Institutes of the Christian Religion

by John Calvin

but the soul, when plunged into that deadly abyss, not only labours under vice, but is altogether devoid of good.

so we cannot set any value on anything that seems praiseworthy in ungodly men.

Bernard, assenting to Augustine, thus writes: "Among animals, man alone is free, and yet sin intervening, he suffers a kind of violence, but a violence proceeding from his will, not from nature, so that it does not even deprive him of innate liberty,"

because the will, when it was free, made itself the slave of sin."

"Thus the soul, in some strange and evil way, is held under this kind of voluntary, yet sadly free necessity, both bond and free; bond in respect of necessity, free in respect of will: and what is still more strange, and still more miserable, it is guilty because free, and enslaved because guilty, and therefore enslaved because free."

Lombard, by not knowing how to distinguish between necessity and compulsion, gave occasion to a pernicious error[1].

"A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.

say the will is abolished, but not in so far as it is will, for in conversion everything essential to our original nature remains:

I also say, that it is created anew, not because the will then begins to exist, but because it is turned from evil to good.

For he is not there treating of universal government, but declaring that all the good qualities which believers possess are due to God.

Grace can do nothing without will, nor the will without grace. Answer. Grace itself produces will. God prevents the unwilling, making him willing, and follows up this preventing grace that he may not will in vain.

that the Lord both corrects, or rather destroys, our depraved will, and also substitutes a good will from himself.

Therefore, Chrysostom is inaccurate in saying, that grace cannot do any thing without will, nor will any thing without grace,

as if grace did not, in terms of the passage lately quoted from Paul, produce the very will itself.

The intention of Augustine, in calling the human will the handmaid of grace, was not to assign it a kind of second place to gra...

Therefore, when the Lord, in the conversion of his people, sets down these two things as requisite to be done, viz., to take away the heart of stone, and give a heart of flesh, he openly declares, that, in order to our conversion to righteousness, what is ours must be taken away, and that what is substituted in its place is of himself.

He says not that we are too weak to suffice for ourselves; but, by reducing us to nothing, he excludes the idea of our possessing any, even the least ability.

The first part of a good work is the will, the second is vigorous effort in the doing of it[2]. God is the author of both.

In this way, the Lord both begins and perfects the good work in us, so that it is due to Him, first, that the will conceives a love of rectitude, is inclined to desire, is moved and stimulated to pursue it;

He rather transfers the whole merit of the labour to grace alone, by thus modifying his first expression, "It was not I," says he, "that laboured, but the grace of God that was present with me."

For to take the words literally, the Apostle does not say that grace was a fellow-worker with him, but that the grace which was with him was sole worker.

"Draw me, who am in some measure unwilling, and make me willing; draw me, who am sluggishly lagging, and make me run," (Serm. 2 in Cantic).

Adam, therefore, had the power if he had the will, but did not will to have the power, whereas to us is given both the will and the power; that the original freedom of man was to be able not to sin, but that we have a much greater freedom, viz., not to be able to sin.

as Lombard erroneously does, (lib. 2 Dist. 25) that he is speaking of the perfection of the future state, he shortly after removes all doubt when he says,

"For so much is the will of the saints inflamed by the Holy Spirit, that they are able, because they are willing; and willing, bec...

In saying elsewhere that the will is not taken away by grace, but out of bad is changed into good, and after it is good is assisted, - he only means, that man is not drawn as if by an extraneous impulse[4]

Fourthly, that by the free mercy of God, the will is turned to good, and when turned, perseveres.

Thus the will, (free will, if you choose to call it so) which is left to man, is, as he in another place (Ep. 46) describes it, a will which can neither be turned to God, nor continue in God, unless by grace; a will which, whatever its ability may be, derives all that ability from grace.

How God works in the hearts of men in indifferent matters. Our will in such matters not so free as to be exempt from the overruling providence of God. This confirmed by various examples.

Moreover, a distinction has been drawn between compulsion and necessity,

making it clear that man, though he sins necessarily, nevertheless

sins volun...

Those whom the Lord favours not with the direction of his Spirit, he, by a righteous judgement, consigns to the agency of Satan.

wills handed over to Satan

The blinding of the wicked, and all the iniquities consequent upon it, are called the works of Satan; works the cause of which is not to be Sought in anything external to the will of man, in which the root of the evil lies, and in which the foundation of Satan's kingdom, in other words, sin, is fixed.

How can we attribute the same work to God, to Satan, and to man, without either excusing Satan by the interference of God, or making God the author of the crime?

This is easily done, if we look first to the end, and then to the mode of acting.

The Lord designs to exercise the patience of his servant by adversity; Satan's plan is to drive him to despair; while the Chaldeans are bent on making unlawful gain by plunder. Such diversity of purpose makes a wide distinction in the act.

purpose in why this is happening is key here

The Lord permits Satan to afflict his servant; and the Chaldeans, who had been chosen as the ministers to execute the deed, he hands over to the impulses of Satan, who, pricking on the already depraved Chaldeans with his poisoned darts, instigates them to commit the crime.

say nothing here of the universal agency of God, which, as it sustains all the creatures, also gives them all their power of acting.

We, therefore, hold that there are two methods in which God may so act. When his light is taken away, nothing remains but blindness and darkness: when his Spirit is taken away, our hearts become hard as stones:

Did he harden his heart by not softening it?

This is, indeed, true; but he did something more: he gave it in charge to Satan to confirm him in his obstinacy.

God does not soften the heart and further hardens the heart by handing it over to Satan

An impure spirit must therefore be called a spirit from the Lord, because completely subservient to his purpose,

he even in external matters so turns and bends the wills of men, that whatever the freedom of their choice may be, it is still subject to the disposal of God.

"The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord hath made even both of them," (Pro 20: 12) For they seem to me to refer not to their creation, but to peculiar grace in the use of them, when he says, "The king's heart is in the hand of the Lard as the rivers of water; he turneth it whithersoever he will," (Pro 21: l)

let them not think themselves excused by a necessity in which they see the clearest cause of their condemnation.

What matters it whether you sin with a free or an enslaved judgement,

so long as you sin voluntarily, especially when man is proved to be a sinner because he is under the bondage of sin? In

"God crowns not our merits but his own gifts; and the name of reward is given not to what is due to our merits, but to the recompense of grace previously bestowed?"

Therefore, while we all labour naturally under the same disease, those only recover health to whom the Lord is pleased to put forth his healing hand.