Note 109 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

The secret of the special bitterness of Calvinist resentment towards the school of Arminius lay in the fact that the latter endorsed some of the most galling of the Catholic criticisms of Calvinism. Arminius [Latinized name of Jacob Harmensen or van Harmin, 1560–1609, professor of theology at Leyden] was personally a man of great amiability, averse to controversy, but unable to reconcile the Calvinist view of predestination with his own quasi-rational ethic, and concerned to secure that the dogma should not be fastened upon all Dutch Protestants. In his opinion, no effective answer could be made on Calvinist lines to the argument of Cardinal Bellarmin109 that from much Calvinist doctrine there flowed the consequences: “God is the author of sin; God really sins; God is the only sinner; sin is no sin at all.”110 This was substantially true; and Arminius, like Bellarmin, unable to see that the Calvinist position was simply a logical reduction to moral absurdity of all theistic ethic, sought safety in fresh dogmatic modifications. Of these the Calvinists, in turn, could easily demonstrate the logical incoherence; and in a ring of dilemmas from which there was no logical exit save into Naturalism there arose an exacerbated strife, as of men jostling each other in a prison where some saw their nominal friends in partial sympathy with their deadly enemies, who jeered at their divisions.