Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

CHAP. in. The Pelagian Controversy. 63
essential to goodness, neither Grod, nor the angels, nor the
saints would be good.
Thus easily and summarily refuted, however, his argu
ment involved a mixture of truth and error. So much
must be conceded to the Pelagian, that the trial of the will
is the necessary condition of the highest kind of virtue that
Of the Divine
comes within our cognisance and experience.
Nature, as being beyond our comprehension, we cannot
speak, though we know that it must be infinitely good,
while it must also be without trial. But the assertion is
true of the moral creature in this present state. For what
ever may be the sweetness of the good affections, even
though we could imagine them from the first in full pos
session of the mind, and so powerfully moving it, that it
felt no inclination to act otherwise than as they dictated ;
even though we could imagine such an uninterrupted flow
of virtue from a source of feeling,
such a result could not
bear a comparison with the victory of the will. The good
affections are aids and supports to goodness ; aids and sup
ports indeed not casual or adventitious, but permanent,
and belonging to our nature ; yet having the effect of
saving pain and effort. But in trial we have to act with
out this aid. For though even the will itself cannot be said
to act without affection, inasmuch as some love of what is
good appears to enter as an ingredient into any decision
in favour of it, we are properly said to act from the will
as distinct from the affections, in the case of trial ; such
trial being in truth caused by the balance of the affections
being on the side of evil. Trial, therefore, throws the man
upon himself in a deep and peculiar sense. He is reduced
to the narrowest condition, and with all the excesses of a
bountifully constituted nature cut mate conscience and the bare
off, sustains from ulti
substance of the soul, the
fight with evil. But such a combat tests and elicits an
inner strength which no dominion of the good affections,
however continuous, could do. The greater the desertion
of the moral being, and his deprivation of aids, the deeper
appears his fidelity ; the triumph is greater in proportion
to the scantiness of the means with which it is gained ;