In the Calvinist Church, after the death of its founder, the controversy over the "divine decrees" continued through the seventeenth century. From the college at Geneva the doctrine of Calvin spread to all parts of Protestant Europe, and into the schools of learning.
But there arose a difference of opinion, not about the "decrees" in themselves, but about the nature of the decrees. The majority held that God simply permitted the first man to fall into transgression; while a respectable minority maintained with all their might, that "to exercise and display his awful justice and his free mercy," God had decreed from all eternity that Adam should sin, and had "so ordered the course of events that our first parents could not possibly avoid their un happy fall." (Id. chap. 2, par. 10)
These last were called Supralapsarians, while their opponents were called Sublapsarians.