The revival system is Arminianism grafted on Calvinism. It is an attempt to unite the belief that man is wholly passive in conversion, and is not able to prepare himself thereunto, with the opposite doctrine that by a use of means he can become a Christian. It is an attempt to unite the Calvinistic article that God, when he chooses, calls those he has predestined to eternal life, with the attempt to make him choose our time and way. Such a system, disjointed at its centre, must necessarily work badly, and result in an alternation of feverish heats and aguish chills. To carry on the work of the Church by revivals is as unreasonable as it would be to carry on a school, or a cotton factory, by a revival system—alternations of violent study and work, followed by relapses into indolence and sloth. The Church of Rome has a great advantage over Protestant Orthodoxy in this respect. It, too, admits revivals, and has its periods of extraordinary attention to religion. But there is this great difference. It does not depend on them for creating Christianity in the soul; it uses them only for increasing its warmth and power. In the Roman Church every baptized person is a Christian so long as he does not continue in mortal sin, but by the regular use of the sacraments preserves his Christian life. The essential work of the Church is done by its regular methods—by baptism, confession, and its ritual service. In the Church of Rome, all connected with it are Christians, and in the way of salvation. In Protestant Orthodox churches, if any of those born and brought up in it are Christians, it is, so far as they are concerned, a happy accident. All this shows something wrong in the common theory of conversion. Every one in a Christian community who desires to be a Christian ought to be able to become one. Christianity is a gospel, because it opens the kingdom of heaven to all. The call of the Church at the beginning was to _follow Christ_. Any one who was willing to follow Christ was baptized at once, and became a Christian. No one waited till he should experience some remarkable interior change, or some influence of the Holy Ghost. The promise at first was, that whosoever became a Christian _should_ receive the Holy Ghost afterwards. Spiritual influences were not the condition of Christianity, but the result of Christianity.