“To sit on My right hand and on My left is not Mine to give; but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of My Father.” Matt. xx. 23.
1 In these words, to which the Festival of St. James the Greater especially directs our minds, our Lord solemnly declares that the high places of His Kingdom are not His to give,—which can mean nothing else, than that the assignment of them does not simply and absolutely depend upon Him; for that He will actually dispense them at the last day, and moreover is the meritorious cause of any being given, is plain from Scripture. I say, He avers most solemnly that something besides His own will and choice is necessary, for obtaining the posts of honour about His throne; so that we are naturally led on to ask, where it is that this awful prerogative is lodged. Is it with His Father? He proceeds to speak of His Father; but neither does He assign it to Him, “It shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of My Father.” The Father’s foreknowledge and design are announced, not His choice. “Whom He did foreknow, them He did predestinate.” He prepares the reward, and confers it, but upon whom? No answer is given us, unless it is conveyed in the words which follow,—upon the humble:—“Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.”
Some parallel passages may throw some further light upon the question. In the description our Lord gives us of the Last Judgment, He tells us He shall say to them on His right hand, “Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” Here we have the same expression. Who then are the heirs for whom the Kingdom is prepared? He tells us expressly, those who fed the hungry and thirsty, lodged the stranger, clothed the naked, visited the sick, came to the prisoners, for His sake. Consider again an earlier passage in the same chapter. To whom is it that He will say, “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord?”—to those whom He can praise as “good and faithful servants,” who have been “faithful over a few things.” These two passages then carry our search just to the very point which is suggested by the text. They lead us from the thought of God and Christ, and throw us upon human agency and responsibility, for the solution of the question; and they finally lodge us there, unless indeed other texts of Scripture can be produced to lead us on further still. We know for certain that they for whom the Kingdom is prepared are the humble, the charitable, and the diligent in the improvement of their gifts; to which another text (for instance) adds the spiritually-minded:—“Eye hath not seen the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.” [Matt. xxv. 21, 34-36. 1 Cor. ii. 9.] Is this as far as we can go? Does it now depend ultimately on ourselves, or on any one else, that we come to be humble, charitable, diligent, and lovers of God?
Now, in answering this question, religious men have for many centuries differed in opinion; not indeed in the first and purest ages of the Church, but when corruptions began to steal in. In the primitive times it was always considered that, though God’s grace was absolutely necessary for us from first to last,—before we believed, in order to our believing, and while we obeyed and worked righteousness, in order to our obeying,—so that not a deed, word, or thought could be pleasing to Him without it; yet, that after all the human mind had also from first to last a power of resisting grace, and thus (as the foregoing texts imply) had the ultimate determination of its own fate committed to it, whether to be saved or rejected, the responsibility of its conduct, and, if it was rejected, the whole blame of it. However, at the beginning of the fifth century, when shadows were coming over the Church, a celebrated Doctor arose, whose name must ever be honoured by us, for his numberless gifts, his diligence, and his extended usefulness, whatever judgment may be passed on certain of his opinions. He is known in the Theological Schools as the first to have given some sort of sanction to two doctrines hitherto unknown in the Church, and apparently far removed from each other, as indeed are the modern Systems in which they are found. The one is the Predestinarian Hypothesis; viz. that, in spite of the text, it is God and Christ with whom the ultimate decision concerning the individual’s state depends; that His grace does not merely suggest, influence, precede, and follow, but forms in the soul a new character, not by the soul’s instrumentality, but immediately by Himself, and is effectual with some, not with others, at His own will, not at the individual’s. The one, I say, is this Predestinarian Doctrine; and the other is the doctrine of Purgatory. With this latter I am not now concerned; and I mention it, only as a remarkable fact, that the same Teacher, highly to be venerated except where he deviates from Catholic doctrine, should have first sanctioned certain characteristics of two Systems, which lie on either side, as of the primitive, so of the present Anglican Church. Dismissing the coincidence with this remark, I proceed to make some brief observations on the ground of argument on which the Predestinarian Doctrine rests.