Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/22

 struggle which began at the beginning and will continue to the end between the few who have had ability to see into the truth and loyalty to obey it, and the multitude who by evasion or rebellion have hoped to thrive in spite of it.

Thus we see that in the better sort of men there are two elementary convictions; that there is over all things an unsleeping, inflexible, all-ordering, just power, and that this power governs the world by laws which can be seen in their effects, and on the obedience to which, and on nothing else, human welfare depends.

And now I will suppose some one whose tendencies are naturally healthy, though as yet no special occasion shall have roused him to serious thought, growing up in a civilised community where, as usually happens, a compromise has been struck between vice and virtue, where a certain difference between right and wrong is recognised decently on the surface, while below it one half of the people are rushing steadily after the thing called pleasure, and the other half labouring in drudgery to provide the means of it for the idle.

Of practical justice in such a community there will be exceedingly little, but as society cannot go along at all without paying morality some outward homage, there will of course be an established religion—an Olympus, a Valhalla, or some system of a theogony or theology, with temples, priests, liturgies, public confessions in one form or another of the dependence of the things we see upon what is not seen, with certain ideas of duty and penalties im-