Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/16

 'Because,' was the remarkable answer, 'because he preaches repentance, and the law of repentance is such that a man shall say, "I may commit a thousand crimes, and if I repent I shall be forgiven, and it will be no worse with me: therefore I will continue to sin."' The Druids argued logically, but they drew a false inference notwithstanding. The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness. Where we find a heroic life appearing as the uniform fruit of a particular mode of opinion, it is childish to argue in the face of fact that the result ought to have been different.

The question which I have proposed, however, admits of a reasonable answer. I must ask you only to accompany me on a somewhat wide circuit in search of it.

There seems, in the first place, to lie in all men, in proportion to the strength of their understanding, a conviction that there is in all human things a real order and purpose, notwithstanding the chaos in which at times they seem to be involved. Suffering scattered blindly without remedial purpose or retributive propriety—good and evil distributed with the most absolute disregard of moral merit or demerit—enormous crimes perpetrated with impunity, or vengeance when it comes falling not on the guilty, but the innocent—

these phenomena present, generation after generation, the same perplexing and even maddening features;