the Arminian doctrine is that it "subverts grace!" How .' Because " it is not an act of grace for the Most High to do justice!" Does this mean that God can- not be at once gracious and just? Grace, in this dis- cussion, is not oi)posed to God's justice, but to man's desert. If, indeed, human merit alone had entered into the cjuestion, the race would have ended with Adam ; and it was only in virtue of the covenant of grace that descendants were born to him. Under that covenant God is bound, not, indeed, by any desert of man (for that would preclude grace), but b}' his own faitliful- ness, to offer salvation in Christ to all who fell in Adam. This is the doctrine of Arniinians; this, too, is the doctrine of Scripture. The Gospel system is called by St. Paul the '• grace of God, given to us in Christ Jesus." And he tells us that "the grace of God, which bringeth salvation to all men (// (twti]- pioQ TTuaiv di'OpwTTOic) hath appeared" (Tit. ii, 11) ; that "the living God is tlie Saviour of all men, es- pecially those that believe" (1 Tim. iv, 10); that ho " will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of tlie truth" (1 Tim. ii, 4). Accord- ing to the Gospel scheme, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive." This OtXri/ia Qsov is his determinate counsel — a decree "of his good pleasure." "Not, however, that it would have been consistent for God to desert the human race, and leave it to perish ; the divine goodness forbids such a suppo- sition. The simple meaning is that no external neces- sity compelled him to it, and that it was his free grace, without desert or worthiness on the part of man" (Knapp, Theol. § 88). Were God bound, hj any merit in man, to restore freedom of will and moi'al power to man, there would be no grace in the act. But God may lie bound by the perfections of his own character, and, in accordance with the scheme of human salva- tion which he in his infinite goodness has devised and announced, to do man}' things for man, which, so far as the recipient is concerned, are pure acts of grace. The Augustinian doctrine holds, in effect, that God displays his mercy in saving a portion of mankind by irresistible grace, and in " destroying the rest bj^ the simple rule of his own sovereignty." The Metho- dist doctrine is that God, of his boundless philanthropy (0i\ov9pw— I'fl, Tit. iii, 4), provides means for the sal- vation of the whole human race, gives grace to enable each man to appropriate that salvation to himself, and destroj-s none but those who wilfully refuse that grace. The former, in its fatalistic elements, is as much the doctrine of Mohammed as of Christ ; the latter is the very "grace of the Gospel." See Grace.
III. Other Views on Election. — It is undeniable that the Augustinian doctrine has been held by nianj' of the greatest and subtlest intellects from Augustine's time until now. It has a sort of fascination, especial- ly for masculine and vigorous natures. Is not the explanation probably to be found in the fact that such natures find "a deep peace in the belief that their own greatest efforts are not really efforts at all, but the natural fruits of a divine necessity ; that the;/ can nei- ther fail nor succeed so long as they obey implicitly, but only transmit the energies and register the decrees of a diviner might and wisdom ? No doubt there is a great fascination in a mode of thought which almost obliterates the human instrument in the grandeur of the inevitable iiurjiosc, Calvinism is a personal and Christian way of merging the individual in the gran- deur of a universal destiny" (Spectator, Jul}' 2, 18G4). Perhaps the greatest danger in the tendencies of mod- ern thought is that of the subversion of the moral freedom of man by the general acceptance of the doC" trine that physical law is just as valid in the moral world as in the material. That the Calvinistic doc- trine tr7i-Is in this direction cannot be denied. And this tendeno}- is doubtless one of the grounds, if not the chief ground, of the modern reaction against Augus- tinianism among spiritual thinkers (as distinguished
ELECTION OF GRACE
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ELEMENTS
from materialists) on the one hand, and of the various schemes of modified Augiistinianism which have been proposed within the theolo^iical sphere as substitutes for extreme Calvinism, as Uaxterianism, the so-called moderate Calvinism (q. v.) and the New-England The- ology (q. v.).