The friends of the reformation consider the original and chief actors in that great revolutionary work as excellent men, actuated by a right apostolical and christian spirit, with a view to the restoration of primitive christianity, and the promotion of the best interests of mankind. Their opponents, on the contrary, consider them in a very different light, and hold them up as persons of a disreputable character, who were actuated by very unworthy and base motives, from whose thoughts nothing could be further than the restoration of genuine christianity, or the promoting of real benevolence, philanthropy, or human happiness. It will not be safe to give implicit credit to either of these representations. There were, certainly, some good men concerned in the reformation, and there were also some very bad men concerned in it, whose misdeeds ought never to be palliated; and these were probably the most numerous and the most powerful, or the work, surely, would have been more worthy of our praise and admiration. The reformation, in the judgment of its admirers, was eminently calculated to promote the cause of truth and virtue, and inculcate the practice of piety, morality, and all manner of good works. All this, however, is flatly contradicted by the champions of the opposite cause, who positively affirm that the doctrines of the reformers were, in the very nature of them, of an evil, immoral and impious tendency:—alluding to the grand Lutheran tenet of _justification_ by faith _without works_, {626a} and to the famous Calvinian notion of predestination, as extending to all the deeds of men, bad and good, or that all human actions, even the very worst, originate in the _Divine decrees_, or _will of God_. {626b} This opinion of the evil tendency of the reformation, or of the reformed doctrine, they represent as further corroborated and established by undeniable facts, and authentic historical evidence; or in other words, by its immediate effects, or the very first fruits it produced wherever it did prevail.