Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

Note VIL 343
for the act is not contrary to the faculty, and therefore
can do nothing towards its destruction. As a consequent,
of this I infer that there is no natural necessity of
sinning,
that there is no sinful action to which naturally we are
but it is our own choice that we sin.
determined ;
p. 88.
This is the Pelagian argument for freewill which we
meet with in 8. Augustine ; and it has the one-sidcdness
of that argument. Nobody, of course, can d ny what is
asserted here, if considered as one side of the truth ;
true that the will must have the power of choosing ;
it is
that
we are conscious of this power; that there is no natural
necessity for sinning ; that there is no sinful action to
which we are naturally determined. All this enters into
our meaning of the term will, and our consciousness of its
operations. But there is another side of the whole truth
respecting the will to which S. Augustine appeals
will is present with me, but how to perform that which is
: To
good I know not. For the good that I would [ do not,
but the evil that I would not that I do. Jeremy Taylor
appeals, as the Pelagians did, to a certain sense of bare
ability to do right which we retain under all circumstances
and states of mind, as if it were the whole truth on this
subject ; he relies absolutely upon it. He goes even to the
length to which the Pelagians went, of saying
that the
power of the will cannot be lessened by any act of the
same faculty,
so that however long a man may continue in
a course of sin, and however inveterate the habit he may
contract, he has still as much freewill as ever, and on the
very next occasion of acting is as able to act aright as ever.
But this is evidently, and on principles
of common sense,
untrue. Jeremy Taylor sees only that side of the human
will which favours his own argument ; he sees in it a simple
unity, a pure undivided faculty, a power of doing anything
to which there is no hindrance but the will is a
;
physical
,
and in
mixed and complex thing, exhibiting oppositions
congruities. He proceeds upon an abstract idea of treewil
there cannot be a will that cannot choose but the
;
question is, what is the actual and real will of which we
find ourselves possessed ?