§ 157. Augustine's doctrine of redeeming grace. 843
concession, that Fabricius stands nearer the position of Chiistian morality, and that there exists at least relative goodiiesa among the heathen. Moreover, he cannot deny, that there were before Christ, not only among the Israelites, but also among the Gentiles, God-fearing souls, such as Melchisedec and Job, true Israelites, not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit, whom God by the secret workings of His Spirit drew to Himself even without baptism and tlia external means ofL grace.' So the Alexandrian fathers saw scattered rays of the Logos in the dark night of heathenism ; only they were far from discriminating so sharply between what was Christian and what was not Christian.
All human boasting is therefore excluded, man is sick, sick unto death out of Christ, but he is capable of health ; and the worse the sickness, the greater is the physician, the more powerful is the remedy — redeeming grace.
§ 157. Augustine's Doctrine of Redeeming Grace.
Augustine reaches his peculiar doctrine of redeeming grace in two ways. First he reasons upwards from below, by the law of contrast ; that is, from his view of the utter incompetency of the unregenerated man to do good. The greater the corruption, the mightier must be the remedial principle. The doctrine of grace is thus only the positive counterpart of the doctrine of sin. In the second place he reasons downwards from above ; that is, from his conception of the allworking, all-penetrating presence of God in natural life, and much more in the spiritual. While Pelagius deistically severs God and the world fifter the creation, and places man on an independent footing, Augustine, even before this controversy,
' Comp. De peccat. orig. c. 24 (§ 28, torn. x. f. 265), where he asserts that the grace and faith of Christ operated even uncDnsciously "sive in eis justis quoa sancta Scriptura commeinorat, sive in eis justis quos quidem ilia non commemorat, sed tamen fuisse credendi sunt, vsl ante diluvium, vel inde usque ad legem datam, vel ipsius legis tempore, noj soliun in filiis Israel, sicut fuerunt prophetae, Bed etiam extra eundem populvn, sicut fuit Job. Et ipsorum euim corda eadem mundabantur mediatoris fide, et diifundebatur in eis caritas per Spiritum Sanctum, '.\\n «bj vult spirat, non merita sequens, sed etiam ipsa merita faciens."
644 IHIED PERIOD. A.D. Sll-590.
was, through his speculative genius and the earnest experience of his life, deeply penetrated Avitli a sense of tlie absolute dependence of the creature on tlie Creator, in whom we live and move, and have our being. But Augustine's impression of the immanence of God in the world has nothing pantheistic ; it does not tempt him to deny the transcendence of God and his absolute independence of the world. Guided by tlie Holy Scriptures, he maintains the true mean between deism and pantlieism. In the very beginning of his Confessions ' he says very beautifully : " How shall I call on my God, on my God and Lord ? Into myself must I call Him, if I call on Him ; and what place is there in me, where my God may enter into me, the God, who created heaven and earth? O Lord my God, is there aiiything in me, that contains Thee'j Do heaven and earth contain Thee, which Thou hast created, in wliich Thou didst create me? Or does all that is, contain Tiiee, because without Thee there liad existed nothing that is ? Because then I also am, do I supplicate Thee, that Thou wouldst come into me, I, who had not in any wise been, if Thou wert not in me? I yet live, I do not yet sink into the lower world, and yet Thou art there. If I made my bed in hell, behold. Thou art there. I were not, then, O my God, I utterly were not, if Thou wert not in me. Yea, still more, I were not, O my God, if I were not in Thee, from whom all. in wliom all, through whom all is. Even so. Lord, even so." In sliort, man is nothing without God, and everything in and through God. The undercurrent of this sentiment could not but carry this father onward to all the views he developed ir; opposition to the Pelagian heresy.
While Pelagius widened the idea of grace to indcfinitenesa and reduced it to a medley of natural gifts, law, gospel, for givenessofsins, enlightenment, and example, Augustine restricts ed grace to the specificall}'- Christian sphere (and, therefoi-e, called it gratia Christi)^ though admitting its oj)eration pre* vious to Christ among tiie saints of the Jewish dispensation' but within this sphere he gave it incom])arably greater depth. With him grace is, first of all, a creative jower of God iu
' Liber i. c. 2.