Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

CHAP. vii. of Final Perseverance. 183
not his absolutely, unless they are his then ; they
wait in
suspense for that final appropriation. The question of
property in the case of happiness or pleasure is perfectly
simple ; for happiness being only a present sensation, can
only belong to the present possessor, but goodness
than present action, and therefore wants another proprietor
is more
besides the present agent.
Indeed, one view which is held of change of character
in persons rejects the idea of real or substantial change in
them altogether, and, whatever they become at last, regards
them as having been really of that character from the first.
According to this view, change is interpretative simply and
not actual, as regards the man s substantial temper ; it only
shows that his former character was superficial, and that
he had at the time another underneath it, which was really
his character, in spite of appearances. Thus the end in
and we wait
terprets the whole of life from its beginning,
in suspense till it arrives, in order to ascertain not what a
man will on the whole turn out, but what he has been all
along. This view rests for its ground upon a certain pre
sumed necessity for a unity of the moral being. It appears
to be dividing one person into two, to say that he was once
a good man, and is now a bad man ; and the division of
his moral unity is considered to be as much a contradiction
as the division of his personal. The popular aspect, then,
of change of character, as an actual change or division of
it, is used as a convenience, just as a metaphor might be
used which expressed a truth with practical correctness and
perhaps even greater vigour than a literal statement would,
while another and a deeper view is really taken of such
change.
And this explanation of change of character is un
doubtedly a natural and true one, properly understood, and
with a certain limitation. A man who changes his cha
racter cannot indeed be said to have had his later character
before in the same sense in which he has it after, nor can
such a meaning be intended ; at the same time he must
have had this character before in the sense of having its
seed or root, that out of which it grew. For it is contrary