§ 156. AJISWEE8 TO PELAGIAN OBJECTIONS. 841
the fruitful mother of actual sins ; and he condemas a man not for the guilt of another, but for making the deed of Adam }iis own, and repeating the fsill by his own voluntary transgression. This every one does who lives beyond unconscious infancy. But Augustine, as we have already seen, makes even infancy subject to punishment for original sin alone, and thus unquestionably trenches not only upon the righteousness of God, but also upon his love, which is the beginning and end of his ways, and the key to all his works.
To sum up the Augustinian doctrine of sin : This fearful power is universal ; it rules the species, as well as individuals ; it has its seat in the moral character of the will, reaches thence to the particular actions, and from them reacts again upon the will ; and it subjects every man, without exception, to the punitive justice of God. Yet the corruption is not so great as to alter the substance of man, and make him incapable of redemption. The denial of man's capacity for redemption is the Manichsean error, and the opposite extreme to the Pclagiaii denial of the need of redemption. " That is still good," says Augustine, " which bewails lost good ; for had not something good remained in our nature, there would be no grief over lost good for punishment." * Even in the hearts of the heathen the law of God is not wholly obliterated,^ and even in the life of the most abandoned men there are some good works. But these avail nothing to salvation. They are not truly good, because they proceed fi'om the turbid source of selfishness. Faith is the root, and love the motive, of all truly good actions, and this love is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. ""Whatsoever is not of faith, is sin." Before the time of Christ, therefore, all virtues were either, like the virtues of the Old Testament saints, who hoped in the same Christ in whom we believe, consciously or unconsciously Christian ; or else they prove, on closer inspection, to be comparative vices or Beeming virtues, destitute of the pure motive and the right aim. Lust of renown and lust of dominion were the funda-
' De Genesi ad literam, viii. 14. » Rom. ii. 14.
S4-2 TflERD I'EKIOD. A.D. 311-590.
mental traits of the jld Ilomaiis, which first gave birth to those virtues of self-devotion to freedom and cciuntry, so glorious in the eyes of men ; but which afterwards, when with th« destruction of Carthage all manner of moral corruption poured in, begot the Roman vices.'
This view of heathen or natural morality as a specious form of vice, tliongh true to a large extent, is nevertheless an unjust extreme, which Augustine himself cannot consistently sustain. Even he was forced to admit important moral differences among the heathen : between, for example, a Fabricins, of incorruptible integrity, and the traitor Catiline ; and though he merely defines this difference negatively, as a greater and less degree of sin and guilt, yet this itself involves the positive
' The sentence often ascribed to Augustine, tliut "all pagan virtues are but splendid vices," is not Augustiniau iu form, but in substance. Comp. the quotation and remarks above, g 151. Dr. Back states his view correctly and clearly when he says (Vorleaungen iiber die Dogmengeschichte, Bd. i. Part 2, p. 342) : " If, as Augustine taught, faith in Christ is the highest principle of willing and acting, nothing can be truly good, which has not its root in faith, which principle Augustine thus expressed, using the words of the apostle Paul, Rom. xiv. 23 : ' Omne, quod non ex fide, peccatum.' Augustine judged therefore all good in the wiU and act of man after the absolute standard of Cliristian good, and accordingly could oidy regard the virtues of the heathen as seeming virtues, and ascribe to anything pre-Christian an inner value only so far as it liad an inner reference to faith in Christ." Comp. also Baur'3 Geschichte der christl. Kirche vom 4-6ten Jahrhundert, p. 153 ff. Neander represents Augustine's doctrine on heathen virtue thus (Church History, vol. iv. 1161, 2d Germ, ed., or vol. ii. p. 620, in Torrey's translation): " Augustine very justly distinguishes the patriotism of the ancients from that which is to be called ' virtue,' in the genuinely Christian sense, and which depends on the disposition towards God {virtus from virtus vera); but then he goes so far as to overlook altogether what bears some relationship to the divine life in such occasional coru-scations of the moral element of human nature, and to see in them nothing but a service done for (vil spirits and for man's glory. He contributed greatly, on tills particular side, to promote in the Western church the partial and contracted way of judging the ancient pat^an times, as opposed to the more liberal Alexandrian views of whicli we still find traces in many of the Orientals in this period, and to wliich Augustine himself, in the earlier part of his life, as a Platonist, had been inclined. Still the vestiges of his earlier and loftier mode of thinking are to be discerned in his later writings, where he searches after and recognizes the scattered fragments of truth and goodness in the pagan literature, which he uniformly traces to the revelation of the Sprit, who is the original source )f all that is true and good, to created mindii ; though this is inconsistent with his own theory respecting the total corrupt'on of humaf nature, and with the particularism of his doctrine of predestination."