Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

350
Note VIIL
thus constructs a kind of indirect vicarious punishment,
which is inflicted for our own personal sins, but inflicted
more severely on account of Adam s sin.
Jeremy Taylor falls into all these forced and incon
sistent modes of explanation, in consequence of the funda
mental misapprehension with which he starts as to the
sense and mode in which the truth of original sin is held.
Had he perceived properly that it was and professed to be
a mysterious as distinguished from an intelligible truth,
he would have seen that all these charges of injustice
against the doctrine were erroneous, and these consequent
attempts at a modification of it superfluous and unneces
sary. The profession of a mystery disarms the opposition
of reason ; for what has reason to object to in that which
it does not understand ? What has reason before it in
such a case ? One who holds the doctrine in this sense
can hold it in its greatest strictness, without the slightest
collision with reason or justice, and is spared this vain
struggle with Scripture.
NOTE VIIL p. 35.
THE doctrine of predestination in Scripture is not uncom
that doc
monly interpreted in such a way as to represent
trine, not as opposed to any counter truth of freewill, but
as itself harmonising and coinciding with it. Predesti
nation and election are interpreted to mean predestination
and election to privileges or means of grace, which depend
on freewill for their cultivation. But this is certainly not
the natural sense of the words in Scripture.
In the text
Matt. xx. 1 6, Many are called but few chosen, or elect ;
4 elect evidently means elect to eternal life itself, and not
merely to the opportunity of attaining it. The same may
be said of Matt. xxiv. 22 : For the elect s sake those days
shall be shortened, the elect being evidently here the
saints, the good, those who will be saved, not those who
have merely been admitted into the Christian Church
and the means of obtaining salvation, many of whom
being wicked men and enemies of God, Grod would not
for their sakes perform this special act of mercy. On