ART. of men are free; then it is natural to inquire which of these is XVII. subject to the other, or how they can be both maintained? whether God determines the will? or if his Providence follows the motions of the will? Therefore all those that believed a Providence have been aware of this difficulty. The Stoics put all things under a fate; even the gods themselves: if this fate was a necessary series of things, a chain of matter and motion that was fixed and unalterable, then it was plain and downright atheism. The Epicureans set all things at liberty, and either thought that there was no God, or at least that there was no Providence. The philosophers knew not how to avoid this difficulty, by which we see Tully and others were so differently moved, that it is plain they despaired of getting out of Joseph. it. The Jews had the same question among them; for they Ant. Jud. could not believe their law, without acknowledging a Provilib. xviii. c. dence: and yet the Sadducees among them asserted liberty in Jud. lib. ii. so entire a manner, that they set it free from all restraints: on the other hand, the Essens put all things under an absolute fate: and the Pharisees took a middle way; they asserted the freedom of the will, but thought that all things were governed by a Providence. There are also subtle disputes concerning this matter among the Mahometans, one sect asserting liberty, and another fate, which generally prevails among them. 1-de Bell. c. 7. Her. lib. i. c. 1. sect. 11. Epiph. Clem. Al. In the first ages of Christianity, the Gnostics fancied that the souls of men were of different ranks, and that they sprang from Iren. adv. different principles, or gods, who made them. Some were carnal, that were devoted to perdition; others were spiritual, and were certainly to be saved; others were animal of a middle order, capable either of happiness or misery. It seems that the Marcionites and Manichees thought that some souls were Pæd. lib.i. made by the bad god, as others were made by the good. In opposition to all these, Origen asserted, that all souls were by Orig. Peri- nature equally capable of being either good or bad; and that 1. iii. Philo- the difference among men arose merely from the freedom of a c. 21. the will, and the various use of that freedom: that God left Explan. men to this liberty, and rewarded and punished them accordEp. ad. Rom.1. vi. ing to the use of it; yet he asserted a Providence: but as he c. 6. archon. brought in the Platonical doctrine of pre-existence into the government of the world; and as he explained God's loving Jacob, and his hating of Esau, before they were born, and had done either good or evil, by this of a regard to what they had done formerly; so he asserted the fall of man in Adam, and his being recovered by grace; but he still maintained an unrestrained liberty in the will. His doctrine, though much hated in Egypt, was generally followed over all the east, particularly in Palestine and at Antioch. St. Gregory Nazianzen and St. Basil drew a system of divinity out of his works, in which that which relates to the liberty of the will is very fully Orig. Phi- set forth: that book was much studied in the east. Chrysostom, Isidore of Damiete, and Theodoret, with all their followers, XVII. Peror. in Isid.Pelus. taught it so copiously, that it became the received doctrine of ART. the eastern church. Jerome was so much in love with Origen, that he translated some parts of him, and set Ruffin on translating the rest. But as he had a sharp quarrel with the bishops of Palestine, so that perhaps disposed him to change his thoughts of Origen: for ever after that, he set himself much to disgrace his doctrine; and he was very severe on Ruffin for translating him: though Ruffin confesses, that, in translating Ruffin. his works, he took great liberties in altering several passages Vers.com. that he disliked. One of Origen's disciples was Pelagius, a Orig. in Scottish monk, in great esteem at Rome, both for his learning Ep. ad. and the great strictness of his life. He carried these doctrines Rom. further than the Greek church had done; so that he was 4. ad Chrys. Ep. reckoned to have fallen into great errors both by Chrysostom Olymp. and Isidore (as it is represented by Jansenius, though that is lib. 1. Ep. denied by others, who think they meant another of the same 514. name). He denied that we had suffered any harm by the fall of Adam, or that there was any need of inward assistances; and he asserted an entire liberty in the will. St. Austin, though in his disputes with the Manichees he had said many things on the side of liberty, yet he hated Pelagius's doctrine, which he thought asserted a sacrilegious liberty, and he set himself to beat down his tenets, which had been but feebly attacked by Jerome. Cassian, a disciple of St. Chrysostom's, came to Marseilles about this time, having left Constantinople perhaps when his master was banished out of it. He taught a middle doctrine, asserting an inward grace, but subject to the freedom of the will; and that all things were both decreed and done, according to the prescience of God, in which all future contingents were foreseen: he also taught, that the first conversion of the soul to God was merely an effect of its free choice; so that all preventing grace was denied by him; which came to be the peculiar distinction of those who were afterwards called the Semipelagians. Prosper and Hilary gave an account of this system to St. Austin, upon which he writ against it, and his opinions were defended by Prosper, Fulgentius, Orosius, and others, as Cassian's were defended by Faustus, Vincentius, and Gennadius. In conclusion, St. Austin's opinions did generally prevail in the west; only Pelagius, it seems, retiring to his own country, he had many followers among the Britains: but German and Lupus, being sent over once and again from France, are said to have conquered them so entirely, that they were all freed from those errors: whatever they did by their arguments, the writers of their legends. took care to adorn their mission with many very wonderful miracles, of which the gathering all the pieces of a calf, some of which had been dressed, and the putting them together in its skin, and restoring it again to life, is none of the least. The ruin of the Roman empire, and the disorders that the western provinces fell under by their new and barbarous masters, occa ART. sioned in those ages a great decay of learning: so that few XVII. writers of fame coming after that time, St. Austin's great : labours and piety, and the many vast volumes that he had left behind him, gave him so great a name, that few durst contest what had been so zealously and so copiously defended by him and though it is highly probable, that Celestine was not satisfied with his doctrine; yet both he and the other bishops of Rome, together with many provincial synods, have so often declared his doctrine in those points to be the doctrine of the church, that this is very hardly got over by those of that communion. The chief, and indeed the only material, difference that is between St. Austin's doctrine and that of the Sublapsarians is, that he, holding that with the sacrament of baptism there was joined an inward regeneration, made a difference between the regenerate and the predestinate, which these do not: he thought persons thus regenerate might have all grace, besides that of perseverance; but he thought that they, not being predestinated, were certainly to fall from that state, and from the grace of regeneration. The other differences are but forced strains to represent him and the Calvinists as of different principles: he thought, that overcoming delectation, in which he put the efficacy of grace, was as irresistible, though he used not so strong a word for it as the Calvinists do; and he thought that the decree was as absolute, and made without any regard to what the free-will would choose, as any of these do. So in the main points, the absoluteness of the decree, the extent of Christ's death, the efficacy of grace, and the certainty of perseverance, their opinions are the same, though their ways of expressing themselves do often differ. But if St. Austin's name and the credit of his books went far, yet no book was more read in the following ages than Cassian's Collations. There was in them a clear thread of good sense, and a very high strain of piety that run through them; and they were thought the best institutions for a monk to form his mind, by reading them attentively: so they still carried down, among those who read them, deep impressions of the doctrine of the Greek church. This broke out in the ninth century, in which Godescalcus, a monk, was severely used by Hincmar, and by the church of Rhemes, for asserting some of St. Austin's doctrines; against which Scotus Erigena wrote; as Bertram, or Ratramne, wrote for them. Remigius, bishop of Lyons, with his church, did zealously assert St. Austin's doctrine, not without great sharpness against Scotus. After this, the matter slept, till the school-divinity came to be in great credit: and Thomas Aquinas being accounted the chief glory of the Dominican order, he not only asserted all St. Austin's doctrine, but added this to it; that whereas formerly it was in general held, that the providence of God did extend itself to all things whatso ever, he thought this was done by God's concurring imme- ART. diately to the production of every thought, action, motion, or XVII. mode; so that God was the first and immediate cause of every thing that was done: and in order to the explaining the joint production of every thing by God as the first, and by the creature as the second cause, he thought, at least as his followers have understood him, that by a physical influence the will was predetermined by God to all things, whether good or bad; so that the will could not be said to be free in that particular instance in sensu composito, though it was in general still free in all its actions in sensu diviso: a distinction so sacred, and so much used among them, that I choose to give it in their own terms, rather than translate them. To avoid the consequence of making God the author of sin, a distinction was made between the positive act of sin, which was said not to be evil, and the want of its conformity to the law of God, which being a negation was no positive being, so that it was not produced. And thus, though the action was produced jointly by God as the first cause, and by the creature as the second, yet God was not guilty of the sin, but only the creature. This doctrine passed down among the Dominicans, and continues to do so to this day. Scotus, who was a Franciscan, denied this predetermination, and asserted the freedom of the will. Durandus denied this immediate concourse; in which he has not had many followers, except Adola, and some few more. When Luther began to form his opinions into a body, he clearly saw, that nothing did so plainly destroy the doctrine of merit and justification by works, as St. Austin's opinions: he found also in his works very express authorities against most of the corruptions of the Roman church: and being of an order that carried his name, and by consequence was accustomed to read and reverence his works, it was no wonder if he, without a strict examining of the matter, espoused all his opinions. Most of those of the church of Rome who wrote against him, being of the other persuasions, any one reading the books of that age would have thought that St. Austin's doctrine was abandoned by the church of Rome: so that when Michael Baius, and some others at Louvain, began to revive it, that became a matter of scandal, and they were condemned at Rome: yet at the council of Trent the Dominicans had so much credit, that great care was taken, in the penning their decrees, to avoid all reflections upon that doctrine. It was at first received by the whole Jesuit order, so that Bellarmine formed himself upon it, and still adhered to it but soon after, that order changed their mind, and left their whole body to a full liberty in those points, and went all quickly over to the other hypothesis, that differed from the Semipelagians only in this, that they allowed a preventinggrace, but such as was subject to the freedom of the will. ART. Molina and Fonseca invented a new way of explaining XVII. God's foreseeing future contingents, which they called a middle, or mean science; by which they taught, that as God sees all things as possible in his knowledge of simple apprehension, and all things that are certainly future, as present in his knowledge of vision; so by this knowledge he also sees the chain of all conditionate futurities, and all the connections of them, that is, whatsoever would follow upon such or such conditions. Great jealousies arising upon the progress that the order of the Jesuits was making, these opinions were laid hold on to mortify them; so they were complained of at Rome for departing from St. Austin's doctrine, which in these points was generally received as the doctrine of the Latin church: and many conferences were held before pope Clement the Eighth, and the cardinals; where the point in debate was chiefly, What was the doctrine and tradition of the church? The advantages that St. Austin's followers had were such, that before fair judges they must have triumphed over the other: pope Clement had so resolved; but he dying, though pope Paul the Fifth had the same intentions, yet he happening then to be engaged in a quarrel with the Venetians about the ecclesiastical immunities, and having put that republic under an interdict, the Jesuits who were there chose to be banished, rather than to break the interdict: and their adhering so firmly to the papal authority, when most of the other orders forsook it, was thought so meritorious at Rome, that it saved them the censure: so, instead of a decision, all sides were commanded to be silent, and to quarrel no more upon those heads. About forty years after that, Jansenius,* a doctor of Lou Cornelius Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, a man of much learning and piety, flourished in the early part of the seventeenth century. He was the author of a celebrated work, entitled Augustinus,' the publication of which, after his death, revived the controversy respecting the nature and extent of grace, and disturbed the temporary calm into which the fierce contests between the Jesuits and Dominicans had, owing to the skilful management of Paul V., subsided. "This celebrated work,' writes Mosheim, 'which gave such a wound to the Romish church, as neither the power nor wisdom of the pontiffs will ever be able to heal, is divided into three parts. The first is historical, and contains a relation of the Pelagian controversy, which arose in the fifth century. In the second, we find an accurate account and illustration of the doctrine of Augustin, relating to the constitution and powers of the human nature, in its original, fallen, and renewed state. third contains the doctrine of the same great man, relating to the aids of sanctifying grace, procured by Christ, and to the eternal predestination of men and angels.' The The publication of this work was so detrimental to the cause of the Jesuits, by placing them in direct opposition to Augustin, that they left no means untried to procure the condemnation of it by the papal see. In this they succeeded by, in the first place, having the perusal of it prohibited by the Roman inquisitors, and in the next place by inducing Urban VIII. to issue a bull against it as a work infected with errors. This condemnation was, however, very far from reaching the end proposed the overthrow of the system of Divine truth propounded in Jansenius's work; and many distinguished men (amongst them the doctors of Louvain) set at nought the papal bull by openly espousing the cause of Jansenius. Each party continued to defend their peculiar tenets with much zeal and no small degree of sophistry, by means of which the followers of Jansenius contrived to evade the fury |