number of those who are predestinated to the kingdom of God is so certain, that not one shall be either added to them or taken from them." "For the salvation of the elect, God employs

means."

"Perseverance is a special gift to the elect, which is afforded to all the elect, and to none but the elect." This gift of perseverance amounts to an "inability to apostatize." The final cause, or the reason of the salvation of the elect number, lies simply in the will of God. He has mercy on whom he will have mercy.

Pelagian Theory.

Predestination is conditional. "God designed those for salvation who, as he foreknew, would believe in him and keep his commands; and reprobated those who, as he foreknew, would remain in sin."

Perseverance depends upon the exertion of the free will: and those, who have hitherto been "saints" and "elect according to the foreknowledge of God," may fall away and be lost.

Passing over the external history of this controversy—which our author has given with great clearness, and placed in interesting points of view-as well as much other matter of deep interest-for which, as well as for the more ample details of the respective theories, and the arguments with which the great disputants met each other, we must refer our readers to the work itself, with the earnest hope that they will not forego the benefit of a careful study of so rare a production, we shall now proceed to examine, as far as our limits will permit, these two antagonistic systems.

Philosophical systems are suggested and conditionated by human experience. But, not only is that experience which is common to man allowed to exercise an undue authority, and, from a mere condition, to be elevated to the rank of an ultimate authority over the Reason-the only source of immutable truth-national peculiarities, the temperament, education and fortuities of the individual become, at least a strongly modifying, and often the determining power of a philosophical system.

Augustine was born in Numidia, and educated in Carthage. By his temperament, derived perhaps from his native climate,

and his habits, formed amid the elegant dissoluteness of a wealthy city, he was addicted, up to the time of his conversion, in the highest degree to sensual pleasure. His mother was a woman of exemplary piety; and had, from his earliest years, labored to restrain his hot and jovial temper, and to initiate him into the Christian life.

It appears that, from an early period, Augustine was subject to severe conflicts between an enlightened conscience and his voluptuous propensities. It is not surprising, therefore, that, in the full career of pleasure and ambition, and at the age of nineteen, he should have found strong and peculiar charms in the doctrines of the Manichæans; a sect who referred the origin of sin to the necessary weakness of man, arising from his union with matter, the great principle of evil. In such a doctrine, the voluptuous heart could find relief from the rebukes of conscience.

When he was released from the bonds of this sect, and, under the full conviction of moral obligation and the power of divine love, entered into the fellowship of Christ, the revulsion of feeling which he naturally experienced led him zealously to oppose the doctrines which he had once espoused. Hence one of his earliest works against this sect, was "his first book on Free Will; a work which he afterwards completed while a presbyter at Hippo, and in which he endeavored to refute the theory of the Manichæans on the origin of evil. They derived evil from a distinct nature, which was coeternal with God; Augustine, from the free will of man." The composition of this treatise is a remarkable event in the history of Augustine. In it, he clearly exhibits the will as endowed with the power of choosing good or evil; and solves at once the question respecting the origin of the sin of the first man.

No man perhaps ever went through a severer ordeal in turning from the "carnal" to the "spiritual mind," than this venerable and distinguished man. After he had become a disciple of the "pious Ambrose," and had abandoned the Manichæans, and while he was drawn by sincere aspirations towards a higher life, "his heart was still encompassed by the allurements of honor, of gain and of sensual love. But he was recalled from the abyss of sensual delights, by the fear of death and the future judgment." After addicting himself to the study of Plato and Paul, and experiencing various conflicts, both of opinion and feeling, he comes to the period of his entire devotion to a holy

life. "Worldly concerns, it is true, had no longer any charm for him; but love still held his heart a captive. In this disquietude, and impelled by his longing for a better mode of life, he went to Simplicianus, formerly a rhetorician, and a zealous Christian, and who afterwards succeeded Ambrose in the episcopal chair at Milan. With some emotion, he heard from him the account of the conversion of Victorianus. Soon after this, a certain Potitianus described to him the life of St. Anthony, and the conversion of two high commissaries. This made the most lively impression on his heart. He betook himself to a garden, where his friend Alypius followed him, who had been present at the conversation. A violent contest arose between his sensual and spiritual nature. He knew the better; and yet sensuality and the power of habit held him a prisoner in their chains. He fell into a violent passion. He tore his hair; smote his forehead; grasped his knees. He then withdrew a little from Alypius, and cast himself under a fig-tree. A flood of tears broke forth; and he implored the divine mercy for grace. Augustine believed he heard a divine voice, calling to him in the words: Tolle, lege; Tolle, lege :-Take up, read; Take up, read. He dried his tears; rose up; went forth where Alypius sat, and where he had been reading the book of the apostle. He seized and opened it; and the first words on which his eyes fell, were Rom. 13: 13,-not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof. Now his heart was completely changed and converted to God. He went with Alypius to his mother. With joy she learned the change which had taken place in her son. Now Augustine was at rest. External things no longer troubled his heart, and he began quietly to meditate on the manner in which he should direct his future life."

There were obviously two elements co-working to form Augustine's views of original sin;-the doctrine of the Manichæans respecting the seat of the evil principle, and his own experience of the "law in his members, warring against the law of his mind." He had indeed abandoned the sect of the Manichæans, and had even written against their doctrines, on the points where these doctrines invaded moral responsibility, and that freedom of the will on which alone responsibility can be based. With respect to the origin of evil, he rejected their theory of a coeternal evil principle. But there were points in

the Manichæan doctrines which had wrought strongly in his nature, and which wrought there still. When in the wild career of sensuality he had sought to justify himself, or at least to silence the rebukes of conscience, the weakness and the unavoidable concupiscence of the flesh presented the expedient. And now that he had engaged in a struggle for godliness and heaven, although he no longer sought to excuse the motions of sin, and hush the accusing voice within, still the very energy and painfulness of the struggle by which the spirit endeavored to master the flesh, would revive, however unconsciously of the source from whence it sprung, the idea of the vitiosity of matter. It was not difficult to make his interpretations of Scripture correspond with opinions which had worked themselves out of the two most excited states of his strongest passions,— their conquering state, and their state of being conquered; since, in addition to the strength which these opinions derived from the circumstances of their formation, they seemed to find a support in the language of the apostle. This evil concupiscence, to his consciousness, had always been working in his nature, and had at no period been introduced by his will. What he observed in himself he found verified by his observations upon others. It was therefore an inherited concupiscence.

Again: the manner in which he had yielded to its impulses, notwithstanding the instructions, prayers and tears of his mother, and notwithstanding his own frequent perceptions of the higher beauty and excellence of godliness; and, in addition to this, the fact that even while under the instructions and example of Ambrose, with strong yearnings after spirituality of mind, he found himself unable to break away from the fascinations of pleasure, but was held in a sort of compulsive bondage until the divine voice spoke to him in the garden, and, by an interposition which appeared to him almost if not altogether miraculous, gave him freedom and peace, naturally influenced his opinions respecting the slavery of the will. And here again, it is probable that the doctrines of the Manichæans, unconsciously to him, reappeared and gave their touch to the mould of his thoughts.

The evil concupiscence and the loss of freedom consequent upon it, in the long line of inheritance, necessarily brought him back to the first man. He had already made the will of Adam responsible for sin, and in doing so had made it a free will; and he had also made men universally responsible for

sin. But as the first man alone had a free will, how shall his posterity retain their responsibility, when they sin necessarily by a will enslaved to the evil concupiscence? There was but one way in which the difficulty could be evaded or removed. As each man, by a long but regular series of generations, had derived his being, with all its powers physical and mental, and all its vitiosity from Adam, so each man could be conceived of as in some sort existing in Adam. When therefore Adam sinned, the whole race, potentially contained in him, sinned likewise. The will of the individual was indeed en aved to the evil concupiscence; but then, in Adam, by an act of the all comprehending free will of the race, he had freely sinned, and inherited a bondage of the will, a guilt and condemnation which were therefore justly his due. Having formed his theory, Augustine found many passages of Scripture which plainly affirm that we all have become sinners through or by means of Adam, and were therefore not difficult of accommodation,particularly, as they appeared in the Latin version, the only one which he used.

Augustine's entire system finds its cardinal basis in his theory of original sin.

1. The condition of infants, and the nature and efficacy of baptism. The whole race sinned in Adam, and are condemned with him for the first sin: infants, therefore, are condemned; and dying, without divine interposition, are inevitably lost. This divine interposition appears in the rite of baptism. All baptised infants will be saved, if they die in a state of infancy. Adults, also, are saved from original sin by baptism, and cannot be saved without it.

Augustine, in his theory of original sin, creates an extraordinary form of guilt; and he creates an equally extraordinary form of purification to meet it. It certainly is not more difficult to believe, that the application of water in a solemn rite, should remove guilt and eternal condemnation, than that this guilt and condemnation should spring from a personal participation in Adam's sin by all his posterity. After this, perhaps, we ought not to be surprised even at the farther extension of the efficacy of baptism, so as to make it embrace the removal of actual sin and physical imperfection. In the extraordinary virtues attributed to it, we behold one form of that portentous corruption of Christianity, which, from early and small beginnings, gradually