Calvin's system has been overthrown not by direct attack, but by the flank, in science as in war the most effective way.

To take but one example out of many that might be given: what has modern criticism made of Calvin's doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture?
But this science was as yet all but unknown: biblical exegesis there was in plenty, but it was only to a minute extent literary and historical; it was almost exclusively philological and dogmatic.
Calvin's doctrine of the arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation irrespective of merit has often excited a moral rather than an intellectual revulsion.

To his true followers, indeed, like Jonathan {167} Edwards, it seems "a delightful doctrine, exceeding bright, pleasant and sweet." [Sidenote: Eternal damnation] But many men agree with Gibbon that it makes God a cruel and capricious tyrant and with William James that it is sovereignly irrational and mean.
Even at that time those who said that a man's will had no more to do with his destiny than the stick in a man's hand could choose where to strike or than a saddled beast could choose its rider, aroused an intense opposition.

Erasmus argued that damnation given for inevitable crimes would make God unjust, and Thomas More blamed Luther for calling God the cause of evil and for saying "God doth damn so huge a number of people to intolerable torments only for his own pleasure and for his own deeds wrought in them only by himself." An English heretic, Cole of Faversham, said that the doctrine of predestination was meeter for devils than for Christians.

"The God of Calvin," exclaimed Jerome Bolsec, "is a hypocrite, a liar, perfidious, unjust, the abetter and patron of crimes, and worse than the devil himself." But there was another side to the doctrine of election.