Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

CHAP. x. of Predestination. 271
and supplies the complement ? Not, according to Aquinas.
The continuance of this state of things is, from moment to
moment, a gratuitous act of God s sustaining power, who
keeps up this moral and spiritual fabric, as He does that
of the material world, so long as it suits His sovereign
pleasure, and no longer. The creature cannot conditionate
this Will Supreme, or impose any obligation in justice
upon it, in this matter. Thus, guarded at both ends from
dependence on the human will, given as the free gift of
God in the first instance, and sustained by His absolute
power afterwards, justifying grace gratia gratumfaciens,
was effective or irresistible grace.
So far, however, theThomist doctrine of grace was only
the Augustinian doctrine, which was a perfectly simple
one, regarding the operation of grace as the action on each
successive occasion of Divine power ; upon which action
the effect of goodness in the soul followed, and upon its
cessation or interruption ceased. But the schoolmen added
to this doctrine a distinction, which, though founded in
reason and nature, ended, in their hands, in greatly bur
dening and it. perplexing Aristotle had laid down the
very natural position, that what constituted a man good,
was not the good act on the particular occasion, but a
habit of mind : this habit was productive, indeed, of acts,
and defined ag such ; but still it was from having this
source of acts in his mind, that a man was good, rather
than from the acts considered in themselves. As grace
was concerned, then, with the production of goodness, the
schoolmen, incorporating the Aristotelian doctrine of habits
with the doctrine of grace, maintained that God imparted
goodness in the shape of habit ; and the result was, the
distinction between habitual and actual grace gratia
in their
habitualis et actualis l
, a distinction which,
1 Homo ad recte vivendum dunt proportionem naturae: alio
duplicitur auxilio Dei indiget : uno modo indiget homo auxilio gratiae,
quidem modo quantum ad aliquod ut a Deo moveatur ad agendum. . . .
habituate donum, per quod natura et hoc propter duo ; primo quidem
humana corrupta sanetur, et etiam ratione generali, propter hoc quod
sanata elevetur ad operanda opera
meritoria vitae aeternae, quse
nulla res create potest in quemcunque
exce- actum prodire,
nisi virtute motionis