THE character of Augustine as a theologian, and the services which he rendered to the truth, in defending it against the leading errors of the day, come now under consideration. As an able logician, an acute metaphysician, and divine, he has but few equals, and perhaps no superior. He possessed a vigorous and masterly genius, and a warm and lively imagination. His writings, also, are pervaded by a spirit of true piety and of deep devotion. The mind is not only enlarged, and the intellectual faculties sharpened, but the heart also is improved by their perusal. The providence of God is remarkably displayed in raising up, and qualifying, fit persons for the exigencies of the church in that particular period in which they live. Whenever God has a work to do, he has at hand the agents for its performance,—it was so in this instance. The age in which Augustine lived was marked by an insidious, but at the same time a bold attack on the fundamental doctrine of divine influence, or efficacious grace. "While the belief and experience of divine influences were strong and vigorous in Christian societies, it was in vain for Satan to attempt to persuade men that such influences were of no necessity or value,-he could do no more than seduce them to counterfeit, abuse, or misapply them. Hence the wildness and incoherence of Montanism. But now that the holy influence of the Spirit of God was generally damped by superstition, or quenched by licentious

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ness, Satan felt himself emboldened to erect a new heresy, which should pretend to the height of purity, supported by MERE HUMAN NATURE, exclusive of the operations of divine grace altogether. This was PELAGIANISM." Pelagius, the author of this heresy, was born in Great Britain, and was known in his own age by the name of Brito. Dr. Henry thinks that he was born in North Wales, that his real name was Morgan, of which Pelagius is a translation, and that he was born on Nov. 13, A. D. 354, the same day as his great antagonist, Augustine. He is supposed to have received his education in the monastery of Bangor, North Wales, of which he afterwards became, first a professed monk, and, in the year 404, abbot. He was a man of very considerable talent and learning, and of austere and irreproachable morals. He was on friendly terms with Jerome and Augustine, who appear to have corresponded with him by letters many years before he discovered the pravity of his opinions. He did this as the opponents of the truth still advance their heretical dogmas,--not openly and in the face of day, as Luther assailed the errors of Rome at Wittenburg, but with much art and caution. He first advanced his peculiar notions as the sentiments of others, without discovering his own. At length, however, he threw off the mask, and openly published and defended his doctrines at Rome about the middle of the fifth century. This in

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volved him in many troubles, and "drew upon him," says Dr. Henry, "the indignation of his former friends, Jerome and Augustine." Both of these fathers, it seems, wrote against him with great acrimony;-and not content with upbraiding him for the abuse of his great talent,-descended even to gross personalities. They represent him as a very ugly fellow, "broadshouldered, thick-necked, fat-headed, lame of a leg, and blind of an eye." One might suppose him to have been another Dr. Johnson-a huge elephant both in body and mind.

Associated with him in the diffusion of his sentiments, was another layman of no mean abilities or attainments, by name, Celestius. He was a disciple and friend of Pelagius, and was called a Scot, which in those times meant a native of Ireland. He defended and propagated the opinions of Pelagius with so much learning, zeal, and success, that those who embraced these opinions were frequently called after his name, Celestians. Before, however, he became acquainted with Pelagius, he wrote several books, which were universally admired for their orthodoxy, learning, and virtuous tendency. Pity it is that the friends of truth should use such weapons in opposing error as it is known they did. Celestius, also, comes in for a measure of personal abuse. Jerome, who on account of his pre-eminence in this line, has obtained the well-known epithet of foul-mouthed Jerome, reviles him as, "a striped fool, a great corpulent barking dog, who was fitter to kick with his legs than to bite with his teeth,-a cerberus who with his master, Pluto, (Pelagius,) deserved to be knocked on the head, that they might be put to eternal silence." It too frequently happens that the advocates of error manifest more self-possession than those of truth. But it ought not to be so. More warmth and zeal may indeed be expected; but surely human passion and mutual recrimination should never be indulged. When such means are resorted to in the defence of truth, she is not so much aided as she is wounded in the house of her friends. Let us cultivate holy fervour, and shun latitudinarian indifference; but let us likewise aim to conduct

our contests without acrimony, ever remembering, that "the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God." It cannot be denied that Pelagius proceeded to disseminate his opinions in a very artful manner. He concealed the full extent of his opinions from persons generally, and only imparted so much of them as was calculated to excite curiosity and ensnare the mind, He used to deliver his views under the modest appearance of queries, (as has been recently done on this very subject in a pamphlet entitled, "What was the Fall?") and he insinuated himself into the favour of women of rank, weak in mind, and unacquainted with the spirit of the gospel. By these means he undermined the truths, and widely diffused the poison of his errors. Celestius more open and daring in speech, pursued a different method, and so far acted a nobler and honester part.

The tenets which are attributed to Pelagius, and are generally known by his name, are as follows:-" 1. That Adam was by nature mortal, and would have died whether he sinned or not. 2. That the consequences of Adam's sin were confined to his own person. 3. That new-born infants are in the same condition as Adam before the fall. 4. That the law qualified men for the kingdom of heaven, and was founded upon equal promises with the gospel. 5. That the general resurrection of the dead does not follow in virtue of our Saviour's resurrection. 6. That the grace of God is given according to our merits. 7. That this grace is not granted for the performance of every moral act-the liberty of the will, and information in points of duty being sufficient."

At such a distance of time it is not easy to determine precisely what views were really held by those who deviated from the ordinary track of religious opinion, and still less of practice. Prejudice and passion sadly distort the mind and warp the judgment. There is reason, however, to believe that these were substantially the opinions of Pelagius and Celestius. They are mostly taken either from the writings of these men, or from their words as deliberately uttered, in reply to enquiries on the several points to which they relate.

They seem to have denied, in toto, the doctrine of original sin, as we understand it, including both the imputation of Adam's guilt, and the derivation from him of a nature sinfully corrupt, as well as the physical consequences of the first transgression, as it regards Adam and his posterity. They seem to have held the doctrine of human depravity in a very modified sense, no wonder then if they disparaged the remedy. The redemption that is in Christ Jesus, and the work of the Holy Spirit on the heart, both imply an awful and incurable disease in our nature; but if that disease is palliated and denied, then what need of the cure? Our views of the great gospel remedy can only be proportioned to those which we entertain of our misery and ruin. On these cardinal points the views of Pelagius and Celestius appear to have been essentially defective. In the year 415, or nearly so, we are told by Milner, two well disposed young men, Timasius and Jacob, meeting with Pelagius were by him induced to enter on the monastic life, in the commendation of which all parties were but too strongly agreed. But they imbibed, also, his self-righteous doctrine, from which, however, by the labours of Augustine, they were subsequently delivered. On this occasion they showed Augustine a book of Pelagius, in which he vehemently accused those who pleaded the faultiness of human nature as an excuse for their sins, and in which, while he seemed to be inveighing only against a licentious abuse of gospel grace, he evidently denied the existence of all grace, and maintained that by that term were to be understood, the natural endowments of the human mind," seasoned and directed by FREE WILL; and these endowments so seasoned and directed he acknowledged to be the free gifts of God." It is impossible to read these words without imagining that we see and hear him in our own day, in the person of those who seem to have drank deeply into his spirit, by similar evasions, explaining away the doctrine of the immediate and special influence of the Holy Spirit on the heart, and other important doctrines which are most surely believed among us. He also preached a perfection attainable in this life-a perfection, too, attained by our

own innate strength, and not conferred by divine grace. Writing to a honourable widow, over whom he had great influence, he described her as the only righteous person upon earth with whom piety found a refuge when it could find none elsewhere. And he taught her to pray in this form,-"Thou knowest, Lord, how holy, innocent, and clean hands these are which I extend to thee, how just and clean these lips, and free from all guile with which I pray for thy mercy." On another occasion, when the saying of Augustine in his confession was mentioned, "Give what thou commandest, and command what thou wilt;" he contradicted it with great vehemence, and expressed much indignation at the sentiment. On the whole, if this is a fair representation of the sentiments of Pelagius and Celestius, we must conclude that their views were to a great extent anti-evangelical, that they tended to do away with the doctrine of divine influence, to frustrate the grace of God, to abolish Christianity, and to establish, as is the tendency of all such views, a pure Deism in its stead.

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Augustine then did good service to the cause of truth in opposing such errors. He did not engage in a needless logomachy, but he contended, as he was bound to do, for the faith once delivered to the saints. At first he proceeded with great mildness in his writings against those sentiments, avoiding all unnecessary censure or imputation, and using all means at once to recover and conciliate him, avoiding," " he says, "the name of Pelagius, thinking that I might more easily profit him, if preserving his spirit I should yet spare his modesty, (his feelings.) Subsequently, in a letter to Demetrias, the aforesaid widow, combating the representations of Pelagius, who had taught her to regard her virtues as springing from herself, Augustine thus writes," Let her (Demetrias) rather hear the apostle, 'I have betrothed you to one husband that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ, but I fear lest, as the serpent beguiled Eve, so your mind should be beguiled from the simplicity that is in Christ. In everything give thanks.' Ye do so because ye have it not of yourselves. For who hath dis

tinguished you from Adam, the mass of death and perdition? Was it not He who came to seek and to save the lost? When the apostle says, 'Who made thee to differ?' does he answer, my good-will, my faith, my righteousness? does he not say, 'What hast thou that thou hast not received?"" Thus does Augustine combat the self-righteous, self-sufficient, flesh-pleasing, God-dishonouring, grace-dishonouring sentiments diffused by Pelagius; and thus it becomes every faithful minister and Christian to combat them, and to exalt the grace of God, and the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul of the believer. The whole epistle is excellent, and a treasure of evangelical doctrine.

In other epistles written at various times, to persons of distinction in the church, Augustine answers the Pelagian arguments, and more fully still in his book concerning "Nature and Grace." But what doctrine has not been abused? and what portion of Scripture has not been perverted by men and wrested to their own destruction? It ever has been so with the doctrine of divine influence or efficacious grace. It was so in Augustine's time,"If I act wrong," said some, "I am not to be blamed, but God is to be prayed to, to give me what he has not given me." To avoid this abuse Augustine wrote his tract on "Rebuke and Grace," in which he shows that sinners are to be rebuked for their sins, that they may betake themselves to the great Physician, and that "from the pain of rebuke the regenerated will may arise." He was not only eminently holy himself, but he constantly held forth a high standard of holiness to others, both in his writings and in his discourses. He opposed the practice of pious frauds, as they have been termed, which were in vogue in his time, and he wrote two "Tracts on Lying," proving the error and the malignity of these devices. "Such, indeed, is the connection between one part of divine truth and another, that those who have the justest and largest views of gospel grace have always the most exact and extensive views of moral duty, and what is more, exemplify them in life and conversation. For the same self-righteousness which tarnishes the lustre of divine

grace, always induces its votary to curtail the demands of the divine law, to adulterate it with pride and love of this world, and to render a thousand things allowable in practice which an humble and holy soul must abhor." We must not omit to inform our readers that the writings of Augustine, by the blessing of God, imposed a powerful check on the progress of Pelagian sentiments, and that both Pelagius and Celestius soon afterwards sank into merited obscurity.

Augustine wrote many other works besides those which relate to Pelagianism, the most comprehensive and celebrated of which is his "City of God." It is described as "a monument of genius, learning, and piety united." It contains a general defence of Christianity, and a masterly exhibition of its glorious truths, and of its blessed effects. The "Meditations," published under his name, are not believed to have emanated from him.

We must now enter on a part of Augustine's public life, which we can by no means approve. We allude to his conduct towards the Donatists. Who were the Donatists? They were the second great body of orthodox Dissenters, as we should now call them, who seceded from the so-called Catholic church. The Novatians were the first. No doubt there was much of human weakness and imperfection, as well as much that was right, in the motives which induced them to form a separate communion. The prevailing motive, however, seems to have been the desire of attaining to a purer discipline and fellowship than could be had within the pale of the Catholic church. Their secession, therefore, was the result of the prevailing laxity, worldliness, and hypocrisy among professing Christians. No doubt they shared in the superstitious notions of the age, and many of them, both pastors and people pushed their views to an extreme. They sought to enforce a too rigorous discipline, and their proceedings were vitiated by an improper spirit. Milner says, "There was nothing peculiarly doctrinal in the whole scheme of the Donatists, they differed from the general church only concerning a matter of fact, viz., whether Cecilian had been legally ordained." We may conclude