CALVIN'S CONFESSION.

The " Westminster Confession of Faith" is an ably written paper, from the pen of Mr. Jas. Smith. The author says, "The law of development is unresting in its operation, and theology must submit to its influence, as well as every other product of the mind of man. When the Reformation occurred, the saturnine mind of John Calvin found a congenial occupation in engrafting on to the new theology the shocking misrepresentations God which had originated with and been propagated by the ascetic schoolmen of earlier times. Science having been proscribed by the Church,little or nothing was known of natural laws ; and every great physical convulsion was looked upon as a special and extraordinary interposition of Supreme Power, undertaken for the express purpose of punishing those who suffered by it, and of reading a terrible warning to those who did not; a repetition of which might be prevented by the performance of certain rites and ceremonies. The first second Confessions of Faith adopted by the Kirk of Scotland reflected the hard and cruel spirit of Calvin's "Institutes." These made God the author of sin (cudet igitur homo, Dei providentia sic ordinante) ; representing Him as issuing " a horrible decree " involving numbers of people,with their infant children, in eternal death ; and went so far as to assert that "the devil and all the legions of the wicked" were unable to conceive any evil or to accomplish it," excepting "in so far as He has commanded." That among the people of Scotland, in the seventeenth century, is only explicable by a variety of circumstances and natural phenomena of an awe-inspiring or depressing character, which I cannot stop to analyse and elucidate. Enough to say that it engendered superstitions, and encouraged practices—witch-burning, heresy-hunting, religious persecution, and physical mortifications among the rest—under the influence of which, as Buckle has pointed out, the national character was dwarfed and multilated, and "joy or love either disappeared or were forced to hide themselves in obscure corners, until at length the fairest and most endearing parts of our nature, being constantly repressed, ceased to bear fruit, and seemed to be withered into perpetual sterility."
. . . . .
No minister of the Scottish Church would now venture to tell his hearers that, at the death of one of his brethren, "The Lord miraculously made a star appear in the heaven at the noon-tide of the day." or that the devil had manifested himself to him in "black clothes and a blue band, and white hand-cuffs," or that, as a punishment for their sins, their "tongue, lungs, and liver, bones and all, shall boil and fry in a torturing fire." Yet statements like these were commonly made in Scottish pulpits, and listened to with gruesome feelings of credulity and terror by Scottish congregations, two hundred years ago ; and the Rev. Mr. Binning merely echoed the belief of his fellows when he declared that "since the first rebellion (that is, the fall of Adam), there is nothing to be seen but the terrible countenance of an angry God."  Sentiments like these are earnestly repudiated by the bulk of the Presbyterian clergy at the present day. But they were logically deducible from the "Westminster Confession;" and so long as the standards of faith remain unaltered, so long must those who have subscribed to them, and who are preaching more humane doctrines, render themselves liable to the imputation of inconsistency, in professing to accept the rigorous dogmas of Calvin, while speaking the language of Christ and of John. For the memorable declaration "Behold I give you a new commandment," and Paul's summary of the teachings of Christianity, " All the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," are directly at variance with the whole tone and tenour of the "Confession" itself, and of the "Larger" and "Shorter" catechism, which expand its meaning and illustrate its spirit. Perhaps the essential difference between the teachings of the Gospel and those of the Westminster divines could not be more pithily conveyed than by the following variation of a couplet, in relation to Sabbatarianism, which occurs in Hood's "Ode to Rae Wilson " :—
"You say— John Calvin and his love of law.
And that—the Saviour with his law of love."

And if, in later times, scepticism and unbelief have become exceedingly rife in Scotland, and among Presbyterians all over the world, may we not hold the documents of 1643 responsible, to some extent at least, for the fact? Among the Reformers was one, who in overthrowing one form of tyranny, was eager to establish another. This was John Calvin, a sour fanatic, an arrogant preacher, a severe disciplinarian, and an altogether unlovely man; who would have made an excellent Inquisitor-General, if his love of power, his inquiring spirit, his impatience of authority, had not combined to impel him to break away from the Church of Rome. Invested with the virtual dictatorship of Geneva, he became, as Mr. P. Seebohm has well said, a sort of Protestant Pope in that city, where he and his fellow "saints" exercised despotic power, during a period of twenty years. " Men were excommunicated for insulting Calvin, and sent to prison for mocking at his sermons. To impugn his doctrine was death or banishment. Hired spies watched people's conduct, and every unseemly word dropped in the streets came to the ears of the elders. Children were liable to punishment for insulting their parents, and men and women were drowned in the Rhine for capital crimes. Witchcraft and heresy were capital crimes ; and one heretic, Servetus, was burned with his books hung to his girdle, for honest difference of opinion from Calvin on an abstruse point of divinity." In this cruel and bitter persecution of a man whose only crime was that he applied the right of private judgment to the examination of Christian dogmas, Calvin was so led away by fanaticism — I borrow the words of M. Gaberel, author of the 'Histoire de l'Eglise de Geneve'— that he came at length to lose all sense of the difference between good and evil. Such was John Calvin ; and his theology reflected the acerbity, narrowness, and hardness of his own mind.
The latter darkened and distorted all his views of God, of human nature, of the life that is, and of the life that is to come. It was a popular delusion with theologians of all denominations in Calvin's time, that this human frame was a despicable piece of mechanism, to be unsparingly mortified and macerated; and that it, and not the mind, was the seat of those desires which "war against the spirit." And no one possessing ever so slight an acquaintance with the physiology and pathology of the cerebral organs will be at a loss to understand the visions, the hallucinations, the emotional exaltation and mental depression the delusions and monomanias, of numbers of pious and excellent men and woman, who have imagined that they were performing an acceptable work in the sight of God, by famishing, mortifying, enfeebling, and even mutilating, the most marvellous, complicated, and beautiful example of His creative power and wisdom with which human beings are acquainted.
From Calvin, through Knox, the Church of Scotland derived its theology ; and the principal doctrines of the "Westminster Confession " are to be found in the "Institutes." But that many of the dogmas contained in the "Westminster Confession" are such as the moral sense and the enlightened judgment of tens of thousands of Presbyterians now revolt against, is a fact too obvious to admit of dispute. It is only in the natural order of things that this should be so. An unprogressive system of theology is bound to become obsolete in process of time, and to be discarded by a generation with whose thoughts and feelings, perceptions and beliefs, it is altogether inharmonius. As society has become more tolerant and humane, its laws and punishments less barbarous, its opinions more liberal, its manners more refined, and its tendencies to superstition much feebler than they were formerly; so, also,in all Protestant countries at least, a higher and clearer and nobler conception of God has replaced the contracted and distorted notions of Him, His attributes, and His method of governing the entire universe, which our forefathers were accustomed to form, and which have left such a powerful impress upon the document under consideration. For we must not lose sight of the fact that the work of Divine Revelation has been continuously proceeding ever since the first stirrings of the religious instinct in the human mind ; and never has that Revelation of the Infinite Being in nature been so magnificent and impressive as during the last two centuries. The Calvinistic theology of the seventeenth century has been laid aside, like its social customs, its penal discipline, its manners, and its fashions; and it is not high time that the "Westminister Confession" should be likewise consigned to a museum of ecclesiastical antiquities ? Are not all iron-bound creeds and rigid formularies falling into disrepute? Is it not beginning to be perceived with increasing clearness that Christianity is a life and not a doctrine, and that the frequently repeated injunction "Follow me," which occurs sixteen times in the four Gospels, is one which has been singularly overlooked by the very men who have been most voluble and vociferous in their professions of faith? . . . .

 The Inquirer  Commercial News  1882, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article65961027