Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

CHAP. x. of Predestination. 291
heathen or professedly Christian, is involved in this conclu
sion, and may demand admission to the benefit of that
explanation which the particular case of infants has evoked.
The life which is conducted upon principles of honesty, jus
tice, and reason, though it be not upon that of Christian
faith, the morality of the conscientious man of the world,
in a word, the well ordered natural life, though below
the spiritual, may claim not to be condemned. And while
the formal theology of the Augustinian allows no interval
between the child of (rod and the child of the devil, the
faithful and the unbelieving, the spiritual and the carnal
man, and their respective ends, eternal happiness and eter
nal misery ; a modification of the meaning of a term, iu
one particular case, undermines in principle this whole
division ; punishment reduced from its positive to a merely
negative and privative sense, becomes another word for a
lower reward, and admits to a valuable and a substantial,
though not the highest, happiness, both in this life and the
next, that not inconsiderable portion of mankind who are
moral without being spiritual, well disposed without faith,
and reasonable without illumination.
It may be added, that the difficulty involved in these
considerations is one which meets us on either theory, that
of necessity or of freewill. The necessitarianism indeed of
Aquinas marks the natural and the spiritual
life alike as
creations of Grod but however we ; may account for them,
the natural life and the spiritual life, in the sense in which
they have been spoken of, exist as facts in the world ; and
we see these two moral classes and types around us. Scrip
ture speaks indeed, speaks only of a way which leadeth to
life, and a way which leadeth to salvation ; and separates
the few who attain to eternal glory from a wicked world.
But it must be confessed that, when we look at the world
around us, the application of the truth of Scripture is not
free from difficulty, and that it depends much on the frame
of mind which we assume, and the point of view which we
adopt, whether society at large most aptly confirms the
scriptural position, or contradicts it. In one
apparently
aspect all is mixture and balance in the world of moral lite
u 2