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Pelagius's views of Grace and Redemption.

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the greatness of the physician also, and the adorable fulness of the universal remedy, redeeming grace. This now claims our conside

ration.

§ 3. The Doctrine of Grace and Redemption.

PELAGIUS distinguishes in the idea of the good three elements, ability, will and being. The first belongs to nature, the second to freedom, the third to the act. Ability, or the power of good, what may be styled moral capacity, is grace, and comes from God, in the way of necessary natural endowment; forming thus the foundation for will and being, without, however, making them necessary in the same way. These, will and being, depend wholly upon man. For example: "the power of seeing with our eyes depends not on ourselves, but, on the other hand, it does depend on ourselves whether we shall see well or otherwise."

This would seem to make revelation entirely superfluous. Pelagius, however, affirms no such consequence. Along with the natural ground, which we may denominate moral capacity, he assumes also the accession of auxiliary grace, showing its force negatively in the forgiveness of sin, and positively in the strengthening influence of instruction and example. This is revelation, both as law and gospel. "In the case of one who is not a Christian," he tells us, "goodness is found in a naked state, without help; but with the Christian, it is made complete by the assistance of Christ." Still more plainly: "At first men lived righteously according to nature, afterwards under the law, and finally under grace (the gospel). When the inward law (conscience) was no longer sufficient, the outward law came. Then again, when this (the Mosaic law), by reason of the preponderance of sinful habit, was no longer sufficient, help must be sought in the lively force of nature as exhibited for imitation in the example of the Lord." This grace, Pelagius teaches further, must be merited, since God otherwise would be unrighteous. "The heathen are subjected to judgment and damnation, because notwithstanding their free will, by which they have it in their power to attain to faith and to merit God's grace, they make an evil use of the freedom they possess; Christians, on the other hand, are worthy of reward, because by the proper use of their freedom they merit the grace of the Lord and keep his commandments."

1 Pelagius in August. de gratia Christi c. 4: Primum illud, id est posse, ad Deum propric pertinet, qui illud creaturae suae contulit, duo vero reliqua, hoc est velle et esse, ad hominem referenda sunt, quia de arbitrii fonte descendunt.

This passage implies, besides, that the grace of revelation is not absolutely necessary. Moral capacity and freedom are of themselves sufficient for fulfilling the divine commandments. The grace of the gospel is not that which first makes it possible to do good; it only renders this more easy. Celestius accordingly affirmed quite consistently gratiam Dei non ad singulos actus dari. Being closely pressed on this point by Augustine, Pelagius did indeed pronounce an anathema on those who deny the necessity of the grace of God in Christ, at every moment and for every action; but this was an admission forced from him in controversy, which was not in keeping with his own premises.

Since Pelagius had so high an opinion of the moral nature of man, as to consider the grace of Christianity useful only, not absolutely indispensable, we need not be surprised at his declaration, that there were men even before Christ, who, by a proper development of their moral powers, and the right use of their free will, had lived in perfect holiness. In his Commentary on Rom. 5: 12, he says that the word "all" designates only the majority of men, without including the righteous few, such as Abel, Isaac and Jacob. In his book on free will, he made use of the superstitious veneration which already prevailed for the Virgin Mary in favor of this assertion, and made it a necessary part of piety to look upon her as free from sin.1

These views serve fully to expose the superficial character of the Pelagian thinking. We have in the first place the same atomistic tendency, which we have found already sundering Adam from his posterity, an act of the will from other acts, and also from the state of the will; separating here too, with like abstraction, ability from will and being, so as to derive one entirely from God, and the other two entirely from man. But moral ability, the power of virtue, holds not beside and beyond the will and its acts, but in them; it is not something finished and complete, but is to be unfolded and advanced by exercise and application; so that man also is concerned in its production. On the other hand, will and being are not to be excluded from ability and the divine coöperation. It comes out here that Pelagius is properly a deist, who denies the permanent creating activity of God, nay, in the end, his efficient omnipresence itself. He conceives of the world and of man as a clock, which, after it has been fixed and

1

Aug. de natura et gratia contra Pelagium, § 42: quamdicit (Pelag.) sine peccato confiteri necesse est pietati. He employs also the argumentum a silentio, inferring that the righteous whose sins are not mentioned in the Scripture, were free from sin: de illis quorum justitiae meminit (Script. Sacra), et peccatorum sine dubio meminisset si qua eos peccasse sensisset.

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wound up by God, runs on without his help by the independent force of its own machinery. God's relation to it is that of an inactive spectator. Such an abstract separation of God and the world is something still much worse, because more lifeless and godless, than pantheism, which confounds them both together. Declarations like these: "In him we live, move, and have our being," "Without his will not a sparrow falls to the ground, but even the very hairs of your head are all numbered," "God works in us both to will and to do," "We will come unto him and make our abode with him," "I am the vine, ye are the branches; whoso abideth in me and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit; for without me ye can do nothing;" these and such like glorious and precious declarations of Scripture, we say, have, from this deistic position, no meaning whatever, but must be resolved into mere oriental figure and hyperbole. In the controversy itself the difference was not indeed carried back to its deepest ground, in this view of the relation between God and the world, the Creator and the creature; Jerome, however, had some sense of it, for he charges the Pelagians, in one place, with denying the absolute dependence of man on God, and brings against them the word of Christ, John 5: 17, concerning the uninterrupted working of God.

It stands equally bad with the Pelagian view of Christian grace. This is sunk to a mere outward help, and resolves itself at last into doctrine and example. It is thus in fact nothing more than “the finger board on the way of life." That Christianity includes doctrine, and that Christ is our example, admits of no doubt. But however much we may make of such doctrine and example, they by no means exhaust the import of our religion. Else would Christ not be specifically different from Moses, Socrates, or any other virtuous sage, and so could not be our Redeemer. The main fact is rather, that in the character of God-man, as prophet, priest and king, he is the author of a new creation, and has imparted to humanity a higher life; that he not only operates upon believers from without, but lives and moves in them as the principle of their spiritual existence. Of this, Pelagius had no apprehension. What signifies the proclamation of a new doctrine, or the exhibition of a lofty example, if to men pining under the dominion of sin there be not granted at the same time power to follow them? Solon, Pythagoras, Socrates, Seneca, Confucius, with all their practical wisdom and moral rules, could not still convert the world. Augustine may well say: "Would that Pelagius might acknowledge that grace, which not only promises us the riches of future glory, but produces faith and hope in regard to the same; a grace that

does not merely exhort, but inwardly inclines also, to all good; that does not simply reveal wisdom, but infuses also love to it."1

When, finally, Pelagius teaches, that grace must be merited, and that it is imparted to us, accordingly, after the measure of our natural virtue, he overthrows thus its proper nature altogether. Grace and merit mutually exclude each other. "To him that worketh," says Paul, "is the reward not reckoned of grace but of debt; but to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness," (Rom. 5: 4, 5). "By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast," (Eph. 2: 8, 9).

We see here the comprehensive importance of the controversy. Pelagianism robs Christianity of its specific dignity, the gospel of its all renovating life, Christ of his divine nature; and leads thus by necessary consequence to the system of naturalism and rationalism, by which the very foundations of our most holy faith are undermined. Since, however, it has no right conception of sin, this is the only result that could be expected. If human nature be not corrupt, and free will prepared for every good work, we need no Redeemer, to begin all anew, but simply a reformer to improve what is at hand, and salvation becomes properly the work of man.

If Augustine had done nothing more than to overcome, negatively and positively, this fundamental heresy, he would be entitled for this alone to the everlasting gratitude of the universal church.

The doctrine of Augustine. He comes in a two-fold way to his peculiar view of redeeming grace. In the first place, by rising upwards, according to the law of antithesis, from the view he takes of the utter incapacity of the unregenerate man for good. The greater the corruption, the more mighty must be the principle that brings relief. The doctrine of grace is thus simply the positive counterpart of the doctrine of sin. Secondly, he reaches the same result, by descending from his conception of the all-efficient, all-pervading, presence of God, in natural and still more in spiritual life. Whilst with Pelagius God and the world, after the work of creation, are deistically sundered from one another, and man placed on an independent footing, Augustine, before this controversy even, by reason of his speculative spirit and the earnestness of his own experience, was deeply penetrated with a sense of the absolute dependence of the creature upon the Creator, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. Still, this sense of the immanence of God in the world has with him no pantheistic form, leading him to

1 De gratia Christi. c. 10.

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deny God's transcendence and independence of the world. He holds the right medium between deism and pantheism, under the guidance of the holy Scriptures and the spirit of the church. In the very beginning of his Confessions, he says beautifully: "How shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord? I must call him into myself, when I call upon him; and what place is there in me into which my God may enter, the God who has created heaven and earth? O Lord my God, is there then anything in me that may contain thee? But do heaven and earth, which thou hast made and in which thou hast made me, contain thee? Or inasmuch as whatever is would not be without thee, does it follow that thou art contained in all? Since then I also am, why do I pray that thou shouldst come into me, who would not myself be, if thou wert not in me. I am not still in hades, and yet even there thou art. For if I should make my bed in hell, behold thou art there! I would not be therefore, my God, I would not be at all, unless thou wert in me. Yea, rather I would not be, if I were not in thee, of whom are all things, by whom are all things, in whom are all things. So is it, O Lord, even so!" In short, man is nothing without God, and all in and by God. This fundamental feeling could not fail to urge our church father into all the doctrines which he has so profoundly asserted and unfolded in opposition to Pelagianism.

Grace is above all, according to Augustine, the power of a divine creation in Christ, renovating man from within. Its operation holds first, negatively, in the remission of sin, by which the way is thrown open for communion with God; and then, positively, also in the communication of a new principle of life. As we have inherited from the first Adam our sinful and mortal life, so the second Adam also implants in us, by the Holy Ghost, the germ of a sinless and immortal life, from God and in God. Positive grace works then not simply, as according to the view of Pelagius, from without, by instruction and exhortation, upon our understanding; but descends into the centre of our personality, and imparts to the will, at the same time, power to obey the truth which is taught, and to follow the pattern exhibited by Christ. Augustine styles it, hence, an inspiratio bonae voluntatis atque operis; also, inspiratio dilectionis.3 The unwilling it meets to make him willing; the willing it follows after, that he may not will in

Non lege atque doctrina insonante forinsecus, sed interna et occulta, mirabili ac ineffabili potestate operari Deum in cordibus hominum, non solum veras revelationes, sed bonas etiam voluntates, (de grat. Christ. c. 24).

De corr. et grat. 3.

3 C. duas epp. Pelag. IV. 11.