Calvinism took away a man& #39;s liberty in the universe; why, then, should it favor his liberty in the State? Puritans denied free will; why should they be likely to affirm free speech?

Why should the Calvinists object to an aristocracy? The Calvinists were an aristocracy; they were the most arrogant and awful of aristocracies by the nature of their own belief; they were the elect.

Why should the Puritans dislike a baby being born a nobleman or a gentleman? It was their whole philosophy that a baby is born a celestial nobleman; that he is at birth and before birth a member of the cosmic upper classes.

It should have been a small matter for the Puritans to admit that one might be born a king; seeing that they maintained the much more paradoxical position that one might be born a saint.

The first conception of Calvinism is a fierce insistence on the utterly arbitrary nature of power.