until early in the next century (1617, by Johann Opsimates) and then apparently only partially, (the first two books only).t To these versions was added in 1624 a Hungarian translation made by Albert Molnar "for the edification of the Hungarian nation in divine truth," which recites on its title-page that the book had already been translated into "French, English, Dutch, Italian, German, Bohemian and other languages" — truly enough, if we may understand by the " other languages" only the Spanish, which seems to be the only "other language" into which the Institutes had been rendered. A Greek version of the Institutes, printed at Frankfort in 1618, has, indeed, been spoken of, and even an Arabic one; but no copies of them seem to be accessible to attest their reality. § Later, in 1626, there was published a Polish translation, not indeed of the Institutes, but of a portion of it, — the portion of it which deals with the very controverted subject of the sacraments. This excerpt had been given separate publication in German at Heidelberg in 1572, and again at Neustadt a. d. Hardt in 1592: it was now rendered into Polish by Blastus Kmita and published at Lubeck. 1 1

II The titles of the Polish and German tracts alike may be seen in Erichson as cited, under their years. Among the portions of the Institutes published separately should be mentioned the chapters De pradestinatione et providentia Dei, De liberlate Christiana, and De vita hominis christiani extracted by Crespin, the Genevan printer, in 1550 from the edition of the Institutes published that year, followed in 1552 by a similar extract: Disputatio de cognitione hominis (Ch. ii of that edition). In 1594 an English translation by J. Shutte of the chapter on the Christian Life (Ch. xxi) was published under the title: "A Treatise of Christian Life." In 1695 there appeared at Amsterdam the versions of the Institutes in the languages of southern Europe, which ultimately remained Catholic, naturally have only a brief history. It does not appear, for example, that the Italian version of 1557 was ever reissued. The Spanish version of 1597 also has apparently been reprinted only in 1858 and that as 'an antiquity" — as part of the Reformistas antiguos espaiioles issued by B. B. Wiffen and Luis de Usoz y Rio (XIV, 2 parts, Madrid, 8vo).* Evil fortune also followed the Bohemian translation. We have seen that, although from the hand of one of the most influential scholars of the Unitas Fratrum, a member of the executive council, and the author of a metrical version of the Psalms upon the model of Marot's, Strejc's version lay in manuscript for years and never was more than half printed. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that a renewed attempt was made to provide the Bohemians with the Institutes in their own tongue; and this attempt met with a similar fate. The maker of the new version was Lie. Theol. Frantisek Sebesta, an author of note, who at the time of his death was pastor at Hustopec in Moravia, t Only two books of his version, however, were published (1890, 1895), his death (July 22, 1896) bringing his work to a sudden close as he was engaged on the third book. The Hungarian version of 1624§ also has remained unreprinted until to-day. Its transdam, the Traits de la justification par J. Calvin, traduit du latin de son Institution par Jean de Labrune, and a new edition of this was issued in 1755. The significance of the extract on Predestination is adverted to by A. F. Mitchell, Baird Lecture on The Westminster Assembly, ed. 2, p. 519; of that on the Christian Life may be gathered from the remarks of E. Doumergue, Princeton Theological Review, January, 1909, vii, i, p. 97; of that on the sacraments is obvious in view of the controversies of the time.

VII

We naturally feel a special interest in the English translations. The Institutes has been thrice translated into English: by Thomas Norton (1561, and often afterwards: London, 1562, 1574, 1578, 1582, 1587, 1599, 1611, 1634; Glasgow, 1762), by John Allen (London, 1813, 3 vols.; 2nd ed., London, 1838, 2 vols.; 3d ed., London, 1844, 2 vols.; 1st American edition, 1816, 3 vols.; 6th Am. ed. n. d., but 1841-1842, 2 vols), and by Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh, 1845-6, 3 vols.; 2d ed., 1863, 2 vols.). Besides these versions of the complete Institutes, at least four abridgments of the Institutes have been printed in English: Edward May's version of Edmund Bunney's Compendium (1580); C. Fetherstone's version of Laune's Epitome (1585, 1586, 1587, 1600, 1837, 1853, n. d.); Henry Holland's version of Piscator's Aphorisms (1596, 1844); and S, Dunn's Selection (1837).

Norton's translation of the whole work, early as it was, was yet almost preceded by a yet earlier one. A note from "The Printers to the Reders," printed on the reverse of the title-page of the edition of 1561, which is identified as Norton's only by the initials "T. N." with which the last page of the book is signed, tells us of a previous translation which had been made, but was not published. Here is the note in full :

"Whereas some men hare thought and reported it to be a fault and negligence in us for that we have so long kept back from you this book being so profitable a work for you, namely sithe master John Dawes had translated it and delivered it into our hands more than a twelvemoneth past: you shall understand for our excuse in that behalf, that we could not well imprint it sooner. For we hare been by diverse necessary causes constrained with our earnest entreatance to procure an other friend of ours to translate it whole again. This translation, we trust, you shall well allow. For it hath not only been faithfully done by the translator himself, but also hath been wholly perused by such men, whose iugement and credit al the godly learned in Englande well known and esteemed But sithe it is now come forth, we pray you accept it, and use it. If any fault es have passed us by oversight, we beseech you let us have your patience, as you hare had our diligence."

The bare allusion we are given to it rouses our curiosity as to why Maister Dawes' translation was set aside; certainly the Preface is a model document — it seems to take the reader into full confidence, and yet says nothing derogatory to any one.

No one better fitted for the task of retranslating the book could easily have been found at any rate than Thomas Norton. His name appears for the first time on the title-page of the third edition, while to the fourth he prefixes a nobly written Preface — "T[homas] N[orton,] the Translator to the Reader" — in which is included an account of how he was led to translate the book, of the care he took to do a proper piece of work in the translating, and of the subsequent means adopted to perfect the printed text. After a brief account of Calvin and his purpose in the Institutes, the Preface continues:*

"So great a jewel was meete to be made most beneficial, that is to say, applied to most common use. Therefore, in the very beginning of the Queenes Maiesties most blessed reigne, I translated it out of Latine into English, for the commoditie of the Church of Christ, at the speciall request of my dear friends of worthy memory, Reginald Wolfe f and Edward V&gt;"hitchurch,% the one her Maiesties Printer for the Hebrew, Greeke and Latin toongs, the other her Highnes Printer of the books of common prayer. I performed my work in the house of my said friend, Edward Whitchurch, a man well known of upright hart and dealing, an ancient zealous Gospeller, as plain and true a friend as ever I knew living, and as desirous to do any thing to common good, specially by the advancement of true religion"

He then explains why he chose the method of literal rather than of paraphrastic translation and continues:

"In the doing hereof , I did not only trust mine ownewit or abilitie, but examined my whole doing from sentence to sentence throughout the whole booke with conference and ouerlooking of such learned men, as my translation being allowed by their judgement, I did both satisfy mine own conscience that I had done truly, and their approouing of it might be a good warrant to the reader, that nothing should herein be delivered him but sound, unmingled, and uncorrupted doctrine, even in such sort as the author himself had first framed it. Ail that I wrote, the graue, learned and vertuous man M. David Whitehead § (whome I name with honorable remembrance) did among other, compare with the Latine, examining euery sentence throughout the whole booke."

The care taken to bring the text of the book in its new editions to greater correctness in the printing being next noted, the Preface concludes thus:

"Thus on the Printers behalf e and mine, your ease and commoditie (good Readers) is prouided for. Now resteth your own diligence for your own profit in studying it. To spend many words in commending the w-orke it selfe were needelesse: yet thus much I thinke I may both not vntruly and not vainly say, that though many great learned men haue written bookes of common places of our religion, as Melanchton, Sarcerius* and other, whose works are very good and profitable to the Church of God : yet by the consenting iudgement of those that vnderstande the same, there is none to be compared to this worke of Caluine, both for his substantiall sufficiencie of doctrine, the sound declaration of truth in articles of our religion, the large and learned confirmation of the same, and the most deepe and strong confutation of all olde and new heresies: so that (the holy Scriptures excepted) this is one of the most profitable bookes for all students of Christian diuinitie. Wherein (good Readers) as I am glad for the glorie of God, and for your benefite, that you have this profite of my trauell, so I beseech you let me haue this vse of your gentlenesse, that my doings may be construed to such good ende as I haue meant them: and that if anything mislike you by reason of hardnesse, or any other cause that may seem to be my default, you will not foorthwith condemne the worke, but reade it ofter: in which doing you will finde (as many haue confessed to me that they have founde by experience) that those things which at the first reading shall displease you for hardnesse, shall be found so easie as so harde matter would suffer, and for the most part, more easie than some other phrase which shoulde with greater loosenesse and smoother sliding away deceiue your vnderstanding. I confesse in deede it is not finely and pleasantly written, nor carieth with it such delightfull grace of speech as some great wise men have bestowed vppon some foolisher things, yet it conteineth sound truth set foorth with faithful plainnesse, without wrong done to the authors meaning: and so if you accept and vse it, you shall not faile to haue great profite thereby, and I shall thinlce my labour very well imployed."

We have quoted largely from this Preface, because it appears to us an admirable document, altogether worthy of its place in the forefront of the Institutes and of the hand of its author, one of the most notable figures in the literary world of his day. Born in 1532, bred to the law, in which profession he gained high distinction, Thomas Norton lived on terms of intimacy with the leaders of the religious Reformation in England, and did his part to further it by voice and pen. A ripe scholar, he prepared translations of some of the best books in circulation expository of Christian truth, f and sent forth a number of writings of his own. A "wise, bold and eloquent" member of Parliament, he championed there the movements that tended to the religious settlement of the land on the lines of a complete reformation. Possessed of a poetic gift, he contributed some twenty-eight translations of Psalms to Sternhold and Hopkins' collection,! as well as wrought for the advancement of more secular species of English poetry. In every way he seemed glad to use his high powers freely in the cause of religion. Assuredly, we will say Calvin's Institutes was introduced by fit hands to its English public; and the excellence of the performance seems to be attested by the rapidly repeated issue of editions of the translation during the latter years of the sixteenth century, and its long-continued hold on the religious public.

It was not until the early years of the nineteenth century that Norton's was superseded by a modernized translation. This was made by John Allen, and appeared first in 1813. John Allen* was a layman like Thomas Norton — a nonconformist school-teacher, born at Truro, in Cornwall, in 1771, and for thirty years master of a private school at Hackney, near London, where he died in 1839. His principal work was a treatise on Modern Judaism (1816), though he published also a Memoir of Major General Burn (1815), and a translation of some sermons of D. de Saperville (1816) and William Durham's Two Dissertations on Sacrifice (1817). He tells us in the Preface to his translation of the Institutes, that one of the circumstances which led him to publish it was " the recent controversy respecting Calvinism, commenced by Dr. Tomline, the present Bishop of Lincoln." His interest in that controversy had already been shown by the anonymous publication in 1812 of a reply to Tomline's Refutation of the Charge of Calvinism against the Church of England, which appeared in 1811. Allen's book bore the title, The Fathers, the Reformers, and the Public Formularies of England in Harmony vxith Calvin and against the Bishop of Lincoln.

It does not predispose the reader favorably to Allen's work that he speaks with scant appreciation of Norton's translation — though that, perhaps, was not unnatural in the Preface of a work designed to supersede it. This Preface is plainly written, and gives an appreciative account of the book being rendered, and a statement of the translator's method of translating — which, declining both "a servile adherence to the letter" and 'a mere attention to the ideas and sentiments," " aimed at a. medium between servility and looseness and endeavored to follow the style of the original as far as the respective" idioms of the Latin and English would admit." The translation is certainly so far successful that it conveys with plain directness the meaning of the original author, and so far, at least as we have observed, never either misses it or obscures it.

If Allen is chargeable with underestimating the merits of his predecessor's work, he certainly was called on to repay his fault a hundredfold by the treatment he received at the hands of his successor — Henry Beveridge.* Beveridge simply passes by Allen's translation without any mention at all. Allen's judgment on Norton's translation, however, Beveridge repeats with interest — the gravamen of his charge turning on its excessive literalness. " Instead of the pure English of the period at which he wrote," he remarks, "the utmost he could give was English words in a Latin idiom. In this way the translation, which must often have seemed rugged and harsh to his contemporaries, has become in great measure unfit for modem use." Beveridge, for his part, avoiding "overstraining after such scrupulosity as Norton aimed at," hopes that, in his own translation "the true meaning of the author has been given in plain English, and so made accessible to every class of readers." Beveridge's translation was issued by the Calvin Translation Society f in 1845, and has probably superseded in Britain the earlier work of Allen.

Meanwhile, however, already in 1816, Allen's translation had been reissued in America as the "First American from the last London Edition," bearing the imprint: "Philadelphia: Published by Philip H. Nicklin, and by Hezekiah Howe, New Haven. William Fry, Printer, 1816." And in 1841 and 1842,J the Presbyterian Board of Publication at Philadelphia had stereotyped a somewhat revised edition of Allen's translation, issuing it as the sixth American edition. This has accordingly become the most accessible translation in America. The edition

* Henry Beveridge was born June 19, 1799, at Dunfermline; acted as tutor in the family of Mr. Erskine (afterwards Earl of Buchan) from 1821; was licensed as probationer of the Church of Scotland, 1827, but never took a charge; served as an elder in the church at Tonyburn for a number of years and sat as an elder in the Assembly of 1837; was called to the bar in 1838, but never practiced the profession; died March 18, 1863. The greater portion of his life was given to literary labor: as a young advocate he reported the cases decided in Court of Session for the Scottish Jurist (1838 sq.); he contributed largely (1848 sq.) to the Imperial Gazetteer and the Popular Encyclopaedia, published by Messrs. Blaikie &amp; Son, of Glasgow (1848 sq.)\ and he served as editor of The Banner of Ulster of Belfast (1855-57). His chief original work was a Comprehensive History of India, 3 vols. (1858-1862); and he made the translation of the first three volumes of D'Aubigne's History of the Reformation (1844 sq.). He published also a translation of Pascal's Provincial Letters (1857). He became connected with the "C!alvin Translation Society" early in its history, and besides editing for it Fetherstone's translation of the Commentary on Acts (1844), and Rosdell's translation of that on Romans (1844), he translated for it the following: On the Necessity of Reforming the Church (1843), Tracts Relating to the Reformation, (3 vols., 1844), Institutes (3 vols., 1845), Four sermons. Commentary on Joshua (1854).

It was founded in 1842 and issued its first installment of translations in 1843.

Of the Presbyterian Board was brought out at the expense of the First and Second Presbyterian churches of Baltimore, of which the Revs. John C. Backus and Robert J. Breckinridge were then pastors, and was introduced by a Preface written by Dr. WiUiam M. Engles, then editor of the Board. How far the revision of the text extended we have not been careful to investigate. Dr. Engles says: "Under the direction of the Executive Committee of the Board, the translation has been diligently compared throughout with the original Latin and French, and various corrections have been made to convey the meaning of the author more distinctly and accurately. This laborious duty has been performed by a member of the PubUshing Committee." This "member of the Publishing Committee" was Mr. Joseph Patterson Engles (1793—1861), a man of varied and high culture, master of the Classical Institute at Philadelphia from 1817 to 1845, and from 1845 to his death publishing agent of the Board. He was, perhaps, most widely known as the editor of an American reprint, with many corrections, of the so-called Polymicrion Greek Testament (1838, and often afterwards), and was a man who, by habits of exact accuracy and by thorough classical scholarship, was eminently fitted to correct a translation from the Latin.*

It should not pass without notice that all three of the later rehandiings of the English Institutes plume themselves on their use of the French text — treating it as a second original, of equal or almost equal authority, as a witness to Calvin's meaning, with the Latin. Allen says:

' ' After the greater part of the work had been translated, he [the translator] had the happiness to meet with an edition in French, of which he has availed himself in translating the remainder, and in the revision of what he had translated before. Every person, who understands any two languages, will be aware that the ambiguity of one will sometimes be explained by the precision of another; and notwithstanding the acknowledged superiority of the Latin to the French in most of the qualities which constitute the excellence of a language, the case of the article is not the only one in which Calvin's French elucidates his Latin."

Beveridge says:

"be a more legitimate and effectual mode of explaining them than to make the Author his own expositor, and hold the meaning to be what he himself has made it, in his vernacular tongue. It has already been observed that Calvin, in his translation, occasionally avails himself of his privilege as an Author. Due attention has been paid to the changes thus made in the original, any difference of meaning or of expression which seemed deserving of notice being given in footnotes. In this respect it is hoped that the present Translation possesses a very decided advantage."

Dr. Engles says:

"The translation has been diligently compared throughout with the original Latin and French' etc.

This use of the French, except in the first few pages of the first book (to the seventh chapter), as ah-eady pointed out, is Uable to some danger when carried through uncritically. For the rest of the book, that alone is certainly Calvin's which has been preserved from the first French translation (1541). The text is composed, as Reuss puts it, "of fragments of the old translation, where the Latin text remains the same (although there, too, the changes are somewhat frequent), and a new translation of the complementary additions which form nearly half the text . . . . Here," he adds, " we meet with not only a great number of inexactitudes, omissions, meaningless and embarrassing additions, but even passages where it is evident that the translator did not even understand the Latin text." Striking examples of this are given by Reuss. It is obvious that an uncritical use of this French translation, as in all its parts of equal authority for Calvin's meaning with the Latin original, is scarcely a commendation of a version; and we need no further evidence that, so far as it was used at all, it must have been used uncritically by our English translators, than the fact that though each of them compared the French diUgently with the Latin, no one of them discovered those glaring faults in the French which render it impossible to attribute it to Calvin's own hand. It would be interesting to compare the texts of the several English translations, with a view to discovering how far the later translations are really independent of the earlier, and which represent the original most faithfully, clearly and happily. We cannot undertake that task now; but we can at least give a specimen of their rendering of a typical passage, from which we may, perhaps, catch something of the flavor of each. Here is the opening section of the treatise in its three English forms (Book i, chap, i, § 1):

COMPARISON OF ENGLISH VERSIONS

xlv

Norton, 1599. The whole sum me in a maner of all our wisedome, which onely ought to be accounted true and perfect wisedome, consisteth in two partes, that is to say, the knowledge of God, and of our selves. But where as these two knowledges be with many bondes linked togither: yet whether goeth before or engendreth the other, it is hard to discerne. For, first no man can looke vpon himselfe, but he must needes by and by turne all his senses to the beholding of God, in whom he liueth and is mooued: bicause it is plaine, that those giftes wherewith we be indued, are not of our selues, yea, euen that we haue being is nothing els but an essense in the one God. Finally, by these good things that are as by dropmeale powred into us from heauen, we are led as it were by certaine streames to the spring head. And so by our owne needinesse, better appeereth that infinite plentie of good things that abideth in God. Specially that miserable ruine, whereinto the fall of the first man hath throwne vs, compelleth vs to lift vp our eies, not onely being foodelesse and hungrie, to craue from thence that which we lacke, but also being awakened with feare, to learne humilitie. For as there is found in man a certaine worlde of all miseries, and since we haue beene spoyled of the diuine apparell, our shameful! nakednesse discloseth an infinite heape of filthie disgracements: it must needes be that euery man be pricked with knowledge in conscience of his owne unhappinesse to make him come.

True and substantial wisdom principally consists of two parts, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. But while these two branches of knowledge are so intimately connected, which of them precedes and produces the other, is not easy to discover. For, in the first place, no man can take a survey of himself, but he must immediately turn to the contemplation of God, in whom he "lives and moves:" since it is evident that the talents which we possess are not from ourselves, and that our very existence is nothing but a subsistence in God alone. These bounties, distilling to us by drops from heaven, form, as it were, so many streams conducting us to the fountain-head. Our poverty conduces to a clearer display of the infinite fulness of God. Especially, the miserable ruin, into which we have been plunged by the defection of the first man, compels us to raise our eyes towards heaven, not only as hungry and famished, to seek thence a supply for our wants, but, aroused with fear, to learn humility. For since man is subject to a world of miseries, and has been spoiled of his divine array, this melancholy exposure discovers an immense mass of deformity: every one therefore must be so impressed with a consciousness of his own infelicity, as to arrive Bbvehidge, 184.5.

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes, and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning i his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone. In the second place, those blessings which unceasingly distil to us from heaven, are like streams conducting us to the fountain. Here, again, the infinitude of good which resides in God becomes more apparent from our poverty. In particular, the miserable ruin into which the revolt of the first man hath plunged us, compels us to turn our eyes upwards; not only that while hungry and famishing we may thence ask what we want, but being aroused by fear we may learn humility. For as there exists in man something like a world of misery, and ever since we were stript of the divine attire our naked shame discloses an immense series of disgraceful properties, every man, being stung by the consciousness of his own unhappiness, in this way Norton, 1599. at the least unto some knowledge of God. So by the vnderstanding of our ignorance, vanitie, beggerie, weaknesse, peruersenesse, and corruption, we learne to reknowledge that no where else but in the Lord abideth the true light of wisdome, sound vertue, perfect abundance of all good things, and puritie of righteousnes. And so by our owne euils we are stirred to coneider the good things of God: and we cannot earnestly aspire toward him, vntill we begin to mislike our selues. For of all men what one is there, that would not willingly rest in himselfe? yea, who doth not rest, so long as he knoweth not himselfe, that is to say, so long aa he is contented with his owne giftes; and ignorant or vnmindfull of his owne miserie? Therefore euery man is by the knowledge of himselfe, not onely pricked forward to seeke God, but also led as it were by the hand to finde him.

Allen, 1813. at some knowledge of God. Thus a sense of our ignorance, vanity, poverty, infirmity, depravity, and corruption, leads us to perceive and acknowledge that in the Lord alone are to be found true wisdom, solid strength, perfect goodness, and unspotted righteousness; and so, by our imperfections, we are excited to a consideration of the perfections of God. Nor can we really asspire toward him, till we have begun to be displeased with ourselves. For who would not gladly rest satisfied with himself? where is the man not actually absorbed in selfcomplacency, while he remains unacquainted with his true situation, or content with his own endowments, and ignorant or forgetful of his own misery? The knowledge of ourselves, therefore, is not only an incitement to seek after God, but Ukewise a considerable assistance towards finding him.

Bevebidge, 1845. necessarily obtains at least some knowledge of God. Thus, our feeling of ignorance, vanity, want, weakness, in short, depravity and corruption, reminds us that in the Lord, and none but He, dwell the true light of wisdom, solid virtue, exuberant goodness. We are accordingly urged by our own evil things to consider the good things of God; and, indeed, we cannot sispire to Him in earnest until we have begun to be displeased with ourselves. For what man is not disposed to rest in himself? Who, in fact, does not thus rest, so long as he is unknown to himself; that is, so long as he is contented with his own endowments, and unconscious or unmindful of his misery? Every person, therefore, on coming to the knowledge of himself, is not only urged to seek God, but is also led as by the band to find him.

So far as one may judge from so brief an extract, it would seem that Allen's version is entirely independent of Norton's, and that Beveridge worked with his predecessors' versions before him, indeed, but with a conscious effort to give a fresh rendering of the original. Any one of the three would appear to provide a plain and sufficiently clear and faithful rendering of the original, while the "perfect version," or the version which conveys the sense of delight and satisfaction with which Calvin's Latin affects the reader, is yet to seek.

÷ 08 Calvin as a Theologian

by Benjamin B. Warfield

THE subject of this address is “John Calvin the Theologian,” and I take it that what will be expected of me is to convey some idea of what manner of theologian John Calvin was, and of his quality as a theological thinker.

I am afraid I shall have to ask you at the outset to disabuse your minds of a very common impression, namely, that Calvin’s chief characteristics as a theologian were on the one hand, audacity—perhaps I might even say effrontery—of speculation; and on the other hand, pitilessness of logical development, cold and heartless scholasticism. We have been told, for example, that he reasons on the attributes of God precisely as he would reason on the properties of a triangle. No misconception could be more gross. The speculative theologian of the Reformation was Zwingli, not Calvin. The scholastic theologian among the early Reformers was Peter Martyr, not Calvin. This was thoroughly understood by their contemporaries. “The two most excellent theologians of our times,” remarks Joseph Scaliger, “are John Calvin and Peter Martyr, the former of whom has dealt with the Holy Scriptures as they ought to be dealt with—with sincerity, I mean, and purity and simplicity, without any scholastic subtleties. . . Peter Martyr, because it seemed to fall to him to engage the Sophists, has overcome them sophistically, and struck them down with their own weapons.”

It is not to be denied, of course, that Calvin was a speculative genius of the first order, and in the cogency of his logical analysis he possessed a weapon which made him terrible to his adversaries. But it was not on these gifts that he depended in forming and developing his theological ideas. His theological method was persistently, rigorously, some may even say exaggeratedly, a posteriori. All a priori reasoning here he not only eschewed but vigorously repelled. His instrument of research was not logical amplification, but exegetical investigation. In one word, he was distinctly a Biblical theologian, or, let us say it frankly, by way of eminence the Biblical theologian of his age. Whither the Bible took him, thither he went: where scriptural declarations failed him, there he stopped short.

It is this which imparts to Calvin’s theological teaching the quality which is its prime characteristic and its real offence in the eyes of his critics—I mean its positiveness. There is no mistaking the note of confidence in his teaching, and it is perhaps not surprising that this note of confidence irritates his critics. They resent the air of finality he gives to his declarations, not staying to consider that he gives them this air of finality because he presents them, not as his teachings, but as the teachings of the Holy Spirit in His inspired Word. Calvin’s positiveness of tone is thus the mark not of extravagance but of sobriety and restraint. He even speaks with impatience of speculative, and what we may call inferential theology, and he is accordingly himself spoken of with impatience by modern historians of thought as a “merely Biblical theologian,” who is, therefore, without any real doctrine of God, such as Zwingli has. The reproach, if it be a reproach, is just. Calvin refused to go beyond “what is written”—written plainly in the book of nature or in the book of revelation. He insisted that we can know nothing of God, for example, except what He has chosen to make known to us in His works and Word; all beyond this is but empty fancy, which merely “flutters” in the brain. And it was just because he refused to go one step beyond what is written that he felt so sure of his steps. He could not present the dictates of the Holy Ghost as a series of debatable propositions.

Such an attitude towards the Scriptures might conceivably consist with a thoroughgoing intellectualism, and Calvin certainly is very widely thought of as an intellectualist à outrance. But this again is an entire misapprehension. The positiveness of Calvin’s teaching has a far deeper root than merely the conviction of his understanding. When Ernest Renan characterized him as the most Christian man of his generation he did not mean it for very high praise, but he made a truer and much more profound remark than he intended. The fundamental trait of Calvin’s nature was precisely—religion. It is not merely that all his thinking is coloured by a deep religious sentiment; it is that the whole substance of his thinking is determined by the religious motive. Thus his theology, if ever there was a theology of the heart, was distinctively a theology of the heart, and in him the maxim that “It is the heart that makes the theologian” finds perhaps its most eminent illustration.

His active and powerful intelligence, of course, penetrated to the depths of every subject which he touched, but he was incapable of dealing with any religious subject after a fashion which would minister only to what would seem to him the idle curiosity of the mind. It was not that he restrained himself from such merely intellectual exercises upon the themes of religion, the force of his religious interest itself instinctively inhibited them.

Calvin marked an epoch in the history of the doctrine of the Trinity, but of all great theologians who have occupied themselves with this soaring topic, none has been more determined than he not to lose themselves in the intellectual subtleties to which it invites the inquiring mind; and he marked an epoch in the development of the doctrine precisely because his interest in it was vital and not merely or mainly speculative. Or take the great doctrine of predestination which has become identified with his name, and with respect to which he is perhaps, most commonly of all things, supposed to have given the reins to speculative construction and to have pushed logical development to unwarrantable extremes. Calvin, of course, in the pellucid clearness and incorruptible honesty of his thought and in the faithfulness of his reflection of the biblical teaching, fully grasped and strongly held the doctrine of the will of God as the prima causa rerum, and this too was a religious conception with him and was constantly affirmed just because it was a religious conception—yes, in a high and true sense, the most fundamental of all religious conceptions. But even so, it was not to this cosmical predestination that Calvin’s thought most persistently turned, but rather to that soteriological predestination on which, as a helpless sinner needing salvation from the free grace of God, he must rest. And therefore Ebrard is so far quite right when he says that predestination appears in Calvin’s system not as the decretum Dei but as the electio Dei.

It is not merely controversial skill which leads Calvin to pass predestination by when he is speaking of the doctrine of God and providence, and to reserve it for the point where he is speaking of salvation. This is where his deepest interest lay. What was suffusing his heart and flowing in full flood into all the chambers of his soul was a profound sense of his indebtedness as a lost sinner to the free grace of God his Saviour. His zeal in asserting the doctrine of two-fold predestination is grounded in the clearness with which he perceived—as was indeed perceived with him by all the Reformers—that only so can the evil leaven of “synergism” be eliminated and the free grace of God be preserved in its purity in the saving process. The roots of his zeal are planted, in a word, in his consciousness of absolute dependence as a sinner on the free mercy of a saving God. The sovereignty of God in grace was an essential constituent of his deepest religious consciousness. Like his great master, Augustine—like Luther, Zwingli, and Bucer, and all the rest of those high spirits who brought about that great revival of religion which we call the Reformation—he could not endure that the grace of God should not receive all the glory of the glory of the rescue of sinners from the destruction in which they are involved, and from which, just because they are involved in it, they are unable to do anything towards their own recovery.

The fundamental interest of Calvin as a theologian lay, it is clear, in the region broadly designated soteriological. Perhaps we may go further and add that, within this broad field, his interest was most intense in the application to the sinful soul of the salvation wrought out by Christ,—in a word, in what is technically known as the ordo salutis. This has even been made his reproach in some quarters, and we have been told that the main fault of the Institutes as a treatise in theological science, lies in its too subjective character. Its effect, at all events, has been to constitute Calvin pre-eminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit.

Calvin has made contributions of the first importance to other departments of theological thought. It has already been observed that he marks an epoch in the history of the doctrine of the Trinity. He also marks an epoch in the mode of presenting the work of Christ. The presentation of Christ’s work under the rubrics of the three-fold office of Prophet, Priest and King was introduced by him: and from him it was taken over by the entirety of Christendom, not always, it is true, in his spirit or with his completeness of development, but yet with large advantage. In Christian ethics, too, his impulse proved epoch-making, and this great science was for a generation cultivated only by his followers.

It is probable, however, that Calvin’s greatest contribution to theological science lies in the rich development which he gives—and which he was the first to give—to the doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit. No doubt, from the origin of Christianity, everyone who has been even slightly imbued with the Christian spirit has believed in the Holy Spirit as the author and giver of life, and has attributed all that is good in the world, and particularly in himself, to His holy offices. And, of course, in treating of grace, Augustine worked out the doctrine of salvation as a subjective experience with great vividness and in great detail, and the whole course of this salvation was fully understood, no doubt, to be the work of the Holy Spirit. But in the same sense in which we may say that the doctrine of sin and grace dates from Augustine, the doctrine of satisfaction from Anselm, the doctrine of justification by faith from Luther,—we must say that the doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit is a gift from Calvin to the Church. It was he who first related the whole experience of salvation specifically to the working of the Holy Spirit, worked it out into its details, and contemplated its several steps and stages in orderly progress as the product of the Holy Spirit’s specific work in applying salvation to the soul. Thus he gave systematic and adequate expression to the whole doctrine of the Holy Spirit and made it the assured possession of the Church of God.

It has been common to say that Calvin’s entire theological work may be summed up in this—that he emancipated the soul from the tyranny of human authority and delivered it from the uncertainties of human intermediation in religious things: that he brought the soul into the immediate presence of God and cast it for its spiritual health upon the free grace of God alone. Where the Romanist placed the Church, it is said, Calvin set the Deity. The saying is true, and perhaps, when rightly understood and filled with its appropriate content, it may sufficiently characterize the effect of his theological teaching. But it is expressed too generally to be adequate. What Calvin did was, specifically, to replace the doctrine of the Church as sole source of assured knowledge of God and sole institute of salvation, by the Holy Spirit. Previously, men had looked to the Church for all the trustworthy knowledge of God obtainable, and as well for all the communications of grace accessible. Calvin taught them that neither function has been committed to the Church, but God the Holy Spirit has retained both in His own hands and confers both knowledge of God and communion with God on whom He will.

The Institutes is, accordingly, just a treatise on the work of God the Holy Spirit in making God savingly known to sinful man, and bringing sinful man into holy communion with God. Therefore it opens with the great doctrine of the testimonium Spiritus Sancti—another of the fruitful doctrines which the Church owes to Calvin—in which he teaches that the only vital and vitalizing knowledge of God which a sinner can attain, is communicated to him through the inner working of the Spirit of God in his heart, without which there is spread in vain before his eyes the revelation of God’s glory in the heavens, and the revelation of His grace in the perspicuous pages of the Word. And therefore, it centres in the great doctrine of Regeneration,—the term is broad enough in Calvin to cover the whole process of the subjective recovery of man to God— in which he teaches that the only power which can ever awake in a sinful heart the motions of a living faith, is the power of this same Spirit of God moving with a truly creative operation on the deadened soul. When these great ideas are developed in their full expression—with explication of all their presuppositions in the love of God and the redemption of Christ, and of all their relations and consequents—we have Calvin’s theology.

Now of course, a theology which commits everything to the operations of that Spirit of God who “worketh when and where and how He pleases,” hangs everything on the sovereign good-pleasure of God. Calvin’s theology is therefore, predestination to the core, and he does not fail, in faithfulness to the teachings of Scripture and with clear-eyed systematizing genius, to develop its predestinarianism with fullness and with emphasis; to see in all that comes to pass the will of God fulfilling itself, and to vindicate to God the glory that is His due as the Lord and disposer of all things. But this is not the peculiarity of his theology. Augustine had taught all this a thousand years before him. Luther and Zwingli and Martin Bucer, his own teacher in these high mysteries, were teaching it all while he was learning it. The whole body of the leaders of the Reformation movement were teaching it along with him. What is special to himself is the clearness and emphasis of his reference of all that God brings to pass, especially in the processes of the new creation, to God the Holy Spirit, and the development from this point of view of a rich and full doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit.

Here then is probably Calvin’s greatest contribution to theological development. In his hands, for the first time in the history of the Church, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit comes to its rights. Into the heart of none more than into his did the vision of the glory of God shine, and no one has been more determined than he not to give the glory of God to another. Who has been more devoted than he to the Saviour, by whose blood he has been bought? But, above everything else, it is the sense of the sovereign working of salvation by the almighty power of the Holy Spirit which characterizes all Calvin’s thought of God. And above everything else he deserves, therefore, the great name of the theologian of the Holy Spirit.

÷ 09 The Theology of John Calvin

by Rev. B. B. WARFIELD

[This essay appeared in a booklet published by the Presbyterian Board of Education in 1909]

The subject of this address is the theology of John Calvin and I shall ask leave to take this subject rather broadly, that is to say, to attempt not so much to describe the personal peculiarities of John Calvin as a theologian, as to indicate in broad outlines the determining characteristics of the theology which he taught. I wish to speak, in other words, about Calvinism, that great system of religious thought which bears John Calvin's name, and which also--although of course he was not its author, but only one of its chief exponents--bears indelibly impressed upon it the marks of his formative hand and of his systematizing genius. Of all the teachers who have wrought into it their minds and hearts since its revival in that tremendous religious upheaval we call the Reformation, this system of thought owes most perhaps to John Calvin and has therefore justly borne since then his name. And of all the services which Calvin has rendered to humanity--and they are neither few nor small--the greatest was undoubtedly his gift to it afresh of this system of religious thought, quickened into new life by the forces of his genius, and it is therefore just that he should be most widely remembered by it. When we are seeking to probe to the heart of Calvinism, we are exploring also most thoroughly the heart of John Calvin. Calvinism is his greatest and most significant monument, and he who adequately understands it will best understand him.

It was about a hundred years ago that Max Gobel first set the scholars at work upon the attempt clearly to formulate the formative principle of Calvinism. A long line of distinguished thinkers have exhausted themselves in the task without attaining, we must confess, altogether consistent results. The great difficulty has been that the formative and distinctive principles of Calvinism have been confused, and men have busied themselves rather in indicating the points of difference by which Calvinism is distinguished from other theological tendencies than in seeking out the germinal principle of which it itself is the unfolding.

The particular theological tendency with which Calvinism has been contrasted in such discussions is, as was natural, the sister system of Lutheranism, with which it divided the heritage of the Reformation. Now undoubtedly somewhat different spirits do inform Calvinism and Lutheranism. And equally undoubtedly, the distinguishing spirit of Calvinism is due to its formative principle and is not to be accounted for by extraneous circumstances of origin or antecedents, such as for example, the democratic instincts of the Swiss, or the superior humanistic culture of its first teachers, or their tendency to intellectualism or to radicalism. But it is gravely misleading to identify the formative principle of either type of Protestantism with its prominent points of difference from the others. They have vastly more in common than in distinction. And nothing could be more misleading than to trace all their differences, as to their roots, to the fundamental place given in the two systems respectively to the principles of predestination and justification by faith.

In the first place, the doctrine of predestination is not the formative principle of Calvinism, it is only its logical implication. It is not the root from which Calvinism springs, it is one of the branches which it has inevitably thrown out. And so little is it the peculiarity of Calvinism, that it underlay and gave its form and power to the whole Reformation movement--which was, as from the spiritual point of view a great revival of religion, so from the doctrinal point of view a great revival of Augustinianism. There was, accordingly, no difference among the Reformers on this point; Luther and Melanchthon and the compromizing Butzer were no less zealous for absolute predestination than Zwingli and Calvin. Even Zwingli could not surpass Luther in sharp and unqualified assertion of this doctrine; and it was not Calvin but Melanchthon who paused, even in his first preliminary statement of the elements of the Protestant faith, to give it formal assertion and elaboration.

Just as little can the doctrine of justification by faith be represented as specifically Lutheran. It is as central to the Reformed as to the Lutheran system. Nay, it is only in the Reformed system that it retains the purity of its conception and resists the tendency to make it a doctrine of justification on account of; instead of by, faith. It is true that Lutheranism is prone to rest in faith as a kind of ultimate fact, while Calvinism penetrates to its causes, and places faith in its due relation to the other products of God's activity looking to the salvation of man. And this difference may, on due consideration, conduct us back to the formative principle of each type of thought. But it, too, is rather an outgrowth of the divergent formative principles than the embodiment of them. Lutheranism, sprung from the throes of a guilt-burdened soul seeking peace with God, finds peace in faith, and stops right there. It is so absorbed in rejoicing in the blessings which flow from faith that it refuses or neglects to inquire whence faith itself flows. It thus loses itself in a sort of divine euthumia [greek: cheerfulness], and knows, and will know nothing beyond the peace of the justified soul. Calvinism asks with the same eagerness as Lutheranism the great question, "What shall I do to be saved?" and answers it precisely as Lutheranism answers it. But it cannot stop there. The deeper question presses upon it, "Whence this faith by which I am justified?" And the deeper response suffuses all the chambers of the soul with praise, "From the free gift of God alone, to the praise of the glory of His grace." Thus Calvinism withdraws the eye from the soul and its destiny and fixes it on God and His glory. It has zeal, no doubt, for salvation but its highest zeal is for the honour of God, and it is this that quickens its emotions and vitalizes its efforts. It begins, it centres and it ends with the vision of God in His glory and it sets itself; before all things, to render to God His rights in every sphere of life-activity.

If thus the formative principle of Calvinism is not to be identified with the points of difference which it has developed with its sister type of Protestantism, Lutheranism, much less can it be identified with those heads of doctrine--severally or in sum--which have been singled out by its own rebellious daughter, Arminianism, as its specially vunerable points. The "five points of Calvinism," we have no doubt learned to call them, and not without justice. They are, each and every one of them, essential elements in the Calvinistic system, the denial of which in any of their essential details is logically the rejection of the entirety of Calvinism; and in their sum they provide what is far from being a bad epitome of the Calvinistic system. The sovereignty of the election of God, the substitutive definiteness of the atonement of Christ, the inability of the sinful will to good, the creative energy of the saving grace of the Spirit, the safety of the redeemed soul in the keeping of its Redeemer,--are not these the distinctive teachings of Calvinism, as precious to every Calvinist's heart as they are necessary to the integrity of the system? Selected as the objects of the Arminian assault, these "five-points" have been reaffirmed, therefore, with the constancy of profound conviction by the whole Calvinistic world. It is well however to bear in mind that they owe their prominence in our minds to the Arminian debate, and however well fitted they may prove in point of fact to stand as a fair epitome of Cavinistic doctrine, they are historically at least only the Calvinistic obverse of "the five points of Arminianism." And certainly they can put in no claim, either severally or in sum, to announce the formative principle of Calvinism, whose outworking in the several departments of doctrine they rather are--though of course they may surely and directly conduct us back to that formative principle, as the only root out of which just this body of doctrine could grow. Clearly at the root of the stock which bears these branches must lie a most profound sense of God and an equally profound sense of the relation in which the creature stands to God, whether conceived merely as creature or, more specifically as sinful creature. It is the vision of God and His Majesty, in a word, which lies at the foundation of the entirety of Calvinistic thinking.

The exact formulation of the formative principle of Calvinism, as I have said, has taxed the acumen of a long line of distinguished thinkers. Many modes of stating it have been proposed. Perhaps after all, however, its simplest statement is the best. It lies then, let me repeat, in a profound apprehension of God in His majesty, with the poignant realization which inevitably accompanies this apprehension, of the relation sustained to God by the creature as such, and particularly by the sinful creature. The Calvinist is the man who has seen God, and who, having seen God in His glory, is filled on the one hand, with a sense of his own unworthiness to stand in God's sight as a creature, and much more as a sinner, and on the other hand, with adoring wonder that nevertheless this God is a God who receives sinners. He who believes in God without reserve and is determined that God shall be God to him, in all his thinking, feeling, willing--in the entire compass of his life activities, intellectual, moral, spiritual--throughout all his individual, social, religious relations--is, by the force of that strictest of all logic which presides over the outworking of principles into thought and life, by the very necessity of the case, a Calvinist.

If we wish to reduce this statement to a more formal theoretical form, we may say perhaps, that Calvinism in its fundamental idea implies three things. In it, (i) objectively speaking, theism comes to its rights; (ii) subjectively speaking, the religious relation attains its purity; (iii) soteriologically speaking, evangelical religion finds at length its full expression and its secure stability. Theism comes to its rights only in a teleological view of the universe, which recognizes in the whole course of events the orderly working out of the plan of God, whose will is consequently conceived as the ultimate cause of all things. The religious relation attains its purity only when an attitude of absolute dependence on God is not merely assumed, as in the act, say, of prayer, but is sustained through all the activities of life, intellectual, emotional, executive. And evangelical religion reaches its full manifestation and its stable form only when the sinful soul rests in humble, self-emptying trust purely on the God of grace as the immediate and sole source of all the efficiency which enters into its salvation. From these things shine out upon us the formative principle of Calvinism. The Calvinist is the man who sees God behind all phenomena, and in all that occurs recognizes the hand of God, working out His will; who makes the attitude of the soul to God in prayer the permanent attitude in all its life activities; and who casts himself on the grace of God alone, excluding every trace of dependence on self from the whole work of his salvation.

I think it important to insist here that Calvinism is not a specific variety of theistic thought, religious experience, evangelical faith, but the perfect expression of these things. The difference between it and other forms of theism, religion, evangelicalism, is a difference not of kind but of degree. There are not many kinds of theism, religion, evangelicalism, each with its own special characteristics, among which men are at liberty to choose, as may suit their individual tastes. There is but one kind of theism, religion, evangelicalism, and if there are several constructions laying claim to these names they differ from one another, not as correlative species of a more inclusive genus, but only as more or less good or bad specimens of the same thing differ from one another.

Calvinism comes forward simply as pure theism, religion, evangelicalism, as over against less pure theism, religion, evangelicalism. It does not take its position then by the side of other types of these things; it takes its place over them, as what they too ought to be. It has no difficulty thus, in recognizing the theistic character of all truly theistic thought, the religious note in all really religious manifestations, the evangelical quality of all actual evangelical faith. It refuses to be set antagonistically over against these where they really exist in any degree. It claims them in every instance of their emergence as its own, and seeks only to give them their due place in thought and life. Whoever believes in God, whoever recognizes his dependence on God, whoever hears in his heart the echo of the Soli Deo gloria of the evangelical profession--by whatever name he may call himself; by whatever logical puzzles his understanding may be confused--Calvinism recognizes such as its own, and as only requiring to give full validity to those fundamental principles which underlie and give its body to all true religion to become explicitly a Calvinist.

Calvinism is born, we perceive, of the sense of God. God fills the whole horizon of the Calvinist's feeling and thought. One of the consequences which flow from this is the high supernaturalism which informs at once his religious consciousness and his doctrinal construction. Calvinism indeed would not be badly defined as the tendency which is determined to do justice to the immediately supernatural, as in the first so in the second creation. The strength and purity of its apprehension of the supernatural Fact (which is God) removes all embarrassment from it in the presence of the supernatural act (which is miracle). In everything which enters into the process of the recovery of sinful man to good and to God, it is impelled by the force of its first principle to assign the initiative to God. A supernatural revelation in which God makes known to man His will and His purposes of grace; a supernatural record of the revelation in a supernaturally given Book, in which God gives His revelation permanence and extension ,--such things are to the Calvinist matters of course. And above all things, he can but insist with the utmost strenuousness on the immediate supernaturalness of the actual work of redemption; this of course, in its impetration. It is no strain to his faith to believe in a supernatural Redeemer, breaking His way to earth through a Virgin's womb, bursting the bonds of death and returning to His Father's side to share the glory which He had with the Father before the world was. Nor can he doubt that this supernaturally purchased redemption is applied to the soul in an equally supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.

Thus it comes about that monergistic regeneration--"irresistible grace," "effectual calling," our older theologians called it,--becomes the hinge of the Calvinistic soteriology, and lies much more deeply imbedded in the system than many a doctrine more closely connected with it in the popular mind. Indeed, the soteriological significance of predestination itself consists to the Calvinist largely in the safeguard it affords to the immediate supernaturalness of salvation. What lies at the heart of his soteriology is absolute exclusion of creaturely efficiency in the induction of the saving process, that the pure grace of God in salvation may be magnified. Only so could he express his sense of men's complete dependence as sinners on the free mercy of a saving God; or extrude the evil leaven of synergism, by which God is robbed of His glory and man is encouraged to attribute to some power, some act, some initiative of his own, his participation in that salvation which in reality has come to him from pure grace.

There is nothing therefore, against which Calvinism sets its face with more firmness than every form and degree of auto-soterism. Above everything else, it is determined to recognize God, in His son Jesus Christ, acting through the Holy Spirit whom He has sent, as our veritable Saviour. To Calvinism, sinful man stands in need, not of inducements or assistance to save himself; but precisely of saving; and Jesus Christ has come not to advise, or urge, or woo, or help him to save himself; but to save him; to save him through the prevalent working on him of the Holy Spirit. This is the root of the Calvinistic soteriology, and it is because this deep sense of human helplessness and this profound consciousness of indebtedness for all that enters into salvation to the free grace of God is the root of its soteriology, that election becomes to Calvinism the cor cordis of the Gospel. He who knows that it is God who has chosen him, and not he who has chosen God, and that he owes every step and stage of his salvation to the working out of this choice of God, would be an ingrate indeed if he gave not the whole glory of his salvation to the inexplicable election of the Divine love.

Calvinism however, is not merely a soteriology. Deep as its interest is in salvation, it cannot escape the question--"Why should God thus intervene in the lives of sinners to rescue them from the consequences of their sin?" And it cannot miss the answer--"Because it is to the praise of the glory of His grace." Thus it cannot pause until it places the scheme of salvation itself in relation with a complete world-view in which it becomes subsidiary to the glory of the Lord God Almighty. If all things are from God, so to Calvinism all things are also unto God, and to it God will be all in all. It is born of the reflection in the heart of man of the glory of a God who will not give His honour to another, and draws its life from constant gaze upon this great image. And let us not fail punctually to note, that "it is the only system in which the whole order of the world is thus brought into a rational unity with the doctrine of grace, and in which the glorification of God is carried out with absolute completeness." Therefore the future of Christianity--as its past has done--lies in its hands. For, it is certainly.true, as has been said by a profound thinker of our own time, that "it is only with such a universal conception of God, established in a living way, that we can face with hope of complete conquest all the spiritual dangers and terrors of our times." "It, however," as the same thinker continues, "is deep enough and large enough and divine enough, rightly understood, to confront them and do battle with them all in vindication of the Creator, Preserver and Governor of the world, and of the Justice and Love of the divine Personality."

This is the system of doctrine to the elaboration and defence of which John Calvin gave all his powers nearly four hundred years ago. And it is chiefly because he gave all his powers to commending to us this system of doctrine, that we are here today to thank God for giving to the world the man who has given to the world this precious gift.

÷ 10 Calvinism Today

by Benjamin B. Warfield

THE subject of this address involves the determination of a matter of fact, about which it is not easy to feel fully assured. What is the present-day attitude towards Calvinism? The answer to this question is apt to vary with the point of sight of the observer, or rather with the horizon which his eye surveys.

Our learning today is “made in Germany”, our culture comes to us largely from England. And the German learning of the day has a sadly rationalistic tendency; which is superimposed, moreover, on a Lutheran foundation that has an odd way of cropping up and protruding itself in unexpected places. Similarly, English culture is not merely shot through. but stained through and through with an Anglican colouring. Lutheranism was ever intolerant of Calvinism. Anglicanism was certainly never patient of it. Naturalism is its precise contradictory. He who breathes the atmosphere of books, therefore—whether books of erudition or books of pure literature—is apt to find it stifling to his Calvinism.

There is, of course, another side to the matter. There may very likely be more Calvinists in the world today than ever before, and even relatively, the professedly Calvinistic churches are no doubt holding their own. There are important tendencies of modern thought which play into the hands of this or that Calvinistic conception. Above all, there are to be found everywhere humble souls, who, in the quiet of retired lives, have caught a vision of God in His glory and are cherishing in their hearts that vital flame of complete dependence on Him which is the very essence of Calvinism.

On the whole, however, I think we must allow, especially when we are contemplating the trend of current thought, that the fortunes of Calvinism are certainly not at their flood. Those whose heritage it was, have in large numbers drifted away from it. Those who still formally profess it do not always illustrate it in life or proclaim it in word.

There remains, however, undoubtedly a remnant according to the election of grace. But the condition of a remnant, while it may well be a healthful one—bearing in it, as a fruitful seed, the promise and potency of future expansion—is little Likely to be a happy one. Unfriendly faces meet it on every side; if doubt and hesitation are not engendered, as least an apologetical attitude is fostered, and an apologetical attitude is not becoming in Calvinists, whose trust is in the Lord God Almighty. In such a situation, Calvinism seems shorn of its strength and is tempted to stand fearful and half-ashamed in the marts of men. I have no wish to paint the situation in too dark colours; I fully believe that Calvinism, as it has supplied the sinew of evangelical Christianity in the past, so is it its strength in the present and its hope for the future. Meanwhile, does it not seem, in large circles at all events, to be thrown very much on the defensive? In the measure in which you feel this to be the case, in that measure you will be prepared to ask with me for the causes and significance of this state of things.

We should begin, I think, by recalling precisely what Calvinism is. It may be fairly summed up in these three propositions. Calvinism is (1) Theism come to its rights. Calvinism is (2) Religion at the height of its conception. Calvinism is (3) Evangelicalism in its purest and most stable expression.

(1) Calvinism, I say, is Theism come to its rights. For in what does Theism come to its rights but in a telelogical view of the universe? For, though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth—as there are gods many and lords conceived by men—yet to the Theist there can be but one God, of whom are all things and unto whom are all things. You see, we have already slipped into the Calvinistic formula, “The will of God is the cause of things.” I do not say, you will observe, that Theism and Calvinism have points of affinity, lie close to one another; I say they are identical. 1 say that the Theism which is truly Theism, consistently Theism, all that Theism to be really Theism must be, is already in principle Calvinism; that Calvinism in its cosmological aspect is nothing more than Theism in its purity. To fall away from Calvinism is to fall away, by just so much, from a truly theistic conception of the universe. Of course then, to fall away in any degree from a pure Theism in our conception of things is just by that much to fall away from Calvinism. Wherever in our view of the world an imperfect Theism has crept in, there Calvinism has become impossible.

(2) Calvinism, I have said, is religion at the height of its conception,for, whatever else may enter into the conscious religious relation,—a vague feeling of mystery, a struggling reaching out towards the infinite, a deep sentiment of reverence and awe, a keen recognition or dull apprehension of responsibility,—certainly its substance lies in a sense of absolute dependence upon a Supreme Being. I do not say, you will observe, an absolute feeling of dependence, which, in the Schleiermacherian meaning at least of a feeling without intellectual content, were an absurdity. What I say is, that religion in its substance is a sense of absolute dependence on God and reaches the height of its conception only when this sense of absolute dependence is complete and all-pervasive, in the thought and feeling and life. But when this stage is reached we have just Calvinism.

For what is Calvinism but the theistical expression of religion, conceived as absolute dependence on God? Wherever we find religion in its purity, therefore, there Calvinism is implicit. I do not say, observe again, that an approach to Calvinism is traceable there, in less or greater measure. I say, there Calvinism is—implicit indeed, but really present. Religion in its purity is Calvinism in life, and you can fall away from Calvinism only by just in that measure falling away from religion; and you do fall away from Calvinism just in proportion as you fall away from religion in its purity. It is, however, dreadfully easy to fall away from religion at the height of its conception. We may assume the truly religious attitude of heart and mind for a moment; it is hard to maintain it and give it unbroken dominance in our thought, feeling, and action. Our soul’s attitude in prayer—that is the religious attitude at its height. But do we preserve the attitude we assume in prayer towards God, when we rise from our knees? Or does our Amen! cut it off at once, and do we go on about our affairs in an entirely different mood? Now, Calvinism means just the preservation, in all our thinking and feeling and action, of the attitude of utter dependence on God which we assume in prayer. It is the mood of religion made determinative of all our thinking and feeling and willing. It is therefore conterminous with religion in the height of its conception. Wherever religion in any measure loses hold of the reins of life and our immanent thought has slipped away from its control,—there Calvinism has become impossible.

(3) I have said too, that Calvinism is evangelicalism in its pure and only stable expression. When we say evangelicalism we say sin and salvation. Evangelicalism is a soteriological conception, it implies sin, and salvation from sin. There may be religion without evangelicalism. We may go further: religion might conceivably exist at the height of its conception and evangelicalism be lacking. But not in sinners. Evangelicalism is religion at the height of its conception as it forms itself in the hearts of sinners. It means utter dependence on God for salvation. It implies, therefore, need of salvation and a profound sense of this need, along with an equally profound sense of helplessness in the presence of this need, and utter dependence on God for its satisfaction. Its type is found in the publican who smote his breast and cried, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” No question there of saving himself, or of helping God to save him, or of opening the way to God to save him. No question of anything but, “I am a sinner, and all my hope is in God my Saviour!” Now this is Calvinism; not, note once more, something like Calvinism or an approach to Calvinism, but just Calvinism in its vital manifestation. Wherever this attitude of heart is found and is given expression in direct and unambiguous terms, there is Calvinism. Wherever this attitude of mind and heart is fallen away from, in however small a measure, there Calvinism has become impossible.

For Calvinism, in this soteriological aspect of it, is just the perception and expression and defence of the utter dependence of the soul on the free grace of God for salvation. All its so-called hard features—its doctrine of original sin, yes, speak it right out, its doctrine of total depravity and the entire inability of the sinful will to good; its doctrine of election, or, to put it in the words everywhere spoken against, its doctrine of predestination and preterition, of reprobation itself—mean just this and nothing more. Calvinism will not play fast and loose with the free grace of God. It is set upon giving to God, and to God alone, the glory and all the glory of salvation. There are others than Calvinists, no doubt, who would fain make the same great confession. But they make it with reserves, or they painfully justify the making of it by some tenuous theory which confuses nature and grace. They leave logical pitfalls on this side or that, and the difference between logical pitfalls and other pitfalls is that the wayfarer may fall into the others, but the plain man, just because his is a simple mind, must fall into those. Calvinism will leave no logical pitfalls and will make no reserves. It will have nothing to do with theories whose function it is to explain away facts. It confesses, with a heart full of adoring gratitude, that to God, and to God alone, belongs salvation and the whole of salvation; that He it is, and He alone, who works salvation in its whole reach. Any falling away in the slightest measure from this great confession is to fall away from Calvinism. Any intrusion of any human merit, or act, or disposition, or power, as ground or cause or occasion, into the process of divine salvation,—whether in the way of power to resist or of ability to improve grace, of the opening of the soul to the reception of grace, or of the employment of grace already received—is a breach with Calvinism.

Calvinism is the casting of the soul wholly on the free grace of God alone, to whom alone belongs salvation. And, such being the nature of Calvinism, it seems scarcely necessary to inquire why its fortunes appear from time to time, and now again in our own time, to suffer some depression. It can no more perish out of the earth than the sense of sin can pass out of the heart of sinful humanity—than the sense of God can fade out of the minds of dependent creatures—than God Himself can perish out of the heavens. Its fortunes are bound up with the fortunes of Theism, religion, evangelicalism; for it is just Theism, religion, evangelicalism in the purity of their conception and manifestation. In the purity of their conception and manifestation—there is the seat of the difficulty. It is proverbially hard to retain, much more to maintain, perfection. And how can precisely these things be maintained at their height? Consider the currents of thought flowing up and down in the world, tending—I do not now say to obliterate the perception of the God of all; atheistic naturalism, materialistic or pantheistic evolutionism—but to blunt or obscure our perception of the divine hand in the sequence of events and the issues of things. Consider the pride of man, his assertion of freedom, his boast of power, his refusal to acknowledge the sway of another’s will. Consider the ingrained confidence of the sinner in his own fundamentally good nature and his full ability to perform all that can be justly demanded of him.

Is it strange that in this world, in this particular age of this world, it should prove difficult to preserve not only active, but vivid and dominant, the perception of the everywhere determining hand of God, the sense of absolute dependence on Him, the conviction of utter inability to do even the least thing to rescue ourselves from sin—at the height of their conceptions? Is it not enough to account for whatever depression Calvinism may be suffering in the world today, to point to the natural difficulty—in this materialistic age, conscious of its newly realized powers over against the forces of nature and filled with the pride of achievement and of material well-being—of guarding our perception of the governing hand of God in all things, in its perfection; of maintaining our sense of dependence on a higher power in full force; of preserving our feeling of sin, unworthiness, and helplessness in its profundity? Is not the depression of Calvinism, so far as it is real, significant merely of this, that to our age the vision of God has become somewhat obscured in the midst of abounding material triumphs, that the religious emotion has in some measure ceased to be the determining force in life, and that the evangelical attitude of complete dependence on God for salvation does not readily commend itself to men who are accustomed to lay forceful hands on everything else they wish, and who do not quite see why they may not take heaven also by storm?

Such suggestions may seem to you rather general, perhaps even somewhat indefinite. They nevertheless appear to me to embody the true, and the whole, account of whatever depression of fortunes Calvinism may be suffering today. In our current philosophies, whether monistic evolutionism or pluralistic pragmatism, Theism is far from coming to its rights. In the strenuous activities of our materialized life, religion has little opportunity to assert itself in its purity. In our restless assertion of our personal power and worth, evangelicalism easily falls back into the background. In an atmosphere created by such a state of things, how could Calvinism thrive?

We may, of course, press on to a more specific account of its depressed fortunes. But in attempting to be more specific, what can we do but single out particular aspects of the general situation for special remark? It is possible, indeed, that the singling out of one of these aspects may give clearness and point to the general fact, and it may be worth-while, therefore, to attend to one of these special aspects for a moment.

Let us observe then, that Calvinism is only another name for consistent supernaturalism in religion. The central fact of Calvinism is the vision of God. Its determining principle is zeal for the divine honour. What it sets itself to do is to render to God His rights in every sphere of life-activity. In this it begins, and centres, and ends. It is this that is said, when it is said that it is Theism come to its rights, since in that case everything that comes to pass is viewed as the direct outworking of the divine purpose—when it is said that it is religion at the height of its conception, since in that case God is consciously felt as Him in whom we live and move and have our being—when it is said that it is evangelicalism in its purity, since in that case we cast ourselves as sinners, without reserve, wholly on the mercy of the divine grace. It is this sense of God, of God’s presence, of God’s power, of God’s all-pervading activity—most of all in the process of salvation—which constitutes Calvinism. When the Calvinist gazes into the mirror of the world, whether the world of nature or the, world of events, his attention is held not by the mirror itself (with. the cunning construction of which scientific investigations may no doubt very properly busy themselves), but by the Face of God which he sees reflected therein. When the Calvinist contemplates the religious life, he is less concerned with the psychological nature and relations of the emotions which surge through the soul (with which the votaries of the new science of the psychology of religion are perhaps not quite unfruitfully engaging themselves), than with the divine Source from which they spring, the divine Object on which they take hold. When the Calvinist considers the state of his soul and the possibility of its rescue from death and sin, he may not indeed be blind to the responses which it may by the grace of God be enabled to make to the divine grace, but he absorbs himself not in them but in it, and sees in every step of his recovery to good and to God the almighty working of God’s grace.

The Calvinist, in a word, is the man who sees God. He has caught sight of the ineffable Vision, and he will not let it fade for a moment from his eyes—God in nature, God in history, God in grace. Everywhere he sees God in His mighty stepping, everywhere he feels the working of His mighty arm, the throbbing of His mighty heart. The Calvinist is therefore, by way of eminence, the supernaturalist in the world of thought. The world itself is to him a supernatural product. not merely in the sense that somewhere, away back before all time, God made it, but that God is making it now, and in every event that falls out. In every modification of what is, that takes place, His hand is visible, as through all occurrences His “one increasing purpose runs”. Man himself is His— created for His glory, and having as the one supreme end of his existence to glorify his Maker, and haply also to enjoy Him for ever. And salvation, in every step and stage of it, is of God. Conceived in God’s love, wrought out by God’s own Son in a supernatural life and death in this world of sin, and applied by God’s Spirit in a series of acts as supernatural as the virgin birth and the resurrection of the Son of God themselves—it is a supernatural work through and through. To the Calvinist, thus, the Church of God is as direct a creation of God as the first creation itself. In this supernaturalism, the whole thought and feeling and life of the Calvinist is steeped. Without it there can be no Calvinism, for it is just this that is Calvinism.

Now the age in which we live is anything but supernaturalistic; it is distinctly hostile to supernaturalism. Its most striking characteristic is precisely its deeply rooted and widereaching rationalism of thought and sentiment. We know the origin of this modern naturalism; we can trace its history. What it is of more importance to observe, however, is that we cannot escape its influence. On its rise in the latter part of the seventeenth century a new era began, an era in which men have had little thought for the rights of God in their absorption in the rights of man. English Deism, French Encyclopaedism, German Illuminism—these are some of the fruits it has borne in the progress of its development. And now it has at length run to seed in our own day in what arrogates to itself the name of the New Protestantism—that New Protestantism which repudiates Luther and all his fervid ways, and turns rather for its spiritual parentage to the religious indifferentism of Erasmus. It has invaded with its solvent every form of thought and every activity of life. It has given us a naturalistic philosophy (in which all “being” is evaporated into “becoming”), a naturalistic science (the single-minded zeal of which is to eliminate design from the universe); a naturalistic politics (whose first fruits was the French Revolution, and whose last may well be an atheistic socialism); a naturalistic history (which can scarcely find place for even human personality among the causes of events); and a naturalistic religion, which says, “Hands off” to God— if indeed it troubles itself to consider whether there be a God, if there be a God, whether He be a person, or if He be a person, whether He can or will concern Himself with men.

You, who are ministers of the gospel, have been greatly clogged by this naturalism of current thought in the prosecution of your calling. How many of those to whom you would carry the message of grace do you find preoccupied with a naturalistic prejudice? Who of your acquaintance really posits God as a factor in the development of the world? How often have you been exhorted to seek a “natural” progress for the course of events in history? Yes, even for the history of redemption. So, even in the region of your own theological science a new Bible has been given to you—not offered to you merely, but violently thrust upon you, as the only Bible a rational man can receive—a new Bible reconstructed on the principle of natural development, torn to pieces and rearranged under the overmastering impulse to find a “natural” order of sequence for its books, and a “natural” course of development for the religion whose records it preserves. But why stop with the Bible? Your divine Redeemer Himself has been reconstructed, on the same naturalistic lines. For a century and a half now—from Reimarus to Wrede—all of the resolves of an age pre-eminent for scholarship have been bent to the task of giving you a “natural” Jesus. Why talk here of the miracles of the Old Testament or of the New? It is the Miracle of the Old Testament and of the New which is really brought into the question. Why dispute as to the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus? It is the elimination of Jesus Himself, as aught but a simple man of His day—in nothing, except perhaps an unusually vivid religious experience, differentiated from other Galilean peasants of His time—that the naturalistic frenzy of our age is set upon. And so furiously has the task been driven on, that the choice that is set before us at the end of the day is, practically, between no Jesus at all or a fanatic, not to say a paranoiac Jesus.

In this anti-supernaturalistic atmosphere, is it strange that men find the pure supernaturalism of the Calvinistic confession difficult—that they waver in their firm confidence that it is God who reigns in heaven and on earth, that in Him we all live and move and have our being—that it is He, and not ourselves, who creates in us every impulse to good—and that it is His almighty arm alone that can rescue us from sin and bring to our helpless souls salvation? Is it strange that here, too, men travel the broad road beaten smooth by many feet—that the Calvinistic gate seems narrow so that few there be that find it, and the Calvinistic way so straitened that few there be who go in thereat?

But let us make no mistake here. For here, too, Calvinism is just Christianity. The supernaturalism for which Calvinism stands is the very breath of the nostrils of Christianity; without it Christianity cannot exist. And let us not imagine that we can pick and choose with respect to the aspects of this supernaturalism which we acknowledge—that we may, for example, retain supernaturalism in the origination of Christianity. and forego the supernaturalism with which Calvinism is more immediately concerned, the supernaturalism of the application of Christianity. Men will not believe that a religion, the actual working of which in the world is natural, can have required to be ushered into the world with supernatural pomp and display. These supernaturals stand or fall together.

A supernatural Redeemer is not needed for a natural salvation. If we can, and do, save ourselves; it were grossly incongruous that God should come down from heaven `to save us, trailing clouds of glory with Him as He came. The logic of the Socinian system gave us at once a human Christ and an auto-soteric religion.. The same logic will work today, and, `every day till the end of time. It is only for a truly supernatural salvation that a truly supernatural redemption, or a truly supernatural Redeemer, is demanded,—or can be believed in. And this reveals to us the real place which Calvinism holds in the controversies of today, and the service it is to render in the preservation of Christianity for the future. Only the Calvinist is the consistent supernaturalist, and only consistent supernaturalism can save supernatural religion for the world.

The supernatural fact, which is God; the supernatural act, which is miracle; the supernatural work, which is the revealed will of God; the supernatural redemption, which is the divine deed of the divine Christ; the supernatural salvation which is the divine work of the divine Spirit,—these things form a system, and you cannot draw one item out without shaking the whole. What Calvinism particularly asserts is the supernaturalism of salvation, as the immediate work of God the Holy Spirit in the soul, by virtue of which we are made new creatures in Christ our Redeemer, and framed into the sons of God the Father. And it is only he who heartily believes in the supernaturalism of salvation who is not fatally handicapped in meeting the assaults of that anti-supernaturalistic worldview which flaunts itself so triumphantly about us. Conceal it from ourselves as we may, defeat here lies athwart the path of all half-hearted schemes and compromising constructions. This is what was meant by the late Dr. H. Boynton Smith, when he declared roundly: “One thing is certain,—that Infidel Science will rout everything excepting thoroughgoing Christian orthodoxy. . . . The fight will be between a stiff thoroughgoing orthodoxy and a stiff thoroughgoing infidelity. It will be, for example, Augustine or Comte, Athanasius or Hegel, Luther or Schopenhauer, J. S. Mill or John Calvin.” This witness is true.

We cannot be supernaturalistic in patches of our thinking and naturalistic in substance. We cannot be supernaturalistic with regard to the remote facts of history, and naturalistic with regard to the intimate events of experience. We cannot be supernaturalistic with regard to what occurred two thousand years ago in Palestine, and simply naturalistic with regard to what occurs today in our hearts. No form of Christian supernaturalism can be ultimately maintained in any department of life or thought, except it carry with it the supernaturalism of salvation. And a consistent supernaturalism of salvation is only another name for Calvinism.

Calvinism thus emerges to our sight as nothing more or less than the hope of the world.

Table of Contents

I. John Calvin: The Man and His Work

II. Calvin's Doctrine of the Knowledge of God

III. Calvin's Doctrine of God

IV. Calvin's Doctrine of the Trinity

V. Calvin's Doctrine of the Creation

VI. Calvinism

VII. On the Literary History of Calvin's "Institutes of the Christian Religion"

Address One - John Calvin the Theologian

Address Two - The Theology of Calvin

Address Three - Present-Day Attitude to Calvinism