Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

96 The Pelagian Controversy. CHAP. in.
feeble show of orthodoxy. The separation
of renovating
from pardoning grace, again, was a blow at the integrity
of Grospel grace. Pardoning grace was necessary for any
one who had sinned, because the sin was a past fact which
could not be undone but the ;
renovating or assisting grace
of Christ was not necessary, however advantageous to him,
because the future sin could be avoided by nature alone.
These two graces go together
in the Divine scheme, and
belong to the same act of the Divine mercy.
Out of one extreme statement at the commencement,
Pelagianism thus expanded into a large body of thought,
incomplete indeed, but having one general stamp, and
developing more and more, as it came out, the original
difference from Catholic truth ; passing from the human
will to higher mysteries, and upon the basis of exalted
nature threatening the truth of the Incarnation.
The philosophical fault of Pelagianism was, that it went
upon ideas without considering facts in the case both of
freewill and the Divine justice. The abstract idea of free
will is that of a power to do anything that it is physically
possible for us to do. As man had freewill, then, the Pela
gian argued that he had this power ; and that any man,
therefore, could fulfil the whole law and be perfect. But
what we have to consider in this question, is not what is
the abstract idea of freewill, but what is the freewill which
we really and actually have. This actual freewill, we find,
is not a simple but a complex thing ; exhibiting opposi
tions and inconsistencies ; appearing
on the one side to be
a power of doing anything to which there is no physical
hindrance, on the other side to be a restricted faculty. It
is that will which S. Paul describes, when, appealing to
the facts of human nature (the account of which, as referred
to the sin of Adam, is a matter of faith, but which are
themselves matters of experience), he describes a state of
divided consciousness, and a sense of power and weakness.
But the Pelagian did not possess himself properly of the
facts of human nature, and, committing the same fault in
morals that the mediaeval philosophers did in science, he
argued upon an abstract idea, instead of examining what