Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/25

 nature he feels that he is conquering himself. The conqueror and the conquered cannot be the same; and he therefore concludes, not in vanity, but in profound humiliation and self-abasement, that the infinite grace of God and nothing else is rescuing him from destruction. He is converted, as the theologians say. He sets his face upon another road from that which he has hitherto travelled, and to which he can never return. It has been no merit of his own. His disposition will rather be to exaggerate his own worthlessness, that he may exalt the more what has been done for him, and he resolves thenceforward to enlist himself as a soldier on the side of truth and right, and to have no wishes, no desires, no opinions but what the service of his Master imposes. Like a soldier he abandons his freedom, desiring only like a soldier to act and speak no longer as of himself, but as commissioned from some supreme authority. In such a condition a man becomes magnetic. There are epidemics of nobleness as well as epidemics of disease; and he infects others with his own enthusiasm. Even in the most corrupt ages there are always more persons than we suppose who in their hearts rebel against the prevailing fashions; one takes courage from another, one supports another; communities form themselves with higher principles of action and purer intellectual beliefs. As their numbers multiply they catch fire with a common idea and a common indignation, and ultimately burst out into open war with the lies and iniquities that surround them.

I have been describing a natural process which has