Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

134 Augustinian Doctrine CHAP. v.
Again : Why He wills to convert some, and to punish
others for being unconverted (quare illos velit converters,
illos ve.ro pro aversione punire), let none presume to ask
as if to blame God for the law of His secret
justice rests with Him alone (consilium occultioris jus-
l
titice penes ipsum est).
S. Augustine, then, regarded predestination as a per
plexing mystery,
a doctrine which disagreed with our
natural ideas of God s justice, and which could only be de
fended by a reference to His inscrutable and sovereign will.
i sertion
I will single out the term c hidden justice occulta
justitiaj as expressing in a summary and convenient
form this characteristic of the doctrine held by him. S.
Augustine asserts, as every one who believes in the
existence of a God must do, that God is just, and there
fore that the decree of predestination and reprobation
which He has from all eternity made is just ; but he adds,
that this is
justice
of a nature not addressed to our natural
faculties and perceptions, or discernible by them. Natural
justice the rule of rewarding and punishing according to
desert is justice, and is also a justice cognisable by our
natural faculties ; predestinating justice is as real justice
as natural, but is not thus cognisable. The one is justice
and also apparent justice ; the other is justice, but not
apparent justice i.e. apparent mjustice.
But such language as this is very inapplicable to a
doctrine of predestination, which is no more than the as-
that God has determined from all eternity to admit
some portions of mankind and not others to certain privi
leges and means of grace ; or, that God has determined to
reward or punish those respectively who He sees will be
virtuous or vicious. There is nothing mysterious in the
doctrine of predestination as thus explained, nothing
from which natural feeling or reason shrinks, nothing
which requires any deep submission of the intellect to
accept. That God should reward the virtuous and punish
the wicked is the simple rule of justice, and that He should
1 De Pecc. Merit, et Kern. 1. 2. c. xviii.
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