with a clear understanding of the consequences. And if the arguments which he uses against you tend to show that your present set of opinions is in some measure inconsistent, and force you to see in Scripture more than you do at present, or else less, be not afraid to add to it, rather than to detract from it. Be quite sure that, go as far as you may, you will never, through God's grace, be led to see more in it than the early Christians saw; that, however you enlarge your creed, you will but carry yourselves on to Apostolic perfection, equally removed from the extremes of Popish irreverence and of Socinian unbelief, neither intruding into things not seen as yet, nor denying what you cannot see1.

1 This Sermon was designed for publication before the Author had seen Dr. Arnold's third volume of Sermons.

SERMON XXVI.

THE FEAST OF ST. JAMES THE APOSTLE.

HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY.

MATT. XX. 23.

To sit on My right hand and on My left is not Mine to give; but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of My Father.

IN these words to which the Festival of St. James the Greater especially directs our minds, our Lord solemnly declares that the high places of His Kingdom are not His to give,-which can mean nothing else, than that the assignment of them does not simply and absolutely depend upon Him; for that He will actually dispense them at the last day, and moreover is the meritorious cause of any being given, is plain from Scripture. I say, He avers most solemnly that something besides His own will and choice is necessary, for obtaining the posts of honour about His throne; so that we are naturally led on to ask, where it is that this awful prerogative is lodged. Is it with His Father? He proceeds to speak of His Father; but neither does He assign it

to Him, "It shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of My Father." The Father's foreknowledge and design are announced, not His choice. "Whom He did foreknow, them He did predestinate." He prepares the reward, and confers it, but upon whom? No answer is given us, unless it is conveyed in the words which follow,-upon the humble:-"Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister, and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant."

Some parallel passages may throw further light upon the question. In the description our Lord gives us of the Last Judgment, He tells us He shall say to them on His right hand, "Come ye blessed of My Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." Here we have the same expression; who then are the heirs for whom the Kingdom is prepared? He tells us expressly, those who fed the hungry and thirsty, lodged the stranger, clothed the naked, visited the sick, came to the prisoners, for His sake. Consider again an earlier passage in the same chapter. To whom is it that He will say, "Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord ?"—to those whom He can praise as good and faithful servants," who have been "faithful over a few things." These two passages

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very same point, as They lead us from

then carry our search just to the that of which the text is a part. the thought of God and Christ, and throw us upon human agency and responsibility, for the solution

of the question; and they finally lodge us there, unless indeed other texts of Scripture can be produced to lead us on further still. We know for certain that they for whom the Kingdom is prepared are the humble, the charitable, and the diligent in the improvement of their gifts; to which another text (for instance,) adds the spiritually-minded;— "Eye hath not seen the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him'" Is this as far as we can go? does it now depend ultimately on ourselves, or on any one else, that we come to be humble, charitable, diligent, and lovers of God?

Now, in answering this question religious men have for many centuries differed in opinion; not indeed in the first and purest ages of the Church, but when corruptions began to steal in. In the primitive times it was always considered that, though God's grace was absolutely necessary for us from first to last,-before we believed, in order to our believing, and while we obeyed and worked righteousness, in order to our obeying,-so that not a deed, word, or thought could be pleasing to Him without it; yet, that after all the human mind had also from first to last a power of resisting grace, and thus (as the foregoing texts imply) had committed to it the ultimate determination of its own fate, whether to be saved or rejected, the responsibility of its conduct, and, if rejected, the whole

1 Matt. xxv. 21. 34-36. 1. Cor. ii. 9.

blame of it. However, at the beginning of the fifth century, when shadows were coming over the Church, a celebrated Doctor arose, whose name must ever be honoured by us, for his numberless gifts, his diligence, and his extended usefulness, whatever judgment may be passed on certain of his opinions. He is known in the Theological Schools as the first to have given some sort of sanction to two doctrines hitherto unknown in the Church, and apparently far removed from each other, as indeed are the modern Systems in which they are found. The one is the Predestinarian Hypothesis1; viz.

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1" When, towards the close of his controversy with the Pelagians, he (Augustine) entered largely and systematically into his own peculiar views of election and predestination, it was, even by those who concurred in the general drift of his previous anti-pelagian treatises . . . objected to him that he was now superfluously advancing a scheme of doctrine hitherto unknown and unheard of, a scheme of doctrine contrary to the opinion of all antecedent fathers, and contrary to the sense of the entire Church Catholic. . . . Augustine was charged with novelty But how does the great Bishop of Hippo act under the present allegation . . . After much superfluous discussion, and (I fear) with a too evident reluctance to meddle with the appeal to antiquity, [he] claims to produce exactly three witnesses in his favour, Cyprian, to wit, and Ambrose, and Gregory of Nazianzum... But in truth, with the scanty exception of nine words written by Ambrose, their several testimonies are altogether nugatory and irrelevant; so that in point of historical evidence, as afforded by those fathers who preceded Augustine, the whole mighty fabric of ... Austinism, rests upon the single Ambrosian sentence: Deus, quos dignatur, vocat; et quem vult, religiosum facit."-Faber's Trinitarianism, vol. i. p. x-xiii..