prescience as applied to God,--God an eternal being, everywhere eternally present, to whom we cannot apply our notions of space and time, and of that succession of events in the midst of which our fleeting life passes? These are questions of supreme importance which we naturally ask ourselves, and which bear witness to the nobility of human nature, but which we are not permitted to answer; for in order to answer them we should need to know and comprehend God, his nature and his designs, as God knows and comprehends himself and his own actions. There is no answer to these questions; even in the midst of Christian light man must resign himself to Christian ignorance; all his knowledge of his own being and of the world around him will never give him a knowledge of God, or of the design of God in the creation of the world and of mankind. And this brings me to Calvin's great mistake. He was much more engrossed in speculations concerning God than in the observation of mankind. God is, so to say, the fixed centre and starting-point of all his thoughts. He meditates and imagines, and if I dared I would say that he presents God to us, and describes him as if he knew him thoroughly, and had exclusive possession of him. {197} He then summons man into the presence of God, and denies or calmly rejects everything in him which does not accord with or cannot be adjusted to the God whom he has conceived and depicted. He denies the free-will of man and affirms his predestination, because he imagines that man's free-will is opposed to the idea which he has formed of the omnipotence and omniscience of God, and that his predestination is necessary to it. Calvin had a very imperfect knowledge and understanding of man because he professed to know and understand too much about God. I find proof in the works of Dr. Chalmers, the most eminent Protestant theologian of our time, a faithful follower of Calvin, and a man profoundly versed in science, that the state of Calvin's mind must, in fact, have been that which I have described; and that at first he was led to deny the free-will of man and affirm his predestination, in order to prove his assumed knowledge of the nature of God and of his design in creating the universe. I find the following passage in Chalmers' 'Institutes of Theology:'--