Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/747

 to human affairs, was assailed by two men-Albert Pighius, a Catholic from the Netherlands, and Jerome Hermes Boisée, a Parisian, an unfrocked Carmelite monk, who had turned physician, and had for a time been closely attached to Calvin. The former argued that if God was the absolute cause of all events and acts, then to Him we owed, not only the goodness of the good, but the wickedness of the wicked; the second, that if faith is made the consequence rather than the condition of election, then God must be charged with partiality. But towards the end of the century a more serious movement took place. The question of the Divine will had exercised the Reformed theologians, especially as criticism had compelled them to consider it in relation to sin as well as to salvation, i.e. both as to the causation of the state from which man was to be saved, and as to his deliverance from it. Certain of the more vigorous Reformed divines, including Beza himself, said that the decree in date precedes the Fall, for what was first in the Divine intention is last in execution; the first thing was the decree to save, but if man is to be saved he must first be lost; hence the Fall is decreed as a consequence of the decreed Salvation. But the milder divines said that the decree of God takes the existence of sin for granted, deals with man as fallen, and elects or rejects him for reasons we cannot perceive, though it clearly knows and regards. The former were known by the name of supralapsarians, and the latter by the name of sublapsarians. In the seventeenth century an acute and effective criticism was directed against both forms of the belief, which, although it falls beyond our scope, must receive passing notice here. Jacobus Arminius (Jakob Herman), a Dutch preacher and professor, declined to recognise the doctrine as either Scriptural or rational. He held that it made God the author of sin, that it restricted His grace, that it left the multitudes outside without hope, that it condemned multitudes for believing the truth, viz. that for them no salvation was either intended or provided in Christ, and it gave an absolutely false security to those who believed themselves to be the elect of God. The criticism was too rational to be cogent, for it was, as it were, an assertion of the rights of man over against the sovereignty of God. And it involved the men who pursued it in the political controversies and conflicts of the time. The Arminians were most successful when the argument proceeded on principles supplied by the conscience and the consciousness of man; and the Calvinists when they argued from the majesty and the might of God. But if the Arminians were dialectically victors, they were politically vanquished. The men who organised authority in Holland proved stronger than those who pleaded and suffered for freedom.

There are still large fields of thought to be traversed before we can do even approximate justice to the mind of Protestantism; but our space is exhausted. All we can now do is to drop a hint as to what was intended; we should have wished to sketch the Renaissance that followed