Calvinism, the creed of Jean Calvin (1509–64), was largely as formulated in his Institutes, published 1536. Calvin was greatly influenced by St Augustine in inferring predestination from divine foreknowledge, and he therefore presumed that the elect, chosen for salvation, were known to God from before the creation. Free will was an illusion: ‘we call predestination God's eternal decree, by which he determined with himself what he willed to become of each man … eternal life is fore-ordained for some, eternal damnation for others … it is very wicked merely to investigate the causes of God's will … when one asks why God has so done, we must reply, because he has willed it.’ [Institutes, iii. xxi. 5; xxiii. 2.] Church organization followed from that basic premiss, that the chosen of God—the elect—were entitled to no inferior place in worship, but should share government with the ministers. While Luther subordinated church to state, Calvin insisted on the supremacy of the church, with a presbyterian form of government. Doctrinally, Calvin shared with Luther belief in the absolute authority of the bible and in justification by faith alone. Taken into Scotland from Calvin's Geneva in 1559 by John Knox, Calvinism became the national creed and was recognized as the established church in 1690. In England it struggled first to influence Anglicanism, then to overthrow it, and was in command from the Civil War to the Restoration. After 1660 it was at first the most powerful of the dissenting sects but lost ground rapidly to the baptists and congregationalists and in the early 18th cent. was infiltrated by socinianism and unitarianism. Its theology continued to influence groups within the protestant dissenting churches, particularly the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion and the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists. But the appeal of so austere and harsh a creed faded in an age of enlightenment and humanitarianism, and at the religious census of 1851 the Presbyterian churches had no more than 160 places of worship, while the Huntingdon Connexion had 109, the Welsh Calvinist Methodists 828, the congregationalists more than 3,000, and the methodists more than 10,000.

J. A. Cannon