In its nature, grace is assistance, help from God; and all divine aid may be included under the term—as well what may be called natural as what may be called spiritual aid.²¹ Spiritual grace includes, no doubt, all external help that God gives man for working out his salvation, such as the law, the preaching of the gospel, the example of Christ, by which we may learn the right way. It includes also forgiveness of sins, by which we are freed from the guilt already incurred. But above all it includes that help which God gives by His Holy Spirit, working within not without, by which man is enabled to choose and to do what he is enabled by the teachings of the law, or by the gospel, or by the natural conscience, to see to be right.²² In this grace are included all those spiritual operations which we call regeneration, justification, perseverance to the end—in a word, all the divine assistance by which, in being made Christians, we are made to differ from other men. Augustine is fond of representing this grace as in essence the writing of God’s law (or God’s will) on our hearts, so that it appears hereafter as our own desire and wish. Even more prevalently he speaks of it as the shedding abroad of love in our hearts by the Holy Ghost given to us in Christ Jesus. It is, therefore, conceived by him as a change of disposition, by which we come to love and freely choose, in co-operation with God’s aid, just the things which hitherto we have been unable to choose because of our bondage to sin. Grace, thus, does not make void free will.²³ It operates through free will, and acts upon it only by liberating it from its bondage to sin—i.e., by liberating the agent that uses the free will, so that he is no longer enslaved by his fleshly lusts and is enabled to make use of his free will in choosing the good. Thus it is only by grace that free will is enabled to act in good part.

But just because grace changes the disposition, and so enables man, hitherto enslaved to sin, for the first time to desire and use his free will for good, it lies in the very nature of the case that it is prevenient.²⁴ Also, as the very name imports, it is necessarily gratuitous;²⁵ since man is enslaved to sin until it is given, all the merits that he can have prior to it are bad merits and deserve punishment, not gifts of favour. When, then, it is asked, on the ground of what grace is given, it can only be answered, “on the ground of God’s infinite mercy and undeserved favour.”²⁶ There is nothing in man to merit it, and it first gives merit of good to man. All men alike deserve death, and all that comes to them in the way of blessing is necessarily of God’s free and unmerited favour. This is true equally of all grace. It is pre-eminently clear of that grace which gives faith, which is the root of all other graces and which is given of God, not to merits of good-will or incipient turning to Him, but of His sovereign good pleasure.²⁷ But equally with faith, it is true of all other divine gifts. We may, indeed, speak of “merits of good” as succeeding faith; but as all these merits find their root in faith, they are but “grace on grace,” and men need God’s mercy always, throughout this life, and even on the judgment day itself, when, if they are judged without mercy, they must be condemned.²⁸ If we ask, then, why God gives grace, we can only answer that it is of His unspeakable mercy. And if we ask why He gives it to one rather than to another, what can we answer but that it is of His will? The sovereignty of grace results from its very gratuitousness:²⁹ where none deserve it, it can be given only of the sovereign good pleasure of the great Giver—and this is necessarily inscrutable, but cannot be unjust. We can faintly perceive, indeed, some reason why God may be supposed not to have chosen to give His saving grace to all,³⁰ or even to the most.³¹ But we cannot understand why He has chosen to give it to just the individuals to whom He has given it, and to withhold it from just those from whom He has withheld it. Here we are driven to the apostle’s cry, “O the depth of the riches both of the mercy and the justice of God!”³²

The effects of grace are according to its nature. Taken as a whole, it is the recreative principle sent forth from God for the recovery of man from his slavery to sin and for his reformation in the divine image. Considered as to the time of its giving, it is either operating or co-operating³³ grace, i.e., either the grace that first enables the will to choose the good, or the grace that co-operates with the already enabled will to do the good. It is, therefore, also called either prevenient or subsequent grace.³⁴ It is not to be conceived as a series of disconnected divine gifts, but as one unbroken work of God. But we may look upon it in the various steps of its operation in men, as bringing forgiveness of sins, faith, which is the beginning of all good, love to God, progressive power of good working, and perseverance to the end.³⁵ In any case, and in all its operations alike, just because it is power from on high and the living spring of a new and re-created life, it is irresistible and indefectible.³⁶ Those on whom the Lord bestows the gift of faith, working from within, not from without, of course have faith and cannot help believing. Those to whom perseverance to the end is given will assuredly persevere to the end. It is not to be objected to this that many seem to begin well who do not persevere. This also is of God, who has in such cases given great blessings indeed, but not this blessing of perseverance to the end. Whatever of good men have, that God has given. And what they have not, why, of course God has not given it. Nor can it be objected that this leaves all uncertain. It is only unknown to us; but this does not argue uncertainty. We cannot know that we are to have any gift which God sovereignly gives, of course, until it is given; and we therefore cannot know that we have perseverance unto the end until we actually persevere to the end.³⁷ But who would call uncertain what God does and knows He is to do, and what man is to do certain? Nor will it do to say that thus nothing is left for us to do. No doubt, all things are in God’s hands and we should praise God that this is so, but we must respond to His touch; and it is just because it is He that is working in us the willing and the doing, that it is worth our while to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. God has not determined the end without determining the appointed means.³⁸

Now, Augustine argues, since grace certainly is gratuitous and given to no preceding merits, prevenient and antecedent to all good, and, therefore, sovereign and bestowed only on those whom God selects for its reception—we must, of course, believe that the eternal God has foreknown all this from the beginning. He would be something less than God, had He not foreknown that He intended to bestow this prevenient, gratuitous and sovereign grace on some men, and had He not foreknown equally the precise individuals on whom He intended to bestow it. To foreknow is to prepare beforehand. And this is predestination.³⁹ He argues that there can be no objection to predestination, in itself considered, in the mind of any man who believes in God. What men object to is gratuitous and sovereign grace: and to this no additional difficulty is added by the necessary assumption that it was foreknown and prepared for from eternity. That predestination does not proceed on the foreknowledge of good or of faith,⁴⁰ follows from its being nothing more than the foresight and preparation of grace, which, in its very idea, is gratuitous and not according to any merits, sovereign and according only to God’s purpose, prevenient and in order to faith and good works. It is the sovereignty of grace, not its foresight or the preparation for it, which places men in God’s hands and suspends salvation absolutely on His unmerited mercy. But just because God is God, of course no one receives grace who has not been foreknown and afore-selected for the gift; and, as much of course, no one who has been foreknown and afore-selected for it, fails to receive it. Therefore the number of the predestinated is fixed, and fixed by God.⁴¹ Is this fate? Men may call God’s grace fate if they choose; but it is not fate, but undeserved love and tender mercy, without which none would be saved.⁴² Does it paralyze effort? Only to those who will not strive to obey God because obedience is His gift. Is it unjust? Far from it: shall not God do what He will with His own undeserved favour? It is nothing but gratuitous mercy, sovereignly distributed, and foreseen and provided for from all eternity by Him who has selected us in His Son.

Augustine’s doctrine of the means of grace, i.e., of the channels and circumstances of the conference of grace upon men, is the meeting point of two very dissimilar streams of thought—his doctrine of grace and his doctrine of the Church. Profound thinker as he was, within whose active mind was born an incredible multitude of the richest conceptions, he was not primarily a systematiser, and these divergent streams of thought rather conditioned each the purity of the other’s development at this point than were thoroughly harmonized.⁴³ He does not, indeed, bind the conference of grace to the means in such a sense that the grace must be given at the exact time of the application of the means. He does not deny that “God is able, even when no man rebukes, to correct whom He will, and to lead him on to the wholesome mortification of repentance by the most hidden and most mighty power of His medicine.”⁴⁴ Though the Gospel must be known in order that man may be saved⁴⁵ (for how shall they believe without a preacher?), yet the preacher is nothing and the preachment is nothing, but God only that gives the increase.⁴⁶ He even has something like a distant glimpse of what has since been called the distinction between the visible and invisible Church. He speaks of men not yet born as among those who are “called according to God’s purpose” and therefore of the saved who constitute the Church,⁴⁷ and asserts that those who are so called, even before they believe, are “already children of God, enrolled in the memorial of their Father with unchangeable surety.”⁴⁸ At the same time, he allows that there are many already in the visible Church who are not of it, and who can therefore depart from it. But he teaches that those who are thus lost out of the visible Church are lost because of some fatal flaw in their baptism, or on account of post-baptismal sins; and that those who are of the “called according to the purpose” are predestinated not only to salvation, but to salvation by baptism. Grace is not tied to the means in the sense that it is not conferred save in the means; but it is tied to the means in the sense that it is not conferred without the means. Baptism, for instance, is absolutely necessary for salvation: no exception is allowed except such as save the principle—baptism of blood (martyrdom),⁴⁹ and, somewhat grudgingly, baptism of intention. And baptism, when worthily received, is absolutely efficacious: “if a man were to die immediately after baptism, he would have nothing at all left to hold him liable to punishment.”⁵⁰ In a word, while there are many baptized who will not be saved, there are none saved who have not been or are not to be baptized; it is the grace of God that saves, but baptism is a channel of grace in the absence of which none actually receive it.⁵¹

One of the corollaries that flowed from this doctrine was that by which Augustine was led to assert that all those who died unbaptized, including infants, are finally lost and depart into eternal punishment. He did not shrink from the inference, although he assigned the place of lightest punishment in hell to those who were guilty of no sin but original sin, but who had departed this life without having washed this away in the “laver of regeneration.” This is the dark side of his soteriology. But it should be remembered that it was not his theology of grace, but the universal and traditional belief in the necessity of baptism for remission of sins, which he inherited in common with all of his time, that forced it upon him. The theology of grace was destined in the hands of his successors, who have rejoiced to confess that they were taught by him, to remove this stumbling-block also from Christian teaching; and if not to Augustine, it is to Augustine’s theology that the Christian world owes its liberation from so terrible a tenet. Along with the doctrine of the damnation of all unbaptized infants, another stumbling-block also, not so much of Augustinian as of the Church theology inherited by Augustine, has gone. It was not because of his theology of grace or of his doctrine of predestination, that Augustine taught that comparatively few of the human race are saved. It was, again, because as a good churchman of his day he believed that baptism and incorporation into the visible Church were necessary for salvation. And it is only because of Augustine’s theology of grace, which places man in the hands of an all-merciful Saviour and not in the grasp of a human institution, that men have come to see that, in the salvation of all who die in infancy, the invisible Church of God embraces the majority of the human race—saved not by the washing of water administered by the Church, but by the blood of Christ administered by God’s own hand outside of the ordinary channels of His grace.⁵² We are indeed born in sin, and those that die in infancy are, in Adam, children of wrath even as others; but God’s hand is not shortened by the limits of His Church on earth that it cannot save.

Despite the strong churchly element within the theology of Augustine, the development of which has produced the ecclesiasticism of Romish thought, it must be admitted that, on the side that is presented in the controversy against Pelagianism, it is in its essence distinctly anti-ecclesiastical. Its central thought was the immediate dependence of the individual on the grace of God in Jesus Christ. It made everything that concerned salvation to be of God, and traced the source of all good to Him. “Without me ye can do nothing,” is the inscription on one side of it; on the other stands written, “All things are yours.” Augustine held that he who builds on a human foundation builds on sand, and founded all his hope on the Rock itself. And there also he founded his teaching; as he distrusted man in the matter of salvation, so he distrusted him in the form of theology. No other of the fathers so conscientiously wrought out his theology from the revealed Word; no other of them so sternly excluded human additions. The subjects of which theology treats, he declares, are such as “we could by no means find out unless we believed them on the testimony of Holy Scripture.”⁵³ “Where Scripture gives no certain testimony,” he says, “human presumption must beware how it decides in favor of either side.”⁵⁴ “We must first bend our necks to the authority of Scripture,” he insists, “in order that we may arrive at knowledge and understanding through faith.”⁵⁵ And this was not merely his theory, but his practice.⁵⁶ No theology was ever, it may be more broadly asserted, more conscientiously wrought out from the Scriptures than that which he opposed to the Pelagians. It is not without its shortcomings. But its errors are on the surface and not of its essence. It came from God, and it leads to God; and in the midst of the controversies of so many ages it has shown itself an edifice whose solid core is built out of material “which cannot be shaken.”

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Footnotes

1. For the relation of Augustine’s doctrine of the Church to his doctrine of grace, and the primacy of the latter in his thought, see the first two essays in Reuter’s Augustinische Studien: “In his later years it was not the idea of the Church as the institute of grace, but that of predestinational grace that was the dominating one”; “the doctrine of predestinational grace is the fundamental datum of his religious consciousness; it must be unconditionally maintained, and all else must yield to it” (p. 102). The ecclesiastical element was the traditional element in his teaching; but as Thomasius points out (Dogmengeschichte, i. 495) both experience and Scripture stood with him above tradition. Accordingly Harnack tells us truly (Dogmengeschichte iii. 87, 89): “No Western theologian before him had so lived in the Scriptures or had drawn so much from the Scriptures as he;” and “as no Church father before him, he brought the practical element into the foreground.” ↩

2. It is inexplicable how Professor Allen, in his Continuity of Christian Thought, can speak of the Augustinian theology as resting “upon the transcendence of Deity as its controlling principle” (p. 3), which is explained as “a tacit assumption of deism” (p. 171). A. Dorner (Augustinus: sein theologisches System, etc.) also finds deistic implications in certain elements of Augustine’s thought. Any tendency to error in Augustine’s conception of God lay, however, in precisely the opposite direction. Compare Aubrey Moore, Lux Mundi, p. 83, and Levi L. Paine, The New World, December, 1895 (iv. 670-673). ↩

3. On Rebuke and Grace, 27, 28. ↩

4. Ibid., 29, 31, sq. ↩

5. Ibid., 28. ↩

6. On the City of God, xiii. 2, 12, 14; On the Trinity, iv. 13. ↩

7. On the Merits and Remission of Sins, i. 15, and often. ↩

8. Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, iv. 7; On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, iii. 14, 15. ↩

9. On Marriage andConcupiscence, ii. 57; On the City of God, xiv. 1. ↩

10. Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, iv. 7. ↩

11. On Original Sin, 42; On Marriage and Concupiscence, ii. 15. ↩

12. Retractations, ii. 24. ↩

13. Against Julian, iv. 3, 25, 26. Compare Thomasius’ Dogmengeschichte, i. 501 and 507. ↩

14. On the Spirit and Letter, 58. ↩

15. On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, ii. 30. ↩

16. On Rebuke and Grace, 11. ↩

17. On the Grace of Christ, 4 sq. ↩

18. On the Predestination of the Saints, 10. ↩

19. Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, i. 5; Epistle 215, 4 and often. ↩

20. Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, i. 7; compare i. 5, 6. ↩

21. Sermon 26. ↩

22. On Nature and Grace, 62; On the Grace of Christ, 13; On Rebuke and Grace, 2 sq. ↩

23. On the Spirit and Letter, 52; On Grace and Free Will, 1 sq. ↩

24. On the Spirit and Letter, 60, and often. ↩

25. On Nature and Grace, 4, and often. ↩

26. On the Grace of Christ, 27, and often. ↩

27. Ibid., 34, and often. ↩

28. On Grace and Free Will, 21. ↩

29. Ibid., 30, and often. ↩

30. On the Gift of Perseverance, 16; Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, ii. 15. ↩

31. Epistle to Optatus, 190. ↩

32. On the Predestination of the Saints, 17, 18. ↩

33. On Grace and Free Will, 33, and often. ↩

34. On Grace and Free Will, 17; On the Proceedings of Pelagius, 34, and often. ↩

35. Compare Thomasius’ Dogmengeschichte, i. 510. ↩

36. On Rebuke and Grace, 40, 45; On the Predestination of the Saints, 13. ↩

37. On Rebuke and Grace, 40. ↩

38. On the Gift of Perseverance, 56. ↩

39. On the Predestination of the Saints, 36 sq. ↩

40. On the Gift of Perseverance, 41 sq., 47. ↩

41. On Rebuke and Grace, 39; compare 14. ↩

42. On the Gift of Perseverance, 29; Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, ii. 9 sq. ↩

43. Says Harnack (Dogmengeschichte, iii. 90): “In conflict with Manicheanism and Donatism, Augustine acquired a doctrine of freedom, of the Church and of the means of grace which has little in common with his experience of sin and grace, and is in open strife with the theological development of this experience (doctrine of predestinational grace). It is possible even to draw out a double theology of Augustine, an Ecclesiastics and a Doctrine of Grace, and to present the whole in both.” ↩

44. On Rebuke and Grace, 1. ↩

45. On the Predestination of the Saints, 17, 18; if the gospel is not preached at any given place, it is proof that God has no elect there. ↩

46. On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, etc., ii. 37. ↩

47. On Rebuke and Grace, 23. ↩

48. Ibid., 20. ↩

49. On the Soul and its Origin, i. 11; ii. 17. ↩

50. On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, etc., ii. 46. ↩

51. On Augustine’s teaching as to baptism, see Rev. James Field Spalding’s The Teaching and Influence of Augustine, pp. 39 sq. ↩

52. This is shown in the accompanying essay on The Development of the Doctrine of Infant Salvation. ↩

53. On the Soul and its Origin, iv. 14. ↩

54. On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, etc., ii. 59. ↩

55. Ibid., i. 29. ↩

56. Compare On the Spirit and the Letter, 63. ↩