From Lectures on Calvinism:
The avoidance of the world has never been the Calvinistic mark, but the shibboleth (i.e. common belief) of the Anabaptist. The specific, anabaptistical dogma of “avoidance” proves this. According to this dogma, the Anabaptists, announcing themselves as “saints,” were severed from the world. They stood in opposition to it. They refused to take the oath; they abhorred all military service; they condemned the holding of public offices. Here already, they shaped a new world, in the midst of this world of sin, which however had nothing to do with this our present existenc.e They rejected all obligation and responsibility towards the old world, and they avoided it systematically, for fear of contamination, and contagion. But this is just what the Calvinist always disputed and denied.
It is not true that there are two worlds, a bad one and a good, which are fitted into each other. It is one and the same person who God created perfect and who afterwards fell, and became a sinner – and it is this same “ego” of the old sinner who is born again, ad who enters into eternal life. So, also, it is one and the same world which once exhibited all the glory of Paradise, which was afterwards smitten with teh curse, and which, since the Fall, is upheld by common grace; which has now been redeemed and saved by Christ, in its center, and which shall pass through the horror of the judgment into the state of glory. For ths very reason the Calvinist cannot shut himself up in his church and abandon the world o its fate.
He feels, rather, his high calling to push the development of this world to an even higher stage, and to do this in constant accordance with God’s ordinance, for the sake of God, upholding, in the midst of so much painful corruption, everything that his honorable, lovely, and of good report among men. Therefore it is that we see in History that scarcely had Calvinism been firmly established in the Netherlands for a quarter of a century when there was a rustling of life in all directions, and an indomitable energy was fermenting in every department of human activity, and their commerce and trace, their handicrafts and industry, their agriculture and horticulture, their art and science, flourished witha brilliancy previously unknown, and imparted a new impulse for an entirely new development of life, to the whole of Western Europe (pgs. 72-73).
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