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Show JOHN CALVIN'S FAITH After Four Hundred Years His Praises J Are Sounded, Whilst His Doctrines of j j Predestination a. Free Will Are Re- j jected. His Horrible Decretum Awful I j Decree Now Obseiete. The Central j ; Catholic of Winnipeg Gives the Fol- j n lowing Brief Summary of Some of His J !j Teachings. j : f ! I :' It was Calvin's creed, that God is supreme and j therefore there is no free will outside of Him; j f hence creatures have no freedom, except from phy- i : sical compulsion. God does not by brute force com- j , j" pel man to act, but He determines irresistibly all j I we do, whether good or evil. If man were a free J ; cause God would cease to be the first cause; hence j He has decreed an absolute order, physical, moral. I religious, never to be modified by act of ours. "Man. by the righteous impulsion of God does that which is unlawful," and man falls, the providence of God so ordaining." (Inst. IV, 18, 2; III, 23, 8). Later, to meet Scriptural objections, he distinguished two wills in the Divine Nature, one public and apparent, appar-ent, commanding good and forbidding evil; the other secret and real, predetermining that Adam, and all the reprobate should fall into sin and perish. " - Calvin made God not only a cruel despot, but ; a double-dealing hypocrite, writes Rev. Michael Kenny, S. J., in an admirable analysis of his doctrine. doc-trine. This is the man whom Presbyterian assem- ; J blies have been lauding as the grand defender of the sovereignty of God; this the system from which human liberty has sprung ! When the injustice of such cruel mystery was objected to him, he replied: "Some men are de- j voted from the womb to certain death that God's i t, name may be glorified in their destruction. I confess it is an - awful degree" (horrible decretum); decre-tum); but it was an "unsearchable mystery" and , -it was impiety to question it. Adam's sin, though Adam could not help it, brought him and his de- j scendants to "total depravity." "Justifying faith" saves the elect; being predestined they cannot miss it and, once they have it, they cannot lose it. All others are "reprobate"; they may bo baptized, leading lead-ing objectively saintly lives and doing the best I they know, but their godliness is apparent, not j real; not having received the "faith that justifies," j they are predestined to destruction, and they can- j not help it. The Catholic doctrine that man's will ; is free, that God gives to all sufficient grace for salvation, that intention and free consent determine deter-mine the quality of an act and that involuntary ' desires are not sinful, are all false and damnable I ; "We, on the contrary," he replies to St. Augustine. ! "deem it to be a sin whenever a man feels any desires de-sires forbidden by divine law; and we assert the depravity which produces them to be sin." Yet such desires in the elect, who are no longer "depraved "de-praved ," are lawful, and what is wrong for the sinner is right for the saint. But the righteousness ' is not his own, it is imputed to him; it come3 at the moment of "conversion" and good works have nothing to do with it. Moreover, since the "con- ; verted" is henceforth justified no further grace ig i i needed, and the sacraments except bantism nnrl the eucharist, which are merely symbols and not productive of grace), the Mass and other Catholic ! ? channels of grace, are superfluous, superstitious : : ! and idolatrous. ; On such foundations did Calvin establish "the -j sovereignty of God and human liberty" for the j elect. Such sovereignty could scarcely prove ac- ' ceptable to the "reprobates," who were the vast j majority; and even on "the elect" its hold was weak. ; It is the irony of fate that on the very day j that the fourth centenary of John Calvin was cele- ; brnted, a very distinguished Anglican churchman, visiting Winnipeg, should make the statement that i he "had been very much struck by the grotesque I competition of denominations in America; seeing small towns with numbers of denominations all ; struggling and none being successful." Calvin wa3 I one of the great "reformers" and Canon Henson j unwittingly provides us with a very happily ex- j pressed comment on their work. It has truly been said that in his famous "Institutes" Calvin wrote ! a book "that made Protestantism for the moment ! and unmade it for all time." - ! " It also befell, curiously enough, to celebrate j Calvin's anniversary on the same Sunday that rabid range preachers were repeating their twice- '; told legends about the Inquisition. For Calvin reigned over Geneva during the middle of the sixteenth six-teenth century when, in that little city of 15,000 people, in the course of five years, there were a I many as fifty-eight sentences of death for heresy. j seventy-six of exile, fines and committals without I number. Servetus' execution was not an exception, but a type. , f |
