besiege, let us besiege: let us look only to this, that they do not conquer. With some evil desires we are born: others we make, by bad habit. It is on account of those with which we are born, that infants are baptized; that they may be freed from the guilt of inheritance, not from any evil of custom, which, of course, they have not. And it is on account of these, too, that our war must be endless: the concupiscence with which we are born cannot be done away as long as we live; it may be diminished, but not done away. Neither can the law free us, for it only reveals the sin to our greater apprehension. Where, then, is hope, save in the superabundance of grace? The next sermon (152) takes up the words in Rom. viii. 1-4, and points out that the inward aid of the Spirit brings all the help we need. " We, like farmers in the field, work from without: but, if there were no one who worked from within, the seed would not take root in the ground, nor would the sprout arise in the field, nor would the shoot grow strong and become a tree, nor would branches and fruit and leaves be produced. Therefore the apostle distinguishes between the work of the workmen and of the Creator (i Cor. iii. 6, 7). If God give not the increase, empty is this sound within your ears; but if he gives, it avails somewhat that we plant and water, and our labor is not in vain." He then applies this to the individual, striving against his lusts; warns against Manichean error; and distinguishes between the three laws, — the law of sin, the law of faith, and the law of deeds, — defending the latter, the law of Moses, against the Manicheans; and then he comes to the words of the text, and explains its chief phrases, closing thus: " What other do we read here than that Christ is a sacrifice for sin?...Behold by what ' sin ' he condemned sin: by the sacrifice which he made for sins, he condemned sin. This is the law of the Spirit of life which has freed you from the law of sin and death. For that other law, the law of the letter, the law that commands, is indeed good; ' the commandment is holy and just and good: ' but ' it was weak by the flesh,' and what it commanded it could not ' Oh the Gift of Perseverance, 55.
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. xlv bring about in us. Therefore there is one law, as I began by saying, that reveals sin to you, and another that takes it away: the law of the letter reveals sin, the law of grace takes it away." Sermon 155 covers the same ground, and more, taking the broader text, Rom. viii. i-ii, and fully developing its teaching, especially as discriminating between the law of sin and the law of Moses and the law of faith; the law of Moses being the holy law of God written with His finger on the tables of stone, while the law of the Spirit of life is nothing other than the same law written in the heart, as the prophet (Jer. xxx. i, 33) clearly declares. So written, it does not terrify from without, but soothes from within. Great care is also taken, lest by such phrases as, "walk in the Spirit, not in the flesh," "who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" a hatred of the body should be begotten. " Thus you shall be freed from the body of this death, not by having no body, but by having another one and dying no more. If, indeed, he had not added, ' of this death,' perchance an error might have been suggested to the human mind, and it might have been said, 'You see that God does not wish us to have a body.' But He says, ' the body of this death.' Take away death, and the body is good. Let our last enemy, death, be taken away, and my dear flesh will be mine for eternity. For no one can ever ' hate his own flesh.' Although the ' spirit lusts against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit,' although there is now a battle in this house, yet the husband is seeking by his strife not the ruin of, but concord with, his wife. Far be it, far be it, my brethren, that the spirit should hate the flesh in lusting against it! It hates the vices of the flesh; it hates the wisdom of the flesh; it hates the contention of death. This corruption shall put on incorruption, — this mortal sh^l put on immortality; it is sown a natural body; it shall rise a spiritual body; and you shall see full and perfect concord, — you shall see the creature praise the Creator." One of the special interests of such passages is to show, that, even at this early date, Augustin was careful to guard his hearers from Manichean error while proclaiming original sin. One of the sermons which, probably, was preached about this time (153), is even entitled, "Against the Manicheans openly, but taciUy against the Pela- gians," and bears witness to the early development of the method that he was somewhat later to use effectively against Julian's charges of Manicheanism against the catholics.' Three days afterwards, Augustin preached on the next few verses, Rom. viii. 12-17, but can scarcely be said to have risen to the height of its great argument. The greater part of the sermon is occupied with a discussion of the law, why it was given, how it is legitimately used, and its usefulness as a pedagogue to bring us to Christ; then of the need of a mediator; and then, of what it is to live according to the flesh, which includes living according to merely human nature; and the need of mortifying the flesh in this world. All this, of course, gave full opportunity for opposing the lead- ing Pelagian errors; and the sermon is brought to a close by a direct polemic against their assertion that the function of grace is only to make it more easy to do what is right. " ^^'ith the sail more easily, with the oar with more difficulty: nevertheless even with the oar we can go. On a beast more easily, on foot with more difficulty: nevertheless progress can be made on foot. It is not true! For the true Master who flatters no one, who deceives no one, — the truthful Teacher and very Saviour to whom the most grievous pedagogue has led us, — when he was speaking about good works, i.e., about the fruits of the twigs and branches, did not say, 'Without me, indeed, you can do something, but you will do it more easily with me; ' He did not say, ' You can make your fruit without me, but more richly with me.' He did not say this! Read what He said: it is the holy gospel, — bow the proud necks! Augustin does not say this: the Lord says it. 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.
xlvi INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
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 our- selves." There was but one mass of perdition from Adam, to which nothing was due but punish- ment; 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 trans- mission 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 pun- ishment 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 con- demnation 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 ques- tion more immediately concerning which the letter was written, Augustin explains that he is will- ing 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 deter- mine 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 sig- nature 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 insti- tuted 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 gratui- tousness 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 reli- gious; " 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