Institutes of the Christian Religion
Common Grace is God working in the heart of the sinner to emulate the Christian life but not effectually saving that sinner. This is a most important distinctive of Historical Calvinism as it is a distinctive made by John Calvin in his book the Institutes of the Christian Religion and by a number of Confessions of faith for Calvinistic denominations originally in Europe. It is also the distinctive made by later theologians such as Abraham Kuyper of the Netherlands and Louis Berkhof and R. C. Sproul. Following Kuyper, Berkhof sees three categories of common grace: