What says the Lord? 'Without me you can do nothing''! '' On the very next day, he was again in the pulpit, and taking for his text chiefly the ninety-fourth Psalm.^ The preacher began ^ by quoting the sixth verse, and laying stress on the words " our Maker." ' No Christian,' he said, ' doubted that God had made him, and that in such a sense that God created not only the ' Compare, below, pp. Iv-lviii. Neander, in the second volume (E. T.) of his History of the Christian Church, discusses the matter in a very fair bpirit.
° English version, xcv.; see verse 6. ' Sermon a6.
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first man, from whom all have descended, but that God to-day creates every man, — as He said to one of His saints, " Before that I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee." At first He created man apart from man; now He creates man from man: nevertheless, whether man apart from man, or man from man, " it is He that made us, and not we ourselves." Nor has He made us and then deserted us; He has not cared to make us, and not cared to keep us. Will He who made us without being asked, desert us when He is besought? But is it not just as foolish to say, as some say or are ready to say, that God made them men, but they make themselves righteous?
Whv, then, do we pray to God to make us righteous? The first man was created in a nature that was without fault or flaw. He was made righteous: he did not make himself righteous; what he did for himself was to fall and break his righteousness. This God did not do: He permitted it, as if He had said, " Let him desert Me; let him find himself; and let his misery prove that he has no ability without Me." In this way God wished to show man what free will was worth without God. O evil free will without God! Behold, man was made good; and by free will man was made evil! When will the evil man make himself good by free will? When good, he was not able to keep himself good; and now that he is evil, is he to make himself good? Nay, behold. He that made us has also made us " His people " (Ps. xciv. 7). This is a distinguishing gift. Nature is common to all, but grace is not. It is not to be confounded with nature; but if it were, it would still be gratuitous. For certainly no man, before he existed, deserved to come into existence. And yet God has made him, and that not hke the beasts or a stock or a stone, but in His own imag|. Who has given this benefit? He gave it who was in existence: he received it who was not. And only He could do this, who calls the things that are not as though they were: of whom the apostle says that " He chose us before the foundation of the world." We have been made in this world, and yet the world was not when we were chosen.
Ineffable I wonderful! They are chosen who are not: neither does He err in choosing, nor choose in vain. He chooses, and has elect whom He is to create to be chosen: He has them in Himself, not indeed in His nature, but in His prescience. Let us not, then, glory in ourselves, or dispute against grace. If we are men. He made us. If we are believers, He made us this too. He who sent the Lamb to be slain has, out of wolves, made us sheep. This is grace. And it is an even greater grace than that grace of nature by which we were all made men.' " I am continually endeavouring to discuss such things as these," said the preacher, "against a new heresy which is attempting to rise; because I wish you to be fixed in the good, untouched by the evil...For, disputing against grace in favor of free will, they became an offence to pious and catholic ears. They began to create horror; they began to be avoided as a fixed pest; it began to be said of them, that they argued against grace. And they found such a device as this:...
' Because I defend man's free will, and say that free will is sufficient in order that I may be righteous,' says one, ' I do not say that it is without the grace of God.' The ears of the pious are pricked up, and he who hears this, already begins to rejoice: ' Thanks be to God! He does not defend free will without the grace of God! There is free will, but it avails nothing without the grace of God.' If, then, they do not defend free will without the grace of God, what evil do they say? Expound to us, O teacher, what grace you mean? 'When I say,' he says, 'the free will of man, you observe that I say " <?/ wtz« "? ' What then? 'Who created man?' God. 'Who gave him free will? ' God. ' If, then, God created man, and God gave man free will, whatever man is able to do by free will, to whose grace does he owe it, except to His who made him with free will? ' And this is what they think they say so acutely! You see, nevertheless, my brethren, how they preach that general grace by which we were created and by which we are men; and, of course, we are men in common with the ungodly, and are Christians apart from them. It is this grace by which we are Christians, that we wish them to preach, this that we wish them to acknowledge, this that we wish, — of which the apostle says, ' I do not make void the grace of God, for if righteousness is by the law, Christ is dead in vain.' " Then the true function of the law is explained, as a revealer of our sinfulness, and a pedagogue to lead us to Christ: the Mani- INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. xlvii chean view of tlie Old-Testament law is attacked, but its insufficiency fcjr salvation is pointed out; and so we are brought back to the necessity of grace, which is illustrated from the story of the raising of the dead child in 2 Kings iv. 18-37, — ^^e dead child being Adam; the ineffective staff (by which we ought to walk), the law; but the living prophet, Christ with his grace, which we must preach. " The prophetic staff was not enough for the dead boy: would dead nature itself have been enough? Even this, by which we are made, although we nowhere read of it under this name, we nevertheless, because it is given gratuitously, confess to be grace. But we show to you a greater grace than this, by which we are Christians...This is the grace by Jesus Christ our Lord: it was He that made us, — both before we were at all, it was He that made us, and now, after we are made, it is He that has made us all righteous, — and not we ourselves." There was but one mass of perdition from Adam, to which nothing was due but punishment; and from that mass vessels have been made unto honor. " Rejoice because you have escaped; you have escaped the death that was due, — you have received the life that was not due. 'But,' you ask, ' why did He make me unto honor, and another unto dishonor?' Will you who will not hear the apostle saying, ' O man, who art thou that repliest against God? ' hear Augustin?...Do you wish to dispute with me? Nay, wonder with me, and cry out with me, ' Oh the depth of the riches! ' Let us both be afraid, — let us both cry out, ' Oh the depth of the riches! ' Let us both agree in fear, lest we perish in error."
Au-gustin was not less busy with his pen, during these months, than with his voice. Quite a series of letters belong to the last half of 418, in which he argues to his distant correspondents on the same themes which he was so iterantly trying to make clear to his Carthaginian auditors.
One of the most interesting of these was written to a fellow-bishop, Optatus, on the origin of the soul.' Optatus, like Jerome, had expressed himself as favoring the theory of a special creation of each at birth; and Augustin, in this letter as in the paper sent to Jerome, lays great stress on so holding our theories on so obscure a matter as to conform to the indubitable fact of the transmission of sin. This fact, such passages as i Cor. xv. 21 sq., Rom. v. 12 sq., make certain; and in stating this, Augustin takes the opportunity to outline the chief contents of the catholic faith over against the Pelagian denial of original sin and grace: that all are born under the contagion of death and in the bond of guilt; that there is no deliverance except in the one Mediator, Christ Jesus; that before His coming men received him as promised, now as already come, but with the same faith; that the law was not intended to save, but to shut up under sin and so force us back upon the one Saviour; and that the distribution of grace is sovereign. Augustin pries into God's. sovereign counsels somewhat more freely here than is usual with him. " But why those also are created who, the Creator foreknew, would belong to damnation, not to grace, the blessed apostle mentions with as much succinct brevity as great authority. For he says that God, ' wishing to show His wrath and demonstrate His power,' etc. (Rom. ix. 22). Justly, however, would he seem unjust in forming vessels of wrath for perdition, if the whole mass from Adam were not condemned. That, therefore, they are made on birth vessels of anger, belongs to the punishment due to them; but that they are made by re-birth vessels of mercy, belongs to the graca that is not due to them. God, therefore, shows his wrath, — not, of course, perturbation of mind, such as is called wrath among men, but a just and fixed vengeance...He shows also his power, by which he makes a good use of evil men, and endows them with many natural and temporal goods, and bends their evil to admonition and instruction of the good by comparison with it, so that these may learn from them to give thanks to God that they have been made to differ from them, not by their own deserts which were of like kind in the same mass, but by His pity...But by creating so many to be born who. He foreknew, would not belong to his grace, so that they are more by an incomparable multitude than those whom he deigned to predestinate as children of the promise into the glory of His Kingdom, — He wished to show by this very ■ Epistle 190.
xlviii INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
multitude of the rejected how entirely of no moment it is to the just God what is the multitude of those most justly condemned. And that hence also those who are redeemed from this condemnation may understand, that what they see rendered to so great a part of the mass was the due of the whole of it, — not only of those who add many others to original sin, by the choice of an evil will, but as well of so many children who are snatched from this life without the grace of the Mediator, bound by no bond except that of original sin alone." With respect to the question more immediately concerning which the letter was written, Augustin explains that he is willing to accept the opinion that souls are created for men as they are born, if only it can be made plain that it is consistent with the original sin that the Scriptures so clearly teach. In the paper sent to Jerome, the difficulties of creationism are sufficiently urged; this letter is interesting on account of its statement of some of the difficulties of traducianism also, — thus evidencing Augustin's clear view of the peculiar complexity of the problem, and justifying his attitude of balance and uncertainty between the two theories. ' The human understanding,' he says, ' can scarcely comprehend how a soul arises from a parent's soul in the offspring; or is transmitted to the offspring as a candle is lighted from a candle and thence another fire comes into existence without loss to the former one. Is there an incorporeal seed for the soul, which passes, by some hidden and invisible channel of its own, from the father to the mother, when it is conceived in the woman? Or, even more incredible, does it lie enfolded and hidden within the corporeal seed? He is lost in wonder over the question whether, when conception does not take place, the immortal seed of an immortal soul perishes; or, does the immortality attach itself to it only when it lives? He even expresses the doubt whether traducianism will explain what it is called in to explain, much better than creationism; in any case, who denies that God is the maker of every soul? Isaiah (Ivii. i6) says, " I have made every breath; " and the only question that can arise is as to method, — whether He " makes every breath from the one first breath, just as He makes every body of man from the one first body; or whether he makes new bodies indeed, from the one body, but new souls out of nothing." Certainly nothing but Scripture can determine such a question; but where do the Scriptures speak unambiguously upon it? The passages to which the creationists point only affirm the admitted fact that God makes the soul; and the traducianists forget that the word " soul " in the Scriptures is ambiguous, and can mean " man," and even a " dead man." What more can be done, then, than to assert what is certain, viz., that sin is propagated, and lea\-e what is uncertain in the doubt in which God has chosen to place it?
This letter was written not long after the issue of Zosimus' Tractoria, demanding the signature of all to African orthodoxy; and Augustin sends Optatus " copies of the recent letters which have been sent forth from the Roman see, whether specially to the African bishops or generally to all bishops," on the Pelagian controversy, " lest perchance they had not yet reached " his correspondent, who, it is very evident, he was anxious should thoroughly realize " that the authors, or certainly the' most energetic and noted teachers," of these new heresies, " had been condemned in the whole Christian world by the vigilance of episcopal councils aided by the Saviour who keeps His Church, as well as by two venerable overseers of the Apostolical see, Pope Innocent and Pope Zosimus, unless they should show repentance by being convinced and reformed." To this zeal we owe it that the letter contains an extract from Zosimus' Tractoria, one of the two brief fragments of that document that have reached our day.
There was another ecclesiastic in Rome, besides Zosimus, who was strongly suspected of favoring the Pelagians, — the presbyter Sixtus, who afterwards became Pope Sixtus III. But when Zosimus sent forth his condemnation of Pelagianism, Sixtus sent also a short letter to Africa addressed to Aurelius of Carthage, which, though brief, indicated a considerable vigor against the heresy which he was commonly believed to have before defended,' and which claimed him as its own." Some months afterwards, he sent another similar, but longer, letter to Augustin and Alypius, more fully INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. xlix expounding his rejection of " the fatal dogma " of Pelagius, and his acceptance of " that grace of Ciod freely given by Him to small and great, to which Pelagius' dogma was diametrically opposed." Augtistin was overjoyed with these developments. He quickly replied in a short letter ' in which he expresses the delight he has in learning from Sixtus' own hand that he is not a defender of Pelagius, but a preacher of grace. And close upon the heels of this he sent another much longer letter,^ in which he discusses the subtler arguments of the Pelagians with an anxious care that seems to bear witness to his desire to confirm and support his correspondent in his new opinions.
Both letters testify to Augustin's approval of the persecuting measures which had been instituted by the Roman see in obedience to the emperor; and urge on Sixtus his duty not only to bring the open heretics to deserved punishment, but to track out those who spread their poison secretly, and even to remember those whom he had formerly heai'd announcing the error before it had been condemned, and who were now silent through fear, and to bring them either to open recantation of their former beliefs, or to punishment. It is pleasanter to recall our thoughts to the dialectic of these letters. The greater part of the second is given to a discussion of the gratuitousness of grace, which, just because grace, is given to no preceding merits. Many subtle objections to this doctrine were brought forward by the Pelagians. They said that " free will was taken away if we asserted that man did not have even a good will without the aid of God; " that we made " God an accepter of persons, if we believed that without any preceding merits He had mercy on whom He would, and whom Pie would He called, and whom He would He made religious; " that " it was unjust, in one and the same case, to deliver one and punish another; " that, if such a doctrine is preached, " men who do not wish to live rightly and faithfully, will excuse themselves by saying that they have done nothing evil by living ill, since they have not received the grace by which they might live well; " that it is a puzzle " how sin can pass over to the children of the faithful, when it has been remitted to the parents in baptism; " that " children respond truly by the mouth of their sponsors that they believe in remission of sins, but not because sins are remitted to thou, but because they believe that sins are remitted in the church or in baptism to those in whom they are found, not to those in whom they do not exist," and consequently they said that " they were unwilling that infants should be so baptized unto remission of sins as if this remission took place in them," for (they contend) " they have no sin; but they are to be baptized, although without sin, with the same rite of baptism through which remission of sins takes place in any that are sinners." This last objection is especially interesting,^ because it furnishes us with the reply which the Pelagians made to the argument that Augustin so strongly pressed against them from the very act and ritual of baptism, as implying remission of sins.+ His rejoinder to it here is to point to the other parts of the same ritual, and to ask why, then, infants are exorcised and exsufflated in baptism. " For, it cannot be doubted that this is done fictitiously, if the Devil does not rule over them; but if he rules over them, and they are therefore not falsely exorcised and exsufflated, why does that prince of sinners rule over them except because of sin?" On the fundamental matter of the gratuitousness of grace, this letter is very explicit. " If we seek for the deser\ing of hardening, we shall find it...But if we seek for the deserving of pity, w-e shall not find it; for there is none, lest grace be made a vanity if it is not given gratis, but rendered to merits. But, should we say that faith preceded and in it there is desert of grace, what desert did man have before faith that he should receive faith? For, what did he have that he did not receive?
and if he received it, why does he glory as if he received it not? For as man would not have wisdom, understanding, prudence, fortitude, knowledge, piety, fear of God, unless he had received (according to the prophet) the spirit of wisdom and understanding, of prudence and fortitude, of knowledge and piety and the fear of God; as he would not have justice, love, continence, except the spirit was received of whom the apostle says, ' For you did not receive the spirit of fear, but of 3 It appears to have been first reported to Augustin, by Mnrius Mercator, in a letter received at Carthage. See Epistle 193, 3.
* As, for example, in Oit the Merits and Remission of Sins, etc., i.
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virtue, and love, and continence: ' so he would not have faith unless he received the spirit of faith of whom the same apostle says, ' Having then the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, " I believed and therefore spoke," we too believe and therefore speak.' But that He is not received by desert, but by His mercy who has mercy on whom He will, is manifestly shown where > | he says of himself, ' I have obtained mercy to be faithful.' " " If we should say that the merit of prayer precedes, that the gift of grace may follow,...even prayer itself is found among the gifts of grace " (Rom. viii. 26). " It remains, then, that faith itself, whence all righteousness takes beginning;...it remains, I say, that even faith itself is not to be attributed to the human will which they extol, nor to any preceding merits, since from it begin whatever good things are merits: but it is to be confessed to be the gratuitous gift of God, since we consider it true grace, that is, without merits, inasmuch as we read in the same epistle, ' God divides out the measure of faith to each ' (Rom. xii. 3). Now, good works are done by man, but faith is wrought in man, and without it these are not done by any man. For all that is not of faith is sin " (Rom. xiv. 23).
By the same messenger who carried this important letter to Sixtus, Augustin sent also a letter to Mercator,' an African layman who was then apparently at Rome, but who was afterwards (in 429) to render service by instructing the Emperor Theodosius as to the nature and history of Pelagianism, and so preventing the appeal of the Pelagians to him from being granted. Now ■,he appears as an inquirer: Augustin, while at Carthage, had received a letter from him in wliich he ■Jiad consulted him on certain questions that the Pelagians had raised, but in such a manner as to indicate his opposition to them. Press of business had compelled the postponement of the reply until this later date. One of the questions that Mercator had put concerned the Pelagian account.of infants sharing in the one baptism unto remission of sins, which we have seen Augustin answer-:ing when writing to Sixtus. In this letter he replies: " Let them, then, hear the Lord (John iii.
36).. Infants, therefore, who are made believers by others, by whom they are brought to baptism, are, of course, unbelievers by others, if they are in the hands of such as do not believe -that they should be brought, inasmuch as they believe they are nothing profited; and accordingly, if they believe by believers, and have eternal life, they are unbelievers by unbelievers, and shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on them. For it is not said, ' it comes on them,' but ' it abideth on them,' because it was on them from the beginning, and will not be taken from them except by the grace of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord...Therefore, when children are baptized, the confession is made that they are believers, and it is not to be doubted that those who are not "believers are condemned: let them, then, dare to say now, if they can, that they contract no evil from their origin to be condemned by the just God, and have no contagion of sin." The other matter on which Mercator sought light concerned the statement that universal death proved universal sin: ^ he reported that the Pelagians replied that not even death was universal, — that Enoch, for instance, and Elijah, had not died. Augustin adds those who are to be found living at the second advent, who are not to die, but be "changed; " and replies that Rom. v. 12 is perfectly explicit that there is no death in the world except that which comes from sin, and that God is a Saviour, and we cannot at all " deny that He is able to do that, now, in any that he wishes, without death, which we undoubtingly believe is to be done in so many after death." He adds that the difficult question is not why Enoch and Elijah did not die, if death is the punishment of sin;