| >What Calvin did was this. He took what is one of the oldest and most perilous directives of mankind, the sense of Fate. He isolated it, and he made it supreme, by fitting it, with the kneading of a powerful mind, into the scheme which Christian men still traditionally associated with the holiness and authority of their ancestral religion. God had become Man, and God had become Man to redeem mankind. That was no part of the old idea of Inevitable Fate. On the contrary, it was a relief from that pagan nightmare. We of the Faith say that the Incarnation was intended to release us from such a pagan nightmare. Well, Calvin accepted the Incarnation, but he forced it to fit in with the old pagan horror of compulsion: “Ananke.” He reintroduced the Inexorable. Yes, God had become Man and had died to save mankind; but only mankind in such numbers and persons as He had chosen to act for. The idea of the Inexorable remained. The merits of Christ were imputed, and no more. God was Causation, and Causation is one immutable whole. A man was damned or saved; and it was not of his doing. The recognition of evil as equal with good, which rapidly becomes the worship of evil (the great Manichean heresy, which has roots as old as mankind; the permanent motive of Fear) was put forward by Calvin in a strange new form. He did not indeed oppose, as had the Manichean, two equal principles of Good and of Evil. He put forward only one principle, God. But to that One Principle he ascribed all our suffering, and, for most of us, necessary and eternal suffering. Again, the Catholic Church had called the soul of man immortal. Calvin accepted that doctrine; but under his hands it becomes an immortality of doom, and for the few who shall have doom to beatitude, doom it yet is, as doom is is to the myriads for whom it shall mean despair. |
“Again, the Catholic Church had called the soul of man immortal. Calvin accepted that doctrine; but under his hands it becomes an immortality of doom, and for the few who shall have doom to beatitude, doom it yet is, as doom is is to the myriads for whom it shall mean despair.”
Then neither was correct from the Scriptures. Says Ezekiel 18:4, 20,
“Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.
The soul that sinneth, it shall die.”