When I wish thy aid, I will call on thee for it. Meanwhile, thou must await my pleasure. There did, indeed, once two men go up into the temple to pray. But we are not left in doubt in which one the religious mood was most purely exhibited. There is One who has told us that with clearness and emphasis.
All men assume the religious attitude, then, when they pray.
But many men box up, as it were, this attitude in their prayer, and shutting it off from their lives with the Amen, rise from their knees to assume a totally different attitude, if not of heart, then at least of mind. The Calvinist is the man who is determined to preserve the attitude he takes in prayer in all his thinking, in all his feeling, in all his doing. That is to say, he is the man who is determined that religion in its purity shall come to its full rights in his thinking, and feeling, and living. Calvinism is, therefore, that type of thought in which there comes to its rights the truly religious attitude of utter dependence on God and humble trust in his mercy alone for salvation. At the opening of the fifth century, the two fundamental types came into direct conflict in remarkably pure form as embodied in the two persons of Augustine and Pelagius.