258

A. D. 412, to 418.

VII. This change of doctrine, one of the most momentous which has ever occurred, appears to have entered the church, like many others, by accident rather than by design. Two British monks, Pelagius and his disciple Celestius, residing at Rome early in this century, imbibed some peculiar sentiments from certain christians who had studied in the East. Though these sentiments were silently spreading in the city, little notice was taken of them; and Pelagius continued to enjoy a high and deserved reputation for the purity of his character and for the warmth of his devotion to the church. Going at length into Africa, he formed some acquaintance with Augustine; and then pursued his course on a visit to John, in Palestine, leaving Celestius at Carthage. Here, the latter was soon involved in a. charge of heresy; and he was condemned at the Council of Carthage, in A. D. 412, for teaching what was certainly a considerabe variation from the popular belief of the age, that Adam was created mortal, that

generally dwell on the black side of the picture. The favorite themes on which they used to expatiate, with all the fervor of enthusiasm, were, the complete pardon purchased by Christ, the free, unconditional gift of salvation, and the omnipotent energy of God's spirit in converting sinners. When these encouraging topics were so zealously urged, without a corresponding regard for the decree of damnation, it was but one step forward to the hope, the conclusion, that God would have all men to be saved; and to this step, the strong tide of their new feelings, their view of the Messiah's increasing and victorious kingdom, as well as the testimonies of scripture, impelled them, often before they were thoroughly aware,

It has been supposed that one Rufinus, a Syrian (a friend and not the opponent of Jerome) brought this doctrine from Asia Minor, and perhaps from Theodorus of Mopsuestia, to Rome, and here taught it to Pelagius.

his transgression affected none of his posterity, but himself alone, and that children dying in infancy whether baptized or unbaptized, immediately enter the joys of heaven. To these particulars we may here add some others which were involved during the progress of the succeeding controversy, and which complete the doctrine of Pelagianism: that as mankind are now born pure, they are able, after transgression, to repent, reform, and arrive at length to the highest degrees of virtue and piety, even to perfection, by the exercise merely of their own natural powers; that though the external excitements of divine grace are necessary to rouse their endeavors, yet they have no need of any internal agency of the Holy Ghost; that infant baptism does not wash away sin, but is only a ceremony of admittance into the church of Christ; and that good works are meritorious as the conditions of salvation. Such, it appears, were the real tenets of Pelagius and Celestius, though they were sometimes unjustly charged with disowning the necessity of the grace of God, in every sense relative to human actions, and with denying the utility of infant baptism.

On the condemnation of Celestius in the Council of Carthage, Augustine began to preach and to write against the heresy, with his characteristic tenderness at first towards its authors, but always with a cool, invincible determination to destroy their doctrine, root and branch. Their equivocations, at least indecision and ambiguity, conspired at length with the ardor of controversy to provoke his zeal; and the hesitation of some of the councils, and of the Roman Pontiff in particular, left to

him the whole responsibility of the warfare. After six years, however, of indefatigable peseverance, he succeeded in procuring the effectual condemnation and general suppression of Pelagianism. But in this long contest, he himself had gone over, by degrees, to the opposite extreme; and influenced, perhaps, by the early bias of his Manichean principles ", he maintained what was new in the church, that Adam's transgression had so thoroughly corrupted all his posterity, that by nature, they could do only evil, and that nothing but the irresistible spirit of the Almighty could incline their wills to good, and induce them, contrary to their nature, to accept of his grace. God alone was, from first to last, the immediate agent of their counternatural conversion ; and on his arbitrary pleasure only did it depend whether the impotent sinner should be renovated. From these premises he advanced to the necessary conclusion that God had foreordained whom to convert and finally save, without reference to any thing which they should perform; while he had likewise predetermined to pass by all the remainder of the fallen race. Such was the first organization of the present orthodox system, so far as it regards total depravity, election and reprobation *. With somewhat different views, the Pelagians were

See Appendix to Chapter v. Sect. 2. Note (b.) It is a curious circumstance that nearly all the fathers who had been converted from other religions, always retained some of the peculiarities of their former doctrines, notwithstanding they became the most stren ucus opposers of those systems, taken as a whole. Witness the converts from the Greek superstitions, who corrupted christianity with their old philosophy; and those from the Magian religion, who introduced the monstrous fables of the Gnostics. x The difference between Augustine's doctrine and that of Calvin, on election and reprobation, though small, is such as to betray the crudeness of

attacked by other cotemporary writers, and among the rest by Jerome, with his accustomed violence. But he, abiding by the common doctrine of the age, went no farther than to maintain the absolute necessity of Christ's assistance in the performance of good works, and the impossibility of living in this world entirely free from sin. He still taught that it depended on man to accept or refuse God's aid, and that election was founded, not on the independent, sovereign purpose, but on the divine foreknowledge of the creature's obedience; and what is remarkable, he seems, notwithstanding the essential difference in their views, to have considered himself a co-worker with the bishop of Hippo.

In short, it was for various reasons that Pelagius was almost universally discarded; while Augustine's novel and arbitrary scheme met with the success which often attends a bold advancement, rather than a retrogression, from former principles. It spread extensively in the West; but was, for many years, generally rejected in the East. The authority of his name, however, pre

the Master, and the finishing touches of his Scholar. Augustine seems to have held that God did not ordain the fall of Adam, and that it was after that event occurred, and when it had become certain that the whole race would be born totally depraved and therefore under helpless bondage to sin, that the elect were chosen and the reprobate abandoned. The original plan of creation did not embrace such a result, But Calvin and other Reformers, with a better digested arrangement, carried back the separating decree to the past ages of eternity; so that mankind were originally created for their respective destinations. Augustine was by no means thoroughly systematic: He held that Christ died for all men; that even genuine conversion is no security of final happiness, as the subjects may afterwards fatally relapse and perish; and that the grace of perseverance alone is the pledge of personal election. No infants who had not been baptized could be saved; because regeneration was effected only in the rite of water baptism.

served his followers from condemnation, so long as they adhered strictly to his definitions, nor suffered themselves to assert that God had foreordained the original fall and the succeeding sins of mankind. But the subject occasioned long and intricate controversies, in which the disputants perpetually ran into error, and sometimes into heresy, on one extreme or the other; and the metaphysical subtilities then involved, have not ceased to employ the ingenuity of logicians, and to feed the spleen of bigots, down to the present day.

VIII. During the first three or four years A. D. 413, of his troubles, Pelagius resided in Palesto 220. tine, enjoying the patronage of John of Jerusalem; and when, in A. D. 416, he was arraigned, on a charge of heresy, before a Synod at Diospolis, near Joppa, that prelate earnestly defended him, and procured his entire acquittal. But John did not live to witness the conclusion of the controversy. A peaceful death closed his career in the beginning of A. D. 417, at about the age of sixty. He was considerably famous in his day, but chiefly for the part he bore in the contests which agitated the church. We discover nothing in his life, that evinces superior learning, talents, or piety; and as he has been generally described, he betrays some appearances of petulance, of timidity, and of a wary cunning. In justice to him, however, we must remember that his history is collected wholly from his opponents, and chiefly from his bitter enemies. His friends, it is certain, gave him the character of a worthy

▾ Fleury's Eccl. Hist. Book xxiii. chap. 19, 20.