Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

The Argument
CHAP. I.
does not
But though such a mode of acting on (rod s part
contradiction, it must be allowed to be
involve any positive
at variance with our reasonable notions of the Divine deal-
ino-s; for what is this but to institute the first dispensation
over again, and repeat
a trial which has been undergone
once, and had its issue ? Suppose a man carried away by
a torrent, to master which he had proved himself unequal,
would it be a reasonable or consistent act to take him out
only to recruit his strength for a second resistance to it ?
So, after man in the exercise of freewill has fallen and lost
freewill, is it not a mockery to save him by giving him free
will again? What will he do with the gift, but tall again ?
On such a mode of Divine dealing, the fall may be re
peated indefinitely, and the Divine purposes for the salvation
of man may remain in perpetual suspense, and never attain
completion.
The principle, then, being acknowledged that God does
not repeat His dispensations,
it follows that a second dis
pensation cannot be the first one a second time instituted,
but must be a different one in itself; divided substantially
from the old one in the nature, character, and effect of the
aid which it supplies to man for attaining salvation. A
dispensation which left the salvation of man dependent on
his will, was highly suitable as a first one ; suitable alike
to the justice of the Creator and the powers of the untried
creature, and such as we should naturally expect at the
beginning of things : but such having been the nature of
the first, the second must, for that very reason, be a dis
pensation of a different kind, effecting its design not by a
conditional, but by an absolute saving act.
And independently of all reasoning, the fact is plain
from Scripture that the new dispensation differs substan
tially from the old in the nature of the aid which it
supplies to man for attaining salvation. God is not repre
sented in Scripture as repeating his dispensations, but as
altering them according to the wants of man. The Gospel
aid to salvation, then, is, in accordance with the fundamen
tal difference in man s own state, fundamentally different
from that which man had before the fall ; and if funda-