Calvin's Calvinism Author:Jean Calvin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: eternal. Here, however, men will continually offer one uniform excuse for Adam;—that it was not possible for him to help or avoid that, which God himself had dec... more »reed. But, to establish the guilt of Adam for ever, his own voluntary transgression is enough, and more than sufficient. Nor, indeed, is the secret counsel of God the real and virtual cause of sin: but, manifestly, the will, and inclination, of man. The folly of the complaint of Medea is justly derided, even by the ancient poet, when he represents her as uttering the well-known lamentation, " O that the ship, made of planks cut down by axes from the Pelian grove, had never sailed from Egina to Colchis, my native land! "— Medea had betrayed her country, carried away by the passion of a desperate love, which she had conceived for a foreigner, and an entire stranger. And when her conscience smites her for her perfidy and barbarous cruelty; when the shame of unlawful indulgence overwhelms her; she absurdly turns her thoughts of regret to various remote circumstances, as the causes of her misery. But since every human being can always find the cause of his evils in himself; of what avail is it, to look about him on every side, or to seek that cause, in heaven? Thus Medea's fault plainly appears, in that she had sinned voluntarily and willingly. Why, then, does she plunge herself into a labyrinth of lost thought, by rushing into the mysteries of heaven ? For, although mortal men may employ their thoughts, in circuitous reasonings, ever so long and deep, they never can so far delude or stupify themselves, as not to find and feel, that they carry the originating cause of all their sins, deeply seated in their own hearts. Impious reasoning, therefore, will attempt in vain to absolve from the guilt of sin, that man, who stands co...« less