Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

CHAP. v. of Predestination. 145
larly wonderful and wonderfully singular adoption ; so that,
without any preceding merits, that Man was from the
beginning of his human life the Son of God, even as he
was one Person with the Word, which is without beginning.
For no one is so blindly ignorant as to dare to say that,
born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, the Son of
the merit of a sinless life and the
Man, he obtained, by
good use of freewill, the Divine Sonship ;
The
to say this in
the face of the text :
"
Word was made flesh. For
where did this take place but in the s Virgin womb, where
the Man Christ began to be That gratuitous nati
vity joined in unity of person man with God, the flesh with
the Word. Good works then followed that nativity, and
did not merit it. There was no risk, when human nature
was thus ineffably taken into unity of Person by the Word
of God, that it should sin in the exercise of freewill: that
nature being so assumed by God that it admitted of no
evil motion of the will. As, therefore, this Mediator was,
by reason of his assumption, never evil but always good ;
so those whom God redeems by his blood are made by him
l
out of evil.
eternally good
This is an argument, however, for predestination which
admits of much the same answer which was given to the
argument drawn from original sin. The sinless life of the
Man Jesus was undoubtedly an infallible consequence of
the Incarnation ; for He could not be one with God and
be capable of sinning. His goodness was therefore a ne
cessary goodness ; and one Man, in being predestinated
from all eternity to a union with God, was predestinated
to a perfect holiness. The Incarnation is thus a premiss
for a doctrine of predestination. But it should be remem
bered what kind of premiss this is, that it is not a truth of
nature or reason which we comprehend, but a mysterious
and incomprehensible truth and ; therefore that the infer
ence drawn from it is alike a mystery and not an ascer
tained and complete truth, like a logical consequence from
a known premiss.
The conclusion, then, to which S. Augustine s general
1 De Corr. et Grat. c. xi.
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