1024 THLED PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
but a revival of Aiigustinianism in the bosom of the Romar. Catholic church. '
The excess of Augustine and the Reforiners in this direo tion is due to the earnestness and energy of their sense of sin and grace. The Pelagian looseness could never beo-et a reformer. It was only the unshaken conviction of man's own inability, of unconditional dependence on God, and of the almighty power of his grace to give us strength for every good work, which could do this. He who would give others the conviction that he has a divine vocation for the church and for mankind, must himself be penetrated with the faith of an eternal, unalterable decree of God, and must cling to it in the darkest hours.
In great men, and only in great men, great opposites and apparently antagonistic truths live together. Small minds cannot hold them. The catholic, churchly, sacramental, and sacerdotal system stands in conflict with the evangelical Protestant Christianity of subjective, personal experience. The doctrine of universal baptismal regeneration, in particular, which j)resupposes a universal call (at least within the church), can on principles of logic hardly be united with the doctrine of an absolute predestination, which limits the decree of redemption to a portion of the baptized. Augustine supposes, on the one hand, that every baptized person, through the inward operation of the Holy Ghost, which accompanies the outward act of the sacrament, receives the forgiveness of sins, and is translated from the state of nature into the state of grace, and thus,
vin. Yet as the real difference between them is invisible even to a theological microscope, the Molinista are oppressed by the authority of the saint, and the Jansenists are disgraced by their resemblance to tlie heretic. In the Jncan while the Protestant Arminians stand aloof, and deride the mutual perplexity of the disputants. Perhaps a reasoner, still more independent, may smile in hin turn wlien he peruses an Arminian commentary on the Kjjistle to the Romans." NouR- KissoN (ii. 1*79), from his Komish stand-point, likewise makes Lutheranism to consist " easeiitiellement dans la question du libre arbitre." But tlie principle of Lutheranism, and of Protestantism f^enerally, is the supremacy of the Holy Scriptures as a rule of faith, and justification by free grace through faitii in Christ.
' On the miglity influence of Augustine in the seventeenth century in France^ especially on the noble Jansenists, see the works on Janflenism, and also Nourris Bo.v, 1. c. torn. ii. pp. 186-276.
§ 180. Augustine's relation to oatholicism, etc. 1025
qua haptizatus, is also a child of God and an heir of eternal life; and yet, on the other hand, he makes all these benefitj dependent on the absolute will of God, who saves only a cer tain number out of the " mass of perdition," and preserves these to the end. Regeneration and election, with him, do not, as with Calvin, coincide. The former may exist without the latter, but the latter cannot exist without the former. Augustine assumes that many are actually born into the kingdom of grace only to perish again ; Calvin holds that in the case of the non-elect baptism is an unmeaning ceremony ; the one putting the delusion in the inward effect, the other in the outward form. The sacramental, churchl}'- system throws the main stress upon the baptismal regeneration to the injury of the eternal election ; the Calvinistic and Puritan system sacrifices the virtue of the sacrament to the election ; the Lutheran and Anglican system seeks a middle ground, without behig able to give a satisfactory theological solution of the problem. The Anglican church allows the two opposite views, and sanctions the one in the baptismal service of the Book of Common Prayer, the other in her Thirty-nine Articles, which are moderately Calvinistic.
It was an evident ordering of God, that the Augustinian system, like the Latin Bible of Jerome, appeared just in that transitional period of history, in which the old civilization was passing away before the flood of barbarism, and a new order of things, under the guidance of the Christian religion, was in preparation. The church, with her strong, imposing organization and her firm system of doctrine, must save Christianity amidst the chaotic turmoil of the great migration, and must become a training-school for the barbarian nations of the middle age.'
' GuizoT, the Protestant historian and statesman, very correctly says in hie Ilistoire generale de la civilization en Europe (Deuxieme le^on, p. 45 sq. ed. Bniielles, 1850): "S'il n'eut pas 6te une ^glise,je ne sais ce qui en serait avenu au milieu de la chute de I'empire romain. . . . Si le christianisme n'eiit 6t6 comme dans les premiers temps, qu'une croyance, un sentiment, une conviction mdividuelle, on pent croire qu'il aurait succombe au milieu de la dissolution de I'empire et de I'invasion des barbares. II a succomb6 plus tard, en Asie et dans toua le uord de I'Afrique, sous une invasion de meme nature, sous I'invasion oea