Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

CHAP. iv. of Original Sin. 1 2 1
Socrates and Fabricius ; but it is difficult to say whether
he allows, in this admission, any relaxation in the servitude
of the natural will, any kind or degree of liberty of choice
as still left in it, or whether he only means that the evil
passions are less strong in some natural constitutions than
in others. Indeed, if it be asked to what extent Augus
tine s law of peccatum poena peccati operated, whether
that relation of necessary effect in which actual sin stood
to original applied to all the actual sin of man in a state
of nature, whether the want of power to avoid sin involved
in original sin was a want of power to avoid every ex
cess of sin which, as a matter of fact, had been committed
in the world, and so whether the whole of that mass of
depravity and crime which the history of mankind pre
sented went back, according to his doctrine, to original
sin, as the necessary development of that one seed, it
must be replied, that his language varies on this subject.
He sometimes represents the whole of this ma?s of actual
sin as the necessary effect of original, and accounts for the
different degrees in it by supposing different degrees of
original sin ; that is to say, by supposing, the impotence of
the will remaining the same in all, different degrees of
strength in the evil passions and inclinations. Sometimes
he only represents a part of it as such, and the rest as
added by the man himself. 1 But the language in which
this modification of the effect of original sin is expressed is
obscure and uncertain ; nor is it easy to see whether those
additions are only additions, as effects or additions to a
cause, or whether they are additions man himself has made
in the use of a lower kind of freewill still left in his nature.
Thus much is certain, however, that such a liberty of choice,
if it is allowed by Augustine, is not the liberty to choose
good, but only lesser evil, and therefore is not properly
freewill ; though whether a will which can do the one and
not the other is a tenable conception, is a question into
which we need not enter.
Original sin was thus represented, in its nature and
effects, by Augustine, as positive sin, and not as, according
1 NOTE XVII.