“Calvin teaches that all the wisdom and goodness in the world comes from God. The Spirit gives some grace to all mankind to prevent such an outbreak of sin as would destroy society. In other words common grace is necessary to preserve men that there may be an opportunity for special grace to work.

This common grace of God is given directly to men through creation in God’s likeness, through the shining into God’s rational creatures of the universal truths which condition all knowledge, through conscience, through civil government, through family and other social ties, through education, etc. God is thus directly related to all His creation. Thus we seek to make God sovereign in every life and in all of life.

It is the doctrine of common grace that enables us to thank God for every spark of goodness we find in non-Christian men. The sin and fall defaced, but did not entirely efface the image of God in man. By God’s common grace men are so blessed that good citizens and good neighbors are found even outside the sphere of special grace. By common grace governments rule, education prospers, and a certain amount of ethical culture is spread. And whatever of good there is in non-Christian religions, is to be attributed to this activity of the Spirit of God, and God is to be praised for it. But special or saving grace is given exclusively through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Because of common grace one expects to find the gifts of eloquence, rhetoric, craftsmanship, and the fine arts not confined to the redeemed, but widely diffused according to the bountiful gifts of the Creator. Thus the fullest recognition of the wisdom and skill of a Burbank, an Edison, an Einstein, may go hand in hand with the sincere regret that these men have not given better evidence of belonging to the household of faith.

Thus we see that the teaching of common grace reconciles the facts of experience that some non-Christian show evidence of good in civil and domestic matters, and leads to a recognition of good wherever found with a thankful acknowledgment of God as the giver thereof.” — William C. Robinson in Margaret T. Russell and William C. Robinson, The Holy Spirit in the Holy Scriptures (1935), pp. 41-42