THE CHESHIRE ACCIDENT.
[To TEE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—In your article of September 5th, on the Cheshire accident, you say,—" We never met a human being of any race, not being essentially religious, who had not somewhere in his mind a useless but incurable fear of the possibility that Fate ruled" [to the exclusion of God].
Is not Calvinism an expression of what is really the same fear, though it expresses itself differently P I should not like to offer an opinion as to whether I am " essentially religions," though I am what is called a religious man, and am an Evangelical believer. When very young, I used to be haunted with a fear that, after all, Calvinism might prove to be true ; and this was, I think, a temptation exactly parallel in my case with the temptation to total religious unbelief and atheism in the case of those who have not, as I had, the blessing of a religious education. The form in which religious doubt assailed me was this :—' May it not be, after all, that our loftiest aspira- tions mock and deceive us ; that God's goodness falls far short of our highest ideal of goodness,—that, in fact, he is not good in any intelligible sense ; that man's freedom is an illusion, and that we are born into the world subject to the danger of enduring God's eternal wrath for sins which, under the nature he gave us, we had no choice but to commit ?' I was not brought up among Calvinists, but I knew that there were passages of Scripture to be quoted in favour of such a view of the Divine character, and I had not then learned that "the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." The God of Calvinism seems to me now, as then, a Fate, with personality, but without any really moral nature,--a grotesque and horrible
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