Heppe:

25.-But while by praeteritio God refuses His redeeming grace to the rejected He does not deprive them of His common grace, which latter would have sufficed man in his original state to attain to eternal blessedness, and of which man continues to receive so much that he has no ground for excuse left at the judgment seat of God.

LEIDEN SYNOPSIS (XXIV, 54-55): “For this to be understood correctly, careful note must be taken that this praeterition does not remove or deny all grace in those passed over, but that only which is peculiar to the elect. But that which through the dispensation of common providence, whether under the law of nature or under gospel grace, is dispensed to men in varying amount, is not by this act of praeterition removed but is rather presupposed; the non-elect are left under the common government of divine providence and the exercise of their own arbitrium.-55: Moreover this dispensation of common providence always involves the communication of outward and inward benefits; which indeed sufficed for salvation in the unimpaired nature, as is clear in the rejected angels and the whole human race considered in the first parent before the fall. But in the corrupt nature so much has survived or been superadded to nature under the gospel, that they have been stripped and deprived of every pretext of excuse before the divine judgment, as the apostle testifies Ac. 14. 27 (they rehearsed all that God had done with them, and how they had opened a door of faith unto the Gentiles), Rom. I. 20 (the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity, that they may be without excuse) 2. I (Wherefore thou art without excuse, whosoever thou art that judge: wherein thou judgest another, thou condemn thyself: for thou that judgest practice the same things); also Jn. 15.22 (If I had not come and spoken to them, they had not had sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin) I Cor. 4. 3 (with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man’s judgment: yea 1 judge not mine own self) and elsewhere.”

WALAUS 490-491: “But reprobation does not deny in the reprobate all grace or every gift saving in itself: for we see that even to the reprobate many even supernatural things are communicated above the gifts of nature, as the propounding of the gospel, many other charisms, and illumination of the mind, and some improvement of the affections or joy, and a taste of future benefits (Heb. 6; Mt. 13) ; by these gifts they are set in order for salvation, did they not suppress them themselves and render God’s counsel towards themselves of no effect, as saith Scripture in Lk. 7, 2nd Rom. I, also Ac. 7, resist the H. Spirit. For it must assuredly be held that they first desert God before they are deserted by God, as Augustine often says. For God endures with much longsuffering. vessels of wrath, etc. Rom. 9.22. In fact we say more with the same Augustine, that it does not conflict with reprobation that even grace sufficient for salvation is given them, as is clear from the example of the reprobate angels, as well as of all men created in Adam in the image of God. Only they are denied grace infallibly effectual for salvation. In Adam all had strength to keep the law, even also to believe in Christ, had it been revealed to them (as even theologians themselves confess who ascend above the fall in this article), and they lost it in him (sc. Adam). Therefore grace sufficient for salvation is consistent with the decree of reprobation.”

Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1978), 185-187.

Thomas:

The Protestant Reformation brought a particular emphasis upon Augustine’s doctrine of the grace of God but it appears that all the early Reformers considered Christ’s sacrifice as bearing a general aspect and as offered for all mankind so as to establish a ground of hope for all. This, unquestionably, was Calvin’s view. So also taught Bullinger, Musculus, Zanchius, and the English Reformers generally. Only in the works of Tyndale and Ridley do we read of any tendency towards the more limited and narrower interpretation.

But in the period succeeding that of the early Reformers, when the effort was made to present theology in a more systematic way, the idea of a particular redemption became more general amongst Calvinistic divines. This, indeed, had begun with Beza who was the first of them to reach the doctrine definitively and to interpret all the general and extensive phrases employed in the New Testament in this context as referring either to the elect only, or to the Gentiles as well as the Jews, or as being used in an indeterminate manner and referring to all ranks and classes of men…

Owen Thomas, The Atonement Controversy: In Welsh Theological Literature and Debate, 1707-1841, (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth, 2002), 123. [first published in 1874.]

A.A. Hodge:

This language is adopted as representing his own view by Calvin in his Commentaries, as on 1 John 2:2. The same was done by Archbishop Ussher in Nos 22 and 23 of his letters, published by his chaplain Richard Parr. The early Reformed Confessions for the most part emphasized the general phase of the atonement… But as Federal Theology more and more gained currency in the Reformed Churches the special bearing of Christ’s death upon the elect necessarily was thrown more conspicuously into the foreground. For if he died in pursuance of the terms of an eternal covenant with the Father, He must needs have died in some special sense for the elect, who were given to Him by the Father by the terms of that Covenant.

A.A. Hodge, “The Consensus of the Reformed Confessions,” The Presbyterian Review 5 (1884): 287-298.

Charnock:

Man is to be considered as respited from the present suffering this sentence by the intervention of Christ; whereby he is put into another way of probation. So those common notions in our understandings, and common motions in our wills and affections, so far as they have anything of moral goodness, are a new gift to our natures by virtue of the mediation of Christ. In which sense he may be said to ‘taste death for every man,’ Heb. ii. 9, and be ‘a propitiation for the sins of the whole world.’ By virtue of which promised death, some sparks of moral goodness are preserved in man. Thus his ‘life was the light of men;’ and he is ‘The light that lightens every man that comes into the world,’ which sets the candle of the Lord in the spirit of man a-burning and sparkling, John I. 9, and upholds all things by his mediatory as well as divine power, Heb. I. 3, which else would have sunk into the abyss. By virtue of this mediation, some power is given back to man, as a new donation, yet not so much as that he is able by it to regenerate himself; and whatsoever power man has, is originally from this cause, and grows not up from the stock of nature, but from common grace.

Stephen Charnock, “A Discourse of the Efficient of Regeneration,” in Works, [1865], 3:210.