The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

for them. This error, so far as its discussion properly comes under the head
of Original Sin, has already been met. The ampler discussion of the
question belongs to the Article on Baptism.
Here then we reach the close of the positive part of the Article of the
Augsburg Confession on Original Sin: the rest is antithetical. This Article
of the Confession, as we have seen, is grounded in every line, and in every
word, on God's sure testimony, and proves, in common with the other
parts of that matchless Symbol in which it stands, that when our fathers
sought in God's Word for light, sought with earnest prayer, and with the
tears of holy ardor, for the guidance of the Holy Spirit into the deep
meaning of His Word, they sought not in vain.
Fourteenth Thesis. Pelagianism in antithesis to the Scriptural
doctrine of Original Sin.
XIV. In maintaining the true doctrine of Original Sin, our Church, of
necessity, condemns:
1. The Pelagians; that is, it condemns them in their doctrine, not by
any means in their person, so far as that is separable from their doctrine.
2. It condemns, in the same way, all others who deny that the vice of
origin is sin; and
3. It condemns all who contend that man, by his own strength, as a
rational being, can be justified before God; and who thus diminish the
glory of the merit of Christ, and of His benefits.
Pelagius.
Pelagius was a British monk, who flourished under the Emperors
Arcadius, Theodosius, and Honorius. About the year 415 he began to
teach unscriptural views in regard to the freedom of the human will.
Violently opposing the Manichaeans, who supposed a corruption in man
which involved an essential evil in his very substance, he ran to the
opposite extreme.
The errors of Pelagius, which our fathers had in view in this solemn
rejection of them in the Confession, are not difficult to ascertain. Our
confessors knew the views of Pelagius mainly from the powerful
confutation of them in the works of Augustine, who styled him the enemy
of grace, and to these we must go to ascertain what they meant to condemn
in condemning