Indeed, the great question between me and the monk [Georgius] is not whether men yield necessary obedience to the secret judgment of God, or are inevitably carried on in their sin by it without any fault of their own, which we not only declare to be a false tenet, but a foul and detestable profanity; but the question between us is whether the wicked, who by their voluntary sins provoke the wrath of God against themselves, were afore reprobated of God (as the righteous but incomprehensible cause of all) “according to the counsel of His own will.” Now, as Paul severely condemns the sins of men, powerfully pressing them home upon their own conscience, and determinately vindicating, at the same time, the justice of God from the profane slanders of men; so he openly declares, and dissembles not, that those who precipitate themselves into destruction by their sins, are “vessels of wrath fitted to destruction.” Christ also charges home their guilt on the reprobate as they deserve. But He, at the same time, shows that the great cause of all was that they were “trees, not planted by the hand of His Father.” In a word, we are told that the Father gave unto the Son those that were His, that He might sanctify them. In the opposite view, Paul, having shown that “the elect obtained it” (namely, “the righteousness of faith”), adds, that all “the rest were blinded.” Vain, therefore, are all the arguments of Georgius, who, fixing his eyes on the open sins of men only, never thinks of that hidden source of all the wickedness of mankind, the corruption of nature!
John Calvin (1552), Calvin’s Calvinism: Treatises on the Eternal Predestination of God & the Secret Providence of God (Reformed Free Publishing Association). p. 177–178. This book is a reproduction of a translation by Henry Cole in 1856.