Calvinism is not a
"licentious" doctrine
It is often said that
the doctrines we believe have a tendency to lead us to sin.
I have heard it asserted most positively, that those
high doctrines which we love, and which we find in the
Scriptures, are licentious ones. I do not know who will have
the hardihood to make that assertion, when they consider
that the holiest of men have been believers in them.
I ask the man who dares to say that
Calvinism is a licentious religion, what he thinks of the
character of Augustine, or Calvin, or Whitefield, who in
successive ages were the great exponents of the system of
grace; or what will he say of the Puritans, whose works are
full of them? Had a man been an Arminian in those
days, he would have been accounted the vilest heretic
breathing, but now we are looked upon as the heretics, and
they as the orthodox. We have gone back to the old school;
we can trace our descent from the apostles. It is that vein
of free grace, running through the sermonizing of Baptists,
which has saved us as a denomination. Were it not for that,
we should not stand where we are today. We can run a golden
line up to Jesus Christ Himself, through a holy succession
of mighty fathers, who all held these glorious truths; and
we can ask concerning them, “Where
will you find holier and better men in the world?” No
doctrine is so calculated to preserve a man from sin as the
doctrine of the grace of God. Those who have called it “a
licentious doctrine” did not know anything at all about it.
Poor ignorant things, they little knew that their own vile
stuff was the most licentious doctrine under Heaven. If they
knew the grace of God in truth, they would soon see that
there was no preservative from lying like a knowledge that
we are elect of God from the foundation of the world. There
is nothing like a belief in my eternal perseverance, and the
immutability of my Father’s affection, which can keep me
near to Him from a motive of simple gratitude.
Nothing makes a man so virtuous as
belief of the truth. A lying doctrine will soon beget
a lying practice. A man cannot have an erroneous belief
without by and by having an erroneous life. I believe the
one thing naturally begets the other. Of all men, those have
the most disinterested piety, the sublimest reverence, the
most ardent devotion, who believe that they are saved by
grace, without works, through faith, and that not of
themselves, it is the gift of God. Christians should take
heed, and see that it always is so, lest by any means Christ
should be crucified afresh, and put to an open shame.
