Lectures on Calvinism

by Abraham Kuyper

And just as Rome drew a boundary line between the consecrated and the profane sides of life, she also subdivided her own sacred precincts according to different degrees of religious intensity,—the clergy and the cloister constituting the Holy of Holies, the pious laity forming the Holy Place, thus leaving the Outer Court to those who, although baptized, continued to prefer to church-devotion the often sinful pleasures of the world,—a system of limitation and division, which for those in the Outer Court, ended in setting nine tenths of practical life outside of all religion. So religion was made partial, by carrying it from ordinary days to days of festival, from days of prosperity to times of danger and sickness, and from the fulness of life to the time of approaching death. A dualistic system which has found its most emphatic expression in the praxis of the Carnival, giving Religion a full sway over the soul during the weeks of Lent, but leaving to the flesh a fair chance, before descending into this vale of gloom, to empty to the dregs the full cup of pleasure, if not of mirth and folly.