Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

308 Conchtsion. CHAP. xi.
one-sided theories are a stumbling block to ordinary minds,
tending to confuse their reason and moral perceptions.
Still, regarding the error of the predestinarian apart from
those consequences which it tends practically to produce
in the minds of the vulgar, but which are not legitimately
deducible from it, it cannot perhaps be called much more
than a metaphysical mistake, an overlooking of a truth
in human nature ; a truth indistinctly perceived indeed,
but still perceived in that sense and mode in which many
other recognised truths are perceived. The predestinarian
passes over the incomplete perception we have of our ori
ginality as agents, because his mind is preoccupied with a
rival truth. But this cannot in itself be called an offence
a well-intended
against piety : rather it is occasioned by
though excessive regard to a great maxim of piety. He is
unreasonably jealous for the Divine Attribute, and afraid
that any original power assigned to man will endanger the
Divine. He thus allows the will of man no original part
in good action, but throws all goodness back upon the
Deity, as the sole Source and Creator of it, forming and
fashioning the human soul as the potter moulds the clay.
It may be said, indeed, that his doctrine, in attributing
injustice to the Deity, is inconsistent with piety
: but he
does not attribute injustice to the Deity; but only a
mode of acting, which, as conceived and understood by
us, is unjust ; or which we cannot explain in consistency
with justice.
II. Pelagianism, on the other hand, offends against the
first principles of piety, and opposes the great religious
instincts and ideas of mankind. It first tampers with the
sense of sin. The sense of sin as actually entertained by
the human mind that sense of it which we ;
perceive, ob
serve, and are conscious of, as a great religious fact a part
of our moral nature whenever sufficiently enlightened is
not a simple, but a mysterious and a complex sense ; not
confined to positive action, as the occasion of it, but going
further back and attaching itself to desire ; nor attaching
itself to desire only as the effect of free choice, but to