162 PART U. Cu. VIII. — SIN.
is a su])eniatiiral act of the Holy Spirit, in which the soul is tho subject and not the agent ; that it is sovereign, granted or with- iield according to the good pleasure of God ; and consequently that salvation is entirely of grace.
This is the Ausustinian svstem in all that is es.'^ential. It is this uliicli has remained, and been the abidino; form of doctrine amono" the great body of evangelical Christians from that day to this. It is of course admitted that Augustine held much connected with the several points above mentioned, which was peculiar to the man or to the age in which he lived, but which does not belong to Augustinianism as a system of doctrine. As Lutheranism does not include all the individual opinions of Luther, and as Calvinism does not include all the personal views of Calviu, so there is much taucrht by Augustine which does not belong to Augustinianism. He taught that all sin is the negation of being ; that liberty is ability, so that in denying to fallen man ability to change his own heart, he denies to him freedom of the will ; that concupiscence (in the lower sense of the word), as an instinctive feeling, is sinful ; that a sinful nature is propagated by the very law of generation ; that baptism removes the guilt of original sin ; and that all unbaptized infants (as Romanists still teach and almost all Protestants deny) are lost. These, and other similar points are not integral parts of his system, and did not receive the sanction of the Churcli when it pronounced in favour of his doctrine as opposed to that of the Pelagians. In like manner it is a matter of minor importance how he understood the nature of the union between Adam and his pos- teritv ; whether he held the representative, or the realistic theory ; or whether he ultimately sided for Traducianism as against Crea- tionism, or for the latter as against the formei'. On these points his language is confused and undecided. It is enough that he held that such was the union between Adam and his race, that the whole human family stood their probation in him and fell with him in his first transgression, so that all the evils which are the consequences of that transgression, including physical and spiritual death, are the |)unishment of that sin. On this point he is perfectly explicit. When it was objected by Julian that sin cannot be the punishment of sin, he replied that we must distinguish three things, that we must know, " aliud esse peccatum, aliud poenam peccati, aliud utrum- que, id est, ita peccatum, ut ipsum sit etiani poena peccati, .... pertinet originale peccatum ad hoc genus tertium, ubi sic peccatum est, ut ipsum sit et poena peccati."^ Again he says : " Est [pecca
1 Opus Jmperfectum, i. 47 ; tVwks, edit. Benedictines, vol. x. pp. 1495, d, and 1496, d