Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/65

 'He that will save his soul shall lose it'? If we think of religion only as a means of escaping what we call the wrath to come, we shall not escape it; we are already under it; we are under the burden of death, for we care only for ourselves.

This was not the religion of your fathers; this was not the Calvinism which overthrew spiritual wickedness, and hurled kings from their thrones, and purged England and Scotland, for a time at least, of lies and charlatanry. Calvinism was the spirit which rises in revolt against untruth; the spirit which, as I have shown you, has appeared, and reappeared, and in due time will appear again, unless God be a delusion and man be as the beasts that perish. For it is but the inflashing upon the conscience of the nature and origin of the laws by which mankind are governed—laws which exist, whether we acknowledge them or whether we deny them, and will have their way, to our weal or woe, according to the attitude in which we please to place ourselves towards them—inherent, like the laws of gravity, in the nature of things, not made by us, not to be altered by us, but to be discerned and obeyed by us at our everlasting peril.

Nay, rather the law of gravity is but a property of material things, and matter and all that belongs to it may one day fade away like a cloud and vanish. The moral law is inherent in eternity. 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word shall not pass away.' The law is the expression of the will of the Spirit of the Universe. The spirit in