It is evident that Calvin scorns to have any recourse to a permissive will in God, in order to soften down the stupendous difficulties under which his system seems to labour. On the contrary, he sometimes betrays a little impatience with those who had endeavoured to mitigate the more rugged features of what he conceived to be the truth. “The fathers,” says he, “are sometimes too scrupulous on this subject, and afraid of a simple confession of the truth.”(61) He entertains no such fears. He is even bold and rigid enough in his consistency to say, “that God often actuates the reprobate by the interposition of Satan, but in such a manner that Satan himself acts his part by the divine impulse.”(62) And again, he declares that by means of Satan, “God excites the will and strengthens the efforts” of the reprobate.(63) Indeed, his great work, whenever it touches upon this awful subject, renders it perfectly clear that Calvin despises all weak evasions in the advocacy of his stern doctrine. It has been truly said, that Calvin never thinks of “deducing the fall of man from the abuse of human freedom.” So far is he from this, indeed, that he seems to lose his patience with those who trace the origin of moral evil to such a source. “They say it is nowhere declared in express terms,” says Calvin, “that God decreed Adam should perish by his defection; as though the same God, whom the Scriptures represent as doing whatever he pleases, created the noblest of his creatures without any determinate end. They maintain, that he was possessed of free choice, that he might be the author of his own fate, but that God decreed nothing more than to treat him according to his desert. If so weak a scheme as this be received, what will become of God’s omnipotence, by which he governs all things according to his secret counsel, independently of every person or thing besides.”(64) The fall of man, says Calvin, was decreed from all eternity, and it was brought to pass by the omnipotence of God. To suppose that Adam was the author of his own fate and fall, is to deny the omnipotence of God, and to rob him of his sovereignty.