Calvinism: An Address Delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871
By . Scribner & Co.
ALL who know Mr. Froude as an historian know the limited nature of his sympathies, his incapacity to discern any universal ends in history, and his disposition to make himself an out-and-out partisan, in every controversy, of one side or the other. This characteristic limitation of his appears in the discussion by which he inaugurates his Rectorship of St. Andrew’s University. He takes for his theme Calvinism, not with any view to commend it as a theologic system, but because it conveniently symbolizes a tendency of the mind, which he prizes very highly in all its historic manifestations, to revolt against established religions, when these religions have lapsed into mere rituality, and so become a cloak to all manner of hypocrisy in the heart and life of their votaries. He thinks, evidently, that we are just now in an historic crisis verging upon revolution. That is to say, Mr. Froude himself feels a lively instinct of revolt against the two main religious and scientific tendencies of his era, — the tendency of religion to disown all moral substance, and sink into mere picturesque form, and the tendency of science to degrade God out of human proportions, and imprison him in the brute mechanism of nature. And how can he better fulfil his rectoral duty than by giving voice to this fervent instinct of his own soul, and warning his youthful hearers against the perpetually recurring vice of history, which consists in giving human frivolity and corruption the prestige of religion, and exalting men’s ignorance and conceit to the dignity of science ? Accordingly, Mr. Froude sets out upon a very rapid run through history, to show his hearers what he finds there of menace and encouragement to our own time, namely, the antagonism of two forces, each hotly contending with the other for the mastery of human life : one negative, or ritualistic, disposing us to rely for acceptance with God upon an instituted priesthood and other apparatus of worship, and to be content with the formal righteousness thus conveyed ; the other positive, or Calvinistic, disposing us to approach God without any ceremonial mediation, or in our proper persons, and to be content with nothing short of a real or substantial righteousness, identical with our own virtuous life or unblemished morality. And the counsel he gives his pupils is, of course, to side with the positive or manlier tendency, and lend all their personal force to the impoverishment of superstition.
The sons of John Knox, if any survive among the students of St. Andrew’s, must have been amused at their new rector’s attempt to interpret Calvinism into a symbol of human dignity, or make it an historic voucher of man’s moral or personal worth. Nothing was ever so dear to the heart of John Calvin, nothing has ever been so faithfully maintained by his intellectual descendants, as the dogma of man’s natural depravity, or moral worthlessness, and his consequent utter dependence upon a righteousness foreign to himself, yet graciously imputed to him as his own, on condition of his renouncing all faith in himself, and believing only in Christ In a word, Calvinism, if it mean anything, means, notoriously, that man is hopefully related to God, not by anything in himself, but exclusively by a fund of merit stored up in his attorney, or vicar, Jesus Christ, who consents to a putative identification with the sinner in the divine sight, in order that the sinner, in gratefully accepting such identification, may forego his proper hideousness in that sight, and so become invested with Christ’s righteousness.
But the wrong which Mr. Froude’s hasty generalization does to Calvinism as an intellectual symbol is after all much less serious than the wrong he does the religious instinct of mankind, in associating as he does the religious destiny of the race with our moral life, or the interests of civilization. What religion in its purest (or Christian) form has always imported is the ultimate apotheosis of man, or the eventual divinization of human nature. But as human nature is a moral, not a physical quantity, as it claims only a conscious, not a material reality, only a subjective, not an objective truth, this great prophecy and promise of religion can only become realized in so far as our human life or consciousness becomes spiritualized ; that is, enlarged out of individual into race proportions, or converted from isolated personal dimensions into unitary social form and order. And Mr. Froude, in ignoring this truth, and identifying religion with the interests of the merely moral or personal consciousness, obscures its spiritual lustre, and betrays it afresh to misconception. Religion, spiritually regarded, has at heart the broadest, most abject interests of human nature itself, and never ducks consequently to any of the subservient persons of that nature, however eminent, but cheerfully tramples Socrates and Xantippe, Confucius and Caligula, Calvin and Brigham Young, into the equal dust of its disregard. The only name eternally dear to it, because spiritually identified with it, is that of the only man in history whose character aspires to mythologic proportions, in that he alone of men laid down his life in spontaneous homage to the enemies of his proper race and person ; these enemies being human nature itself or uni-versal man. How idle, therefore, to conceive of religion as concerned with any dogmatic symbols, or as legitimating any of the frivolous controversies which men continue to wage between reason and authority ! Its aims are transcendently practical; and no one can spiritually ally himself with it who is not ready to renounce all the honors and emoluments of the world, and wed himself exclusively to the interests of universal justice.