Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

Augustinian Doctrine
CHAP. YTI.
of his goodness.
For there is a peculiarity
in the composi
tion or organisation
of moral character which makes it
apply.
It might appear, indeed, at first sight, that as
happiness is present sensation, so goodness is present action;
and therefore, that if any portion, large or small, of a man s
life has been conducted well, there has been so much good
ness which cannot be reversed, whatever state of sin may
succeed it. But this is not a true statement of the case.
Present action is certainly present goodness, goodness for
the time ; but goodness for the time is not goodness abso
lutely. Moral character is subject to this law, that change
in it affects not only the individual s present life, but his
him with it. The
relation to his former, disconnecting
change from bad to good conduct disconnects him with the
bad ; the change from good to bad disconnects him with
the good, (rood after bad and bad after good, exert each
a rejective power over the past, to his loss and to his relief
respectively. For a man cannot turn from bad to good
conduct sincerely and heartily without such a sense of
aversion, grief, and disgust for his former life as amounts
to a putting it away from him, a severance of it from his
proper self; and in like manner he cannot turn from a good
behaviour to a bad entirely, without such an indifference to
or contempt of virtue as amounts to a disowning and rejec
tion even of his own. Thus he loses his property in one
set of actions as he turns to another. The actions, indeed,
that he has performed remain for ever his in the sense that
he is the person that performed them ; but they cease to be
his in the sense that they affect his character. From this
law, then, it follows necessarily, that the character of the
man is the character which he has at last, inasmuch as he has
no other but that, being dispossessed, by the fact of having
it, of any different one which he may have had before. The
question of property in acts is the whole of the question of
the goodness or badness of the man ; for how can his pre
vious actions, good or bad, affect Mm, except they belong
to him ? This law, then, determines the question of pro
perty in acts, and it determines it by the fact of what come
latest. The man s previous virtue or vice for the time are