My third lecture leaves the sanctuary of religion and enters upon the domain of the State—the first transition from the sacred circle to the secular field of human life. Only now therefore we proceed, summarily and in principle, to combat the unhistorical suggestion, that Calvinism represents an exclusively ecclesiastical and dogmatic movement.
The religious, momentum of Calvinism has placed, also beneath political Society, a fundamental conception, all its own, just because it not merely pruned the branches and clean the stem, but reached down to the very root of our human life.
That this had to be so becomes evident at once to everyone who is able to appreciate the fact that no political scheme has ever become dominant, which was not founded in a specific religious or antireligious conception. And that this has been the fact, as regards Calvinism, may appear from the political changes which it has effected in those three historic lands of political freedom, -the Netherlands, England and America.
Every competent historian will without exception confirm the words of Bancroft:—“The fanatic for Calvinism was a fanatic for liberty, for in the moral warfare for freedom, his creed was a part of his army, and his most faithful ally in the battle.”1 And Groen van Prinsterer has thus expressed it: “In Calvinism lies the origin and guarantee of our constitutional liberties.” That Calvinism has led public law into new paths, first in Western Europe, then in two Continents, and to-day more and more among all civilized nations, is admitted by all scientific students, if not yet fully by public opinion. But for the purpose Ihave in view, the mere statement of this important fact is insufficient.
In order that the influence of Calvinism on our political development may be felt, it must be shown, for what fundamental political conceptions Calvinism has opened the door, and how these political conceptions sprang from its root principle.
This dominating principle was not, soteriologically, justification by faith, but, in the widest sense cosmologically, the Sovereignty of the Tviune God over ihe whole Cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible. A primordial Sovereignty which eradiates in mankind in a threefold deduced supremacy, viz., 1. The Sovereignty in the State; 2. The Sovereignty in Society; and 3. The Sovereignty in the Church. Allow me to argue this matter in detail by pointing out to you how this threefold deduced Sovereignty was understood by Calvinism. 1) BANCROFT, History of the United States of America. Fifteenth Ed. Boston 1853, I. 464. Ed. New York, 1891, I. 310.
First then a deduced Sovereignty in that political sphere, which is defined as the State. And then we admit that the impulse to form states arises from man’s social nature, which was expressed already by Aristotle, when he called man a “ζῶον πολιτικόν.” God might have created men as disconnected individuals, standing side by side and without genealogical coherence. Just as Adam was separately created, the second and third and every further man might have been individually called into existence; but this was not the case.
Man is created from man, and by virtue of his birth he is organically united with the whole race. Together we form one humanity, not only with those who are living now, but also with all the generations behind us and with all those who shall come after us,— pulverized into millions though we may be. All the human race is from one blood. The conception of States, however, which subdivide the earth into continents, and each continent into morsels, does not harmonize with this idea. Then only would the organic unity of our race be realized politically, if one State could embrace all the world, and if the whole of humanity were associated in one world-empire. Had sin not intervened, no doubt, this would actually have been so. If sin, as a disintegrating force, had not divided humanity into different sections, nothing would have marred or broken the organic unity of our race. And the mistake of the Alexanders, and of the Augusti, and of the Napoleons was not, that they were charmed with the thought of the One World-empire, but it was this—that they endeavoured to realize this idea notwithstanding that the force of sin had dissolved our unity.
In like manner the international cosmopolitan endeavours of the Social-democracy present, in their conception of union, an ideal, which on this very account charms us, even when we are aware that they try to reach the unattainable, in endeavouring to realize this high and holy ideal, now and in a sinful world. Nay even Anarchy, conceived as the attempt to undo all mechanical connections among men, together with the undoing of all human authority, and to encourage, in their stead, the growth of a new organic tie, arising from nature itself, — I say, all this is nothing but a looking backward after a lost paradise.