Lyman Hotchkiss Atwater — Calvinism in Doctrine and Life

To say that Christianity is not a doctrine but a life, is to utter a doctrine.

To deny the reality of doctrine and the necessity of believing it, on pretext of exalting the Christian life above it, is to deny the possibility of such life.

It is sometimes called Pauline, because while its distinctive principles underlie all parts of the Bible, ever and anon cropping out as its granitic stratum, they are most fully articulated in the Epistles of Paul.

Whoever so apprehends the doctrine of foreordination as to abridge the fulness, freeness, universality and sincerity of the gospel offer, misapprehends it.

It is forever true that nothing stands in the way of the sinner’s salvation but his own perverseness and refusal to accept it.

If God makes willing in the day of his power, it is we that will. If he gives repentance, we repent. If he fulfils in us the work of faith, we believe.