the fruitful mother of actual sins; and he condemus a man not for the guilt of another, but for making the deed of Adam his own, and repeating the fall by his own voluntary transgression. This every one does who lives beyond unconscious infancy. But Augustine, as we have already seen, makes even infancy subject to punishment for original sin alone, and thus unquestionably trenches not only upon the righteousness of God, but also upon his love, which is the beginning and end of his ways, and the key to all his works.

1

To sum up the Augustinian doctrine of sin: This fearful power is universal; it rules the species, as well as individuals; it has its seat in the moral character of the will, reaches thence to the particular actions, and from them reacts again upon the will; and it subjects every man, without exception, to the punitive justice of God. Yet the corruption is not so great as to alter the substance of man, and make him incapable of redemption. The denial of man's capacity for redemption is the Manichæan error, and the opposite extreme to the Pelagian denial of the need of redemption. "That is still good," says Augustine, "which bewails lost good; for had not something good remained in our nature, there would be no grief over lost good for punishment." Even in the hearts of the heathen the law of God is not wholly obliterated, and even in the life of the most abandoned men there are some good works. But these avail nothing to salvation. They are not truly good, because they proceed from the turbid source of selfishness. Faith is the root, and love the motive, of all truly good actions, and this love is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. "Whatsoever is not of faith, is sin." Before the time of Christ, therefore, all virtues were either, like the virtues of the Old Testament saints, who hoped in the same Christ in whom we believe, consciously or unconsciously Christian; or else they prove, on closer inspection, to be comparative vices or seeming virtues, destitute of the pure motive and the right aim. Lust of renown and lust of dominion were the funda

'De Genesi ad literam, viii. 14.

Rom. ii. 14.

mental traits of the old Romans, which first gave birth to those virtues of self-devotion to freedom and country, so glorious in the eyes of men; but which afterwards, when with the destruction of Carthage all manner of moral corruption poured in, begot the Roman vices.'

This view of heathen or natural morality as a specious form of vice, though true to a large extent, is nevertheless an unjust extreme, which Augustine himself cannot consistently sustain. Even he was forced to admit important moral differences among the heathen: between, for example, a Fabricius, of incorruptible integrity, and the traitor Catiline; and though he merely defines this difference negatively, as a greater and less degree of sin and guilt, yet this itself involves the positive

'The sentence often ascribed to Augustine, that “all pagan virtues are but splendid vices," is not Augustinian in form, but in substance. Comp. the quotation and remarks above, § 151. Dr. BAUR states his view correctly and clearly when he says (Vorlesungen über die Dogmengeschichte, Bd. i. Part 2, p. 342): "If, as Augustine taught, faith in Christ is the highest principle of willing and acting, nothing can be truly good, which has not its root in faith, which principle Augustine thus expressed, using the words of the apostle Paul, Rom. xiv. 23: ‘Omne, quod non ex fide, peccatum.' Augustine judged therefore all good in the will and act of man after the absolute standard of Christian good, and accordingly could only regard the virtues of the heathen as seeming virtues, and ascribe to anything pre-Christian an inner value only so far as it had an inner reference to faith in Christ." Comp. also BAUR's Geschichte der christl. Kirche vom 4-6ten Jahrhundert, p. 153 ff. NEANDER represents Augustine's doctrine on heathen virtue thus (Church History, vol. iv. 1161, 2d Germ. ed., or vol. ii. p. 620, in Torrey's translation): "Augustine very justly distinguishes the patriotism of the ancients from that which is to be called 'virtue,' in the genuinely Christian sense, and which depends on the disposition towards God (virtus from virtus vera); but then he goes so far as to overlook altogether what bears some relationship to the divine life in such occasional coruscations of the moral element of human nature, and to see in them nothing but a service done for evil spirits and for man's glory. He contributed greatly, on this particular side, to promote in the Western church the partial and contracted way of judging the ancient pagan times, as opposed to the more liberal Alexandrian views of which we still find traces in many of the Orientals in this period, and to which Augustine himself, in the earlier part of his life, as a Platonist, had been inclined. Still the vestiges of his earlier and loftier mode of thinking are to be discerned in his later writings, where he searches after and recognizes the scattered fragments of truth and goodness in the pagan literature, which he uniformly traces to the revelation of the Spirit who is the original source of all that is true and good, to created minds; though this is inconsistent with his own theory respecting the total corruption of humar nature, and with the particularism of his doctrine of predestination."

concession, that Fabricius stands nearer the position of Chris tian morality, and that there exists at least relative goodness among the heathen. Moreover, he cannot deny, that there were before Christ, not only among the Israelites, but also among the Gentiles, God-fearing souls, such as Melchisedec and Job, true Israelites, not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit, whom God by the secret workings of His Spirit drew to Himself even without baptism and the external means of grace.' So the Alexandrian fathers saw scattered rays of the Logos in the dark night of heathenism; only they were far from discriminating so sharply between what was Christian and what was not Christian,

All human boasting is therefore excluded, man is sick, sick unto death out of Christ, but he is capable of health; and the worse the sickness, the greater is the physician, the more powerful is the remedy-redeeming grace.

§ 157. Augustine's Doctrine of Redeeming Grace.

Augustine reaches his peculiar doctrine of redeeming grace in two ways. First he reasons upwards from below, by the law of contrast; that is, from his view of the utter incompetency of the unregenerated man to do good. The greater the corruption, the mightier must be the remedial principle. The doctrine of grace is thus only the positive counterpart of the doctrine of sin. In the second place he reasons downwards from above; that is, from his conception of the allworking, all-penetrating presence of God in natural life, and much more in the spiritual. While Pelagius deistically severs God and the world after the creation, and places man on an independent footing, Augustine, even before this controversy,

1

Comp. De peccat, orig. c. 24 (§ 28, tom. x. f. 265), where he asserts that the grace and faith of Christ operated even unconsciously "sive in eis justis quos sancta Scriptura commemorat, sive in eis justis quos quidem illa non commemorat, sed tamen fuisse credendi sunt, vel ante diluvium, vel inde usque ad legem datam, vel ipsius legis tempore, non solum in filiis Israel, sicut fuerunt prophetæ, sed etiam extra eundem populu'n, sicut fuit Job. Et ipsorum enim corda eadem mundabantur mediatoris fide, et diffundebatur in eis caritas per Spiritum Sanctum, qui ubi vult spirat, non merita sequens, sed etiam ipsa merita faciens.”

was, through his speculative genius and the earnest experience of his life, deeply penetrated with a sense of the absolute dependence of the creature on the Creator, in whom we live and move, and have our being. But Augustine's impression of the immanence of God in the world has nothing pantheistic; it does not tempt him to deny the transcendence of God and his absolute independence of the world. Guided by the Holy Scriptures, he maintains the true mean between deism and pantheism. In the very beginning of his Confessions' he says very beautifully: "How shall I call on my God, on my God and Lord? Into myself must I call Him, if I call on Him; and what place is there in me, where my God may enter into me, the God, who created heaven and earth? O Lord my God, is there anything in me, that contains Thee ! Do heaven and earth contain Thee, which Thou hast created, in which Thou didst create me? Or does all that is, contain Thee, because without Thee there had existed nothing that is! Because then I also am, do I supplicate Thee, that Thou wouldst come into me, I, who had not in any wise been, if Thou wert not in me? I yet live, I do not yet sink into the lower world, and yet Thou art there. If I made my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there. I were not, then, O my God, I utterly were not, if Thou wert not in me. Yea, still more, I were not, O my God, if I were not in Thee, from whom all, in whom all, through whom all is. Even so, Lord, even so." In short, man is nothing without God, and everything in and through God. The undercurrent of this sentiment could not but carry this father onward to all the views he developed in opposition to the Pelagian heresy.

While Pelagius widened the idea of grace to indefiniteness, and reduced it to a medley of natural gifts, law, gospel, for giveness of sins, enlightenment, and example, Augustine restrict ed grace to the specifically Christian sphere (and, therefore, called it gratia Christi), though admitting its operation pre vious to Christ among the saints of the Jewish dispensation but within this sphere he gave it incomparably greater depth, With him grace is, first of all, a creative power of God in

1 Liber i. c. 2

Christ transforming men from within. It produces first the negative effect of forgiveness of sins, removing the hindrance to communion with God; then the positive communication of a new principle of life. The two are combined in the idea of justification, which, as we have already remarked, Augustine holds, not in the Protestant sense of declaring righteous once for all, but in the Catholic sense of gradually making righteous; thus substantially identifying it with sanctification.' Yet, as he refers this whole process to divine grace, to the exclusion of all human merit, he stands on essentially Evangelical ground.' As we inherit from the first Adam our sinful and mortal life, so the second Adam implants in us, from God, and in God, the germ of a sinless and immortal life. Positive grace operates, therefore, not merely from without upon our intelligence by instruction and admonition, as Pelagius taught, but also in the centre of our personality, imparting to the will the power to do the good which the instruction teaches, and to imitate the example of Christ.' Hence he frequently calls it the inspiration of a good will, or of love, which is the fulfilling of the law. "Him that wills not, grace comes to meet, that he may will; him that wills, she follows up, that he may not will in vain." Faith itself is an effect of grace; indeed, its first and fundamental effect, which provides for all others, and manifests itself in love. He had formerly held faith to be a work of man (as, in fact, though not exclusively, the capacity

1 De spiritu et litera, c. 26 (tom. x. f. 109): “Quid est enim aliud, justificati, quam justi facti, ab illo scilicet qui justificat impium, ut ex impio fiat justus?" Retract. ii. 33: "Justificamur gratia Dei, hoc est, justi efficimur.”

Comp. De gratia et libero arbitrio, c. 8 (§ 19), and many other places, where he ascribes fides, caritas, omnia bona opera, and vita æterna to the free, unmerited grace of God.

"Non lege atque doctrina insonante forinsecus, sed interna et occulta, mirabi ac ineffabili potestate operatur Deus in cordibus hominum non solum veras revela trones, sed bonas etiam voluntates." De grat. Christi, cap. 24 (x. f. 24).

De corrept. et grat. cap. 2 (x. 751): "Inspiratio bonæ voluntatis atqu operis." Without this grace men can "nullum prorsus sive cogitando, sive volend et amando, sive agendo facere bonum." Elsewhere he calls it also "inspiratic dilectionis" and "caritatis." C. duas epist. Pel. iv., and De gratia Christi, 39.

"Nolentem prævenit, ut velit; volentem subsequitur, ne frustra velit." Enchir. c. 32.