Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

1 1 8 Different Interpretations
CHAP. iv.
dounded ultimately to God s glory,
for the worthiest and
noblest creature must know Him best. Tertullian, then,
distinctly and philosophically recognised
a created will
which was yet an original
cause in nature. But 8. Augus
tine, while on the ground of Scripture he assigned freewill
to man before the fall, never recognised philosophically an
original source of good in the creature. As a philosopher
he argued wholly upon the Divine attribute of power, or
the operation of a First Cause, to which he simply referred
and subordinated all motion in the universe ; and laid
down in his dicta on this subject the foundation of scho
lastic necessitarianism. 1
Thus philosophically predisposed, the mind of S. Au
gustine took up the doctrine of original sin as handed
down by the voice of the Church and by a succession of
writers, and brought the whole mass of language which
three centuries had produced, and which up to his time
had advanced in copiousness and illustration, rather than
in strength of meaning, to a point. He explained the
corruption of human nature to mean the loss of freewill ;
and this statement was the fundamental barrier which
.divided the later from the earlier scheme and rationale
of original sin. The will, according to the earlier school,
was not substantially affected by the fall. Its circum
stances, its means and appliances, were altered, not itself;
and endowed with spiritual aids in Paradise ; deprived of
them at the fall ;
re-endowed with them under the Gospel,
it retained throughout these alterations one and the same
unchanged essential power, in that power of choice whereby
it was, in every successive state of higher or lower means,
able to use and avail itself of whatever. means it had. But
in Augustine s scheme the will itself was disabled at the
fall, and not only certain impulses to it withdrawn, its
itio sortitus est formam qua esset, boni in homine et quodammodo
atque ita non natura in bonum dis- natura, de institutions ascripta--est
positus est, sed institutione ; non illi quasi libripens emancipati a
suum habens bonus esse sed insti- Deo boni, libertas et potestas arbi
tutione. . . . Ut ergo bonum jam trii, quse efficeret bonum ut pro
suum haberet homo, emancipatum prium. Adv. Marc. 1. 2. c. 6.
*ibi a Deo, et fieret proprietas jam
J
See p. 4.