In an attestation to the work on the atonement by John Owen (Death of Death) a then famous Puritan divine who was a member of the Westminster Assembly gives us the idea that men in that time had of Arminianism. Again we must note that there is a distinction between what one believes about a system of thought and what one might believe about individual members who profess that system. I am quoting from this attestation written by Stanley Gower in an effort to get across the idea that it was not just John Owen who believed these things.
There are two rotten pillars on which the fabric of late Arminianism (an egg of the old Pelagianism, which we had well hoped had been long since chilled, but is sat upon and brooded by the wanton wits of our degenerate and apostate spirits) doth principally stand. The one is, that God loveth all alike, Cain as well as Abel, Judas as the rest of the apostles. The other is, that God giveth (nay is bound, “ex debito,” so to do) both Christ, the great gift of his eternal love, for all alike to work out their redemption, and “vires credendi,” power to believe in Christ to all alike to whom he gives the gospel; whereby that redemption may effectually be applied for their salvation, if they please to make right use of that which is so put into their power.
The former destroys the free and special grace of God, by making it universal; the latter gives cause to man of glorifying in himself rather than in God,–God concurring no farther to the salvation of a believer than a reprobate. Christ died for both alike;–God giving power of accepting Christ to both alike, men themselves determining the whole matter by their free-will; Christ making both savable, themselves make them to be saved.
This cursed doctrine of theirs crosseth the main drift of holy Scripture; which is to abase and pull down the pride of man, to make him even to despair of himself, and to advance and set up the glory of God’s free grace from the beginning to the end of man’s salvation. His hand hath laid the foundation of his spiritual house; his hand shall also finish it.
Again we notice that in older days men used strong words and put them down for all to see. In our day it is not thought to be politically correct or gracious to use such strong language. However, we must remember that in the New Testament Jesus and Paul used strong language. Men like Stanley Gower and John Owen thought of themselves as defending the Gospel itself and Reformed theology as a whole when they took up their pens against Arminian theology. As we can see from the above quote, the issues of free-will and a universal redemption were thought to destroy the Gospel of grace alone. Those men saw it that way, though it is no longer thought of that way in the modern day. Why do we not think of it that way today? Has Scripture changed or something else?
Today we think of grace as supplying salvation. In their day they saw grace not only supplying but also supplying what is needed to apply salvation and then applying it. In our day even Reformed people think that grace provides and then applies salvation by regenerating man and giving man the ability to believe. This makes it easy to join hands with Arminian theology since the Arminian thinks that God gives some grace and that he (the Arminian) simply chooses to go along. The modern Reformed person says that they are not far apart and that God gives the grace to the Arminian to believe though the Arminian simply does not recognize that it is God who enabled him or her to believe. The older writers would have thought that a failure to attribute all to grace was another Gospel.
The older writers said the death of Christ was applied by the Spirit and not the human will. They saw that for salvation to be applied to those truly dead in sins and trespasses, that grace must not only apply salvation, it must break the pride of the sinner and make him desire to be saved. Not only must grace work faith in the soul, it must work until the soul does not believe in itself. Instead of grace giving man hope in his own free-will to do something toward salvation, instead grace works despair of any help or hope in self in order that the person may trust in Christ alone. In other words, the sinner is nothing but a mass of sin and self and has nothing to start with. Grace works from the beginning and does all of the work in the sinner and nothing is left to the free-will to do because in the sinner the will is never free from a desire to sin until grace delivers the soul from sin. It was more than believing in the doctrine of justification by faith alone; it was being justified by the work of grace alone.
God Loves... Himself 
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