The chief purpose of my lecturing in this country was, to eradicate the wrong idea, that Calvinism represented an exclusively dogmatical and ecclesiastical movement.
Calvinism did not stop at a church-order, but expanded in a life-system, and did not exhaust its energy in a dogmatical construction, but created a life- and world-view, and such a one as was, and still is, able to fit itself to the needs of every stage of human development, in every department of life. It raised our Christian religion to its highest spiritual splendour; it created a church order, which became the preformationof state confederation; it proved to be the guardian angel of science; it emancipated art; it propagated a political scheme, which gave birth to constitutional government, both in Europe and America; it fostered agriculture and industry, commerce and navigation; it put a thorough Christian Stamp upon home-life and family-ties; it promoted through its high moral standard purety in our social circles; and to this manifold effect it placed beneath Church and State, beneath society and home-circle a fundamental philosophic conception, strictly derived from its dominating principle, and therefore all its own.
This of itself excludes every idea of imitative repristination, and what the descendants of the old Dutch Calvinists as well as of the Pilgrim fathers have to do, is not to copy the past, as if Calvinism were a petrefact, but to go back to the living root of the Calvinist plant, to clean and to water it, and so to cause it to bud and to blossom once more, now fully in accordance with our actual life in these modern times. and with the demands of the times to come.
This explains the subject of my final lecture. 4 new Calvinistic development needed by the wants of the future. The prospect of this future does not present itself to us, as every student of sociology will acknowledge, in bright colours. I would not go so far as to assert that we are on the eve of universal social bankruptcy, but that the signs of the times are ominous admits of no denial. To be sure, in the control of nature and her forces, immense gains are being registered year by year, and the boldest imagination is unable to foretell to what heights of power in this respect the race may attain in the next half century. As a result of this, the comforts of life are increasing. World-intercourse and communication are constantly becoming more rapid and widespread. Asia and Africa, until recently dormant, gradually feel themselves drawn into the larger circle of stirring life. Aided by sport, the principles of hygiene exert a growing influence. Consequently, we are physically stronger than the preceding generation. We live longer. And in combating the defects and infirmities that threaten and afflict our bodily life, surgical science makes us marvel at her achievements. In brief, the material, a tangible side of life holds out the fairest of promises rl for the future.
And yet discontent makes itself heard, and the thinking mind cannot suppress its misgivings; for, however hich one may value the material things, they do not fill out the round of our existence as men. Our personal life as men and citizens subsists not in the comforts that surround us, nor in the body, which serves us as a link with the outward world, but in the spirit that internally actuates us; and in this inner consciousness we are becoming more and more painfully aware, how the hypertrophy of our external life results in a serious atrophy of the spiritual. Not as if the faculties of thought and reflection, the arts of poetry and letters, were in abeyance. On the contrary, empirical science is more brilliant in her attainments than ever, universal knowledge spreads in constantly widening circles, and civilization, in Japan, for instance, is almost dazzled by her too-rapid conquests. But even the intellect does not constitute the mind. Personality is seated more deeply in the hidden recesses of our inner being, where character is formed, whence the flame of enthusiasm is kindled, where the moral foundations are laid, where love’s blossoms bud, whence spring consecration and heroism, and where in the sense for the Infinite, our time-bound existence reaches out unto the very gates of eternity. It is in regard to this seat of personality that we hear on all sides the complaint of empoverishment, degeneracy and petrifaction. The prevalence of this state of malaise explains the rise of a spirit like Arthur Schopenhauer’s; and the wide acceptance of his pessimistic doctrine reveals to what a deplorable extent this fatal Sirocco has scorched already “the fields of life,” it is true, Tolstoi’s efforts show force. of character, but even hist. religious and social theory is a protest along the whole line against the spiritual degeneracy of our race. Friedrich Wilhelm, Nietzsche may give us offence by his sacrilegious mockery, still what else is his demand for the “Ucbermensch” (over-man), but the cry of despair wrung from the heart of humanity by the bitter consciousness that it is spiritually pining away. What is Social-democracy also but one gigantic protest against the insufficiency of the existing order of things. Even Anarchism and Nihilism but too plainly demonstrate that there are thousands upon ten thousands who would rather demolish and annihilate everything, than continue to bear the burden of present conditions. The German author of the “Decadenz der Volker” descries nothing in the future but decay and social ruin. Even the sober-minded Lord Salisbury recently spoke of peoples and states for whose unceremonious burial preparations were already being made. How often has not the parallel been drawn between our time and the golden age of the Roman empire, when the external brilliancy of life likewise dazzled the eye, notwithstanding that the social diagnosis could yield no other verdict than “rotten to the very core”. And, although on the American continent, in a younger world, a relatively healthier tone of life prevails than in senescent Europe, yet this will not for a moment mislead the thinking mind. It is impossible for you to shut yourselves off hermetically from the old world, as you form no humanity apart, but are a member of the great body of the race. And the poison having once entered the system at a single point in due time must necessarily pervade the whole organism.