saved by it without his coöperation where it is bestowed. The passage quoted at the commencement of this discourse is a fair and intelligible statement of the combined operation of God and man in the process of spiritual renovation. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, knowing that it is God that worketh within you, both to will and to do of his good pleasure."

The highest aim of God is our spiritual good. No sincere and earnest endeavour on our part shall fail to be aided by the gracious furtherance of our Heavenly Father.

The doctrines of personal election and irresistible grace, which have prevailed in the Calvinistic churches of modern times, were unknown in the Christian Church previous to the time of Augustine, in the beginning of the fifth century. Passages are abundant in the writings of the Fathers of the first four centuries, which show that the early Christians believed that the future free actions of mankind were the ground of God's foreknowledge, and not that God's foreknowledge was the ground and cause of the free actions of mankind.

Justin Martyr says, in his Dialogue with Trypho, the Jew," But that those, whether men or angels, who are foreknown that they would be unjust, are not wicked through the fault of God, but that each through his own fault is what he is, I have shown above. But that you may not have any pretence for saying that Christ must necessarily have been crucified, or that in your race there are transgressors, and that it could not have been otherwise, I have already observed, in few words, that God, desiring that men and angels should follow his will, determined to make them with full powers to act justly, with the means of knowing by whom they were made,

and through whom they were called into existence out of nothing; and with this condition, that they were to be judged by him, if they acted contrary to right reason; and we men, and the angels, shall be by ourselves convicted of having acted wickedly, unless we make haste to repent. But if the word of God declares beforehand that some, both angels and men, will hereafter be punished, because he knows that they would persevere to the last in wickedness, he foretold it, but not that God made them such. Wherefore if they will repent, all who are willing to obtain mercy from God have it in their power."

Tatian says," But the power of the Word, having in itself the foreknowledge of what would happen, not according to fate, but by the determination of free agents, foretold future events, and guarded against wickedness by prohibitions, and commended those who should persevere in goodness."

Irenæus says, "Those who desert the light given them by the Father, and transgress the law of liberty, have deserted it from their own fault, having been made free and endowed with free will. But God, foreknowing all things, has prepared fit habitations for both, to those who seek the light of incorruption, and run to it, kindly giving that light which they desire, but for others who despise it, and turn away from it and avoid it, and as it were blind themselves, he has prepared darkness suitable to persons who dislike light."

Clement of Alexandria :- "We say that there is one ancient and Catholic Church, collected into the unity of one faith according to its own testaments, or rather according to one testament, declared at sundry times by the will of one God through one Lord, those who had

been already ordained, whom he predestinated, who he knew before the foundation of the world would be just.” Origen: "If therefore innumerable motives to virtue and vice, and to what is becoming and unbecoming, be presented to us, the result must necessarily be known to God with other things before they happen from the creation and foundation of the world, and every thing which God preordained in consequence of what he saw would be in our power, he must have preordained consistently with the exercise of free will in every instance, both what would take place according to his providence, and what would happen from the future relation of things; the prescience of God not being the cause of events which were future, and which depended on our free will."

Hilary, half a century before Augustine: "The ungodly are froward even from their mother's womb; as soon as they are born they go astray, speaking lies. Thus Esau was froward from his mother's womb, when it is announced that the elder shall serve the younger, even before he was born, God not being ignorant of the future will, when the speaking of lies and the error of life are from the mother's womb, he himself rather knowing this, than any one being born to the necessity and nature of sin."

“Al

Epiphanius, still nearer the time of Augustine: though Scripture declared that Christ was to be crucified, and although the Scripture mentioned the sins that would be committed by us in the latter days, yet no one of us who commit sins can find an excuse by producing the testimony of Scripture, foretelling that these things would happen. For we do not those things because Scripture foretold them; but Scripture foretold them,

because we were about to do them, through the foreknowledge of God."

It is likewise certain, that what is now orthodoxy was heresy before the time of Augustine, and that Augustine came round and defended, in his controversy with Pelagius, the very doctrines he had attacked in his arguments against the Manichees. It is certain that Manicheus, Valentinus, and Basilides, advocated a doctrine very nearly resembling the modern doctrines of Calvinism. Jerome writes, that "Manicheus says, that his elect are free from sin, and that they could not sin if they would." Origen speaks of certain heretics, "who pervert certain passages, almost destroying free will by maintaining that there are abandoned natures incapable of salvation, and that there are other natures which are saved and cannot possibly perish.”

Cyril of Jerusalem writes, "We will not bear those who put a wrong interpretation upon this passage, In this the children of God are manifest and the children of the Devil,' as if some men were saved and others perish by nature, for we come into this holy adoption, not by necessity, but by our own free will."

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Thus it would seem that that interpretation of the Bible which is termed Calvinistic dates no farther back in the Church than the time of Augustine, but that something similar was held by those termed heretics for many ages antecedent to that period.

DISCOURSE XXI.

CAUSES OF HUMAN SINFULNESS.

LO, THIS ONLY HAVE I FOUND, THAT GOD HATH MADE MAN UPRIGHT; BUT THEY HAVE SOUGHT OUT MANY INVENTIONS.

Eccles. vii.

29.

To the views of human nature which I have been giving in the series of discourses now drawing to a close, it may be objected, that they lead the mind to underrate the sinfulness of mankind, that they make light of the evil of sin, and, instead of rousing men to throw it off, lead them to remain contented under it. I deny that either of these consequences follows from the positions I have taken, the arguments I have used, or the results to which I have been led. I affirm, on the other hand, that the analysis of human nature which I have given leaves the sinfulness of mankind just where it was. It is a palpable fact, which I have not for a moment attempted to deny or conceal. I maintain, that both the evil and the guilt of sin are greater upon the principles laid down than they are upon the opposite system. I affirm, moreover, that the encouragements and inducements to resist sin, and to strive for its cure and prevention, are greater upon the supposition of the essential integrity of human