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nourished by the secret conviction that he was "the man of destiny". Fatalism has begotten a race of Titans. Their energy has been superhuman, because they have believed themselves the instruments of a superhuman power.

If the grim caricature of this doctrine has breathed such energy, the doctrine itself must inspire a yet loftier, for all that is energizing in it remains with added force when for a blind fate, or a fatalistic deity, we substitute a wise, decreeing God. Let me but feel that in every commanded duty, in every needed reform, I am but working out an eternal purpose of Jehovah; let me but hear behind me, in every battle for right, the tramp of the Infinite Reserves; and I am lifted above the fear of man or the possibility of final failure. I am inspired with a Divine strength and confidence. So in former chapters we have seen how in the long struggle for human advancement, civil and religious, wherever the surge of battle has rolled fiercest and

fastest and the day of toil has hung hottest and heaviest, there always have been found the holders of this faith. Rooted in the Divine Word, this doctrine has borne through all the ages heroes and martyrs innumerable. Against them, as against Joseph, have been used all the weapons that rage and hate could devise. But in dungeons, in dens and caves of the earth, on battle-field, rack, and scaffold, they were more than conquerors. For they knew with a victorious confidence, that not Satan, or chance, or fate, but God was Sovereign; that even the wrath and wickedness of men were but carrying out His eternal purpose; and that the day was surely coming when to all these hostile agencies they could say, as Joseph said to his brethren: As for you, ye thought evil against me but God meant it unto good."

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APPENDIX

It may interest our readers to learn that the Calvinistic view of nature and life,

which was derived exclusively from the Scriptures, is in striking harmony with modern scientific philosophy and with the ascertained facts of history and observation. Regarding the grounds of the Divine choice, Matthew Arnold, the trained student of life and history, whose sympathies were not with Calvinism, frankly says: "In rebutting the Arminian theory the Calvinists are in accordance with historical truth and with the real march of human affairs." 1 The historian Froude, himself held by no trammels of sect or party, unhesitatingly affirms that "Calvinism is nearer to the facts, facts which no casuistry can explain away." 2 With a different nomenclature, and a different idea of the truth of supernaturalism, the foremost modern scientific philosophers hold the Calvinistic worldview. Mr. Froude cites as examples John Stuart Mill and Mr. Buckle. With equal appositeness he might have named Mr.

1 "St. Paul and Protestantism", p. 21.

2" Short Studies on Great Subjects ", pp. II, 12.)

Herbert Spencer, Mr. Lecky, Prof. Huxley, and many more. Sadly as these may diverge on the question of God's rational will and free personality, extremely as their necessitarian metaphysics may conflict with the true doctrine of His Providence and grace, their impression of the co-ordinated facts of observation is thoroughly Calvinistic.

We submit upon this point the compact yet luminous statement of the celebrated Dr. Abraham Kuyper, Professor in the University of Amsterdam, Member of the States General of Holland, and one of the profoundest of living thinkers. "It is a fact", he says, "that the more thorough development of science in our age has almost unanimously decided in favor of Calvinism with regard to the antithesis between the unity and stability of God's decree, which Calvinism professes, and the superficiality and looseness, which the Arminians preferred. The systems of the great • "Lectures on Calvinism", p. 149.

modern philosophers are almost to one in favor of unity and stability. Buckle's History of the Civilization in England' has succeeded in proving the firm order of things in human life with astonishing, almost mathematical, demonstrative force. Lombroso, and his entire school of criminalists, place themselves on record in this respect as moving on Calvinistic lines. And the latest hypothesis, that the laws of heredity and variation, which control the whole organization of nature, admit of no exception in the domain of human life, has already been accepted as 'the common creed' by all evolutionists. Though I abstain at present from any criticism either of these philosophical systems or of these naturalistic hypotheses, so much at least is very clearly demonstrated by them, that the entire development of science in our age presupposes a cosmos, which does not fall a prey to the freaks of chance, but exists and develops from one principle, according to a firm order, aiming at one fixed plan. This

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