versy that arrays against him the force of his own previous labors, although the inconsistency may be more apparent than real. The orthodox Protestant, after having battled against Papal pretensions to infallibility, is always somewhat puzzled when a Christian of the liberal school turns against him his own weapons, and in the name of reason, Scripture and liberty challenges the authority of his dogmas. So too the liberal Christian, after arguing with the Orthodox, is troubled when the free-thinker takes the same attitude against all authority in religion, and denies the right of any man to judge for another as to what is Scripture, or whether Scripture is infallible. He must be an able controversialist, who can maintain his ground well against a double assault, and whilst he charges the enemy in front, does not leave the rear defenceless. Augustine was placed in a similar position between two antagonists. As a convert from the Manicheans, he of course felt himself called upon to deny the necessity and eternity of evil and advocate the free-will of man. In the zeal of his new faith he began his work on the free-will before he left Rome, and completed it after becoming a presbyter in Africa. His conversation, letters, and sermons exhibited the same tone. His efforts were concentrated upon one chief point, the Manichean heresy and its antidote. He produced great effect by his labors in this direction. His conversion had created as much sensation among his former associates, as would the conversion of a Paulus or Strauss among the German neologists of our own day. Crowds thronged to hear the famous neophyte, and among them not a few of his old companions in error. He won signal laurels, and many hardened heretics acknowledged the power of his appeal.

This was well, and Augustine blessed God for having made him the instrument of so glorious a work. But when, some years after, the monks Pelagius and Cœlestius began to speak and write of the dignity of man, the power of the will, the value of self-reliance, and to make human effort more conspicuous than supernatural grace, Augustine evidently felt not a little troubled. In fact, so late in life as the time of composing his Retractations, a man of nearly four-score years, on the verge of the grave, he recurs to the charge of inconsistency brought against him by the Pelagians, and labors not a little to reconcile the statements

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in his earlier work on the free-will with those of the treatise on nature and grace. We do not see that there is good ground for accusing him of any shuffling arts or truckling expediency. His change of position was the natural result of the progress of his mind under its peculiar experiences and circumstances. He had been led to reject the monstrous error of the Manicheans, that evil is an eternal necessity, in fact, a God; and very honestly he attacked this doctrine, and asserted the origin of evil in human will. He had also been converted from his errors and sins by an agency not his own, by human ministrations and direct Divine grace; thus in his conversion he had the fundamental principle of the doctrines of original sin, election, and free grace, which he afterwards urged with such power. This principle would in the nature of things. act with an increasing force, as he felt the fearful power of evil around him, the obstacles to the diffusion of Christianity, and the need of trusting in the Divine grace. What at first he vaguely hints, he at last boldly urges, that human freedom and existing evil are to be reconciled by the doctrine, that man was created free, but lost his freewill in the first transgression, was then cut off from Divine communion, the whole race virtually acting in the first man, and that nothing but the overpowering grace of God can restore man to his freedom, remove original sin, and renew the communion with Heaven. Thus we have the great elements of his system, the doctrines of original sin and irresistible grace. Pelagius maintained opposite ground, maintained that all men were born as pure as Adam, and might keep so by a proper use of their faculties, and of the Divine aid offered to all. Thus the greatest controversy in Christendom, next to that between Athanasius and Arius, sprung up; a controversy that has been renewed in every age, and probably will be renewed until the end of time, for its origin lies in the various constitution and experience of men.

Wrong is done to Augustine, and to the true bearing of this controversy, by ascribing the formation of his opinions and the change from his previous ground, to his hostility to Pelagius and his doctrines. This charge has become a common-place thing, and is found in quarters as various as our English historian Priestley and the German Gieseler.

Schleiermacher impeached its truth, and Neander has demonstrated its falsity. The latter has shown conclusively, that Augustine declared opinions substantially the same as those he advocated against Pelagius, long before the controversy sprung up, and appeals in proof to a letter written to Simplician, bishop of Milan, as long before as the year 397. The two tendencies now at issue had long existed in the Christian Church, and only wanted the right men to bring them to a crisis. Augustine and Pelagius were the men to do this, marked out for it probably by native disposition and temperament, surely by education and experience. In the one we see the enthusiastic apostle of faith and grace, in the other the mild champion of conscientious duty and moral freedom, in fact the Paul and the James of the Church in its imperial age. Like Paul, Augustine had been converted, as it seemed to him, by a direct sign from heaven after a life of fierce passion; like James, Pelagius had been apparently a disciple from the beginning and had no violent nature to subdue. These same opposing characteristics appear in the third century in the fiery Tertullian, a convert from Heathen errors, and the mild and philosophic Origen, who had been educated in the bosom of the Church; nay, they characterize the general tone of the theology of the Greek and of the Roman Churches as distinguished from each other.

Pelagius received Christianity more directly from the East. He was intimate with Rufinus, a pupil of the liberal, perhaps the latitudinarian, Origen. He was a Briton, and of course educated in a church that derived its principles from the East through missionaries from Gaul, as was the case with all the Celtic Christians. Michelet will have it, that Pelagius was a native of Brittany, that province of France, so distinguished for personal freedom and individuality, the land of Abelard, the great liberalist of the middle ages, and of Descartes, the father of modern metaphysics. We will not try to spoil the eloquent Frenchman's brilliant analogies, especially as his view does not essentially militate with the common opinion as to the country of Pelagius. Whether born in England, Wales or France, he of course was of Celtic blood, and subject to the same tendencies of religion and temperament, and in either case deserves his name, Pelagios, the dweller by the

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sea. His doctrines show traces of themselves in the remains of the Celtic Church, whether we consider the monks of Iona in the Hebrides, or of Lerins in France, or whether we look to the Culdees of Scotland and Ireland.

As a monk, Pelagius must have been saved from Augustine's temptations and conflicts, and both from position and temperament he must have viewed the Divine Being, human nature, and Christian salvation differently from the flaming Numidian doomed to such struggles with error and vice, and saved at last through a baptism of fire. We aim not to enter into the particulars of their controversy. Their lives interpret its origin, and their mode of conducting it reflects honor upon their temper. This controversy has been continued virtually in all ages, yet to the end of time the names of the Numidian bishop and the British monk will be used to designate the rival opinions concerning the nature of man and the way of salvation. Neither the ghostly and imperious St. Bernard contesting the claims of reason and will with the elegant and rationalizing Abelard, nor the dogmatic Italian, Aquinas, battling with the subtle Briton, Scotus, nor the Jesuits struggling with the Jansenists, nor the Calvinists with the Arminians, nor the Evangelical with the Liberal sects, have been able to eclipse the original controversy or hide the names of the original combatants. They were first in the open field, and fought the battle well. Viewed in the broad vision and calm light of subsequent centuries, their experience and position so interpret and justify their opinions as to teach us charity, if not to silence debate, and to make us wish that modern controversialists would always make allowance for diversity of gifts, and strive, as did Augustine and Pelagius, to show that under that diversity there may be the same spirit. Augustine spoke of his antagonist respectfully and even affectionately. We cannot praise him for acquiescing in the imperial decree for the heretic's final banishment; but while we condemn his course, we must not forget how wide a range of good men even in modern times the condemnation of intolerance comprises. Only he who advocates the broad toleration first asserted in modern times by the founder of the State of Rhode Island, can presume to assail the great name of Augustine for his treatment of Pelagius. If we wish to see the difference between intolerVOL XL. -4TH S. VOL. V. NO. II.

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ance of heart and intolerance merely as a result of custom, we must compare Jerome, the monk of Bethlehem, with Augustine, the theologian of Hippo. The conduct of Jerome

is open to universal censure, except by those who are as cynical as he, -watch-dog of the Church, as he was proud of being called, and making it his especial business to bark at all heretics, being, as Jortin facetiously remarks, the founder of the great and growing sect of barkers. The tone in which he abuses Pelagius, and also the less questionable reformers, Jovinian and Vigilantius, reminds us of the language with which that noted divine of his time in Massachusetts, Cotton Mather, heaped his epithets of odium upon Roger Williams and Samuel Gorton of Rhode Island.

Although we cannot ascribe Augustine's doctrines of sin and grace to his controversy, we may ascribe to this something of the rigor and exclusiveness with which he held them. Theological controversy is always dangerous, and each party is far more apt to hurt himself than his opponent, to warp his own mind than to work his opponent's conversion. The two looked at different sides of Christian salvation, the one most upon the human, the other most upon the Divine side, until by too exclusive contemplation they became one-sided in their views, and Pelagius was in danger of a self-reliance that leaned toward self-righteousness, and Augustine verged towards the borders of fatalism. Now that very few, if any, adopt the whole extent of Augustine's creed, we stand in no fear of contradiction in ascribing something of this evil to his strifes. He was made too much a man of one idea, and might have been narrowed down into a mere dogmatist, had not his position soon called him to treat a topic as broad as Christendom.

Before passing to his treatise on that topic, the City of God, let us observe, that the emphasis, with which Augustine urged the power of original sin and the need of divine grace, must have tended strongly to guard the Christian Church against some peculiar dangers, especially that of arrogant formalism and self-righteousness, and was needed, moreover, in an age of singular tumult and wickedness, to save the faithful from despair and lead them to trust in a power whose grace is beyond human force or understanding. His system is liable to run into Antinomianism or the disparagement of good works, as Augustine saw that in