Quesnel: Moral Reflections on the Gospels Vol 1

XXXI
cramped, by these decisions. His noble spirit, taught
of God, and raised upwards by his grace, is fettered
by the bonds of educational prepossession, and church
decrees, and writings of fathers. This is the chief
defect in <strong>Quesnel</strong>, as it is in most of the Roman
CathoHc writers. I know not one that holds clearly
and consistently the doctrine of a free justification as
taught by St. Paul, and defended by Luther and the
Reformers.
But this defect being qualified by an unreserved
belief in the doctrine of grace, in the merciful election
of God, the utter inefficiency of man to any thing
good, and the reward of mercy, was, in <strong>Quesnel</strong>'s case,
as in St. Augustine's, not a fundamental error, but
a want of order and clearness in his theological creed.
Hear him speaking thus, {Matt. xxv. 35.) " Good
works done for God's sake, through Jesus Christ,
in the Spirit of the Father and the Son, are the
price of the glory prepared for the elect ; prepared
without merit by a bounty altogether free; bestowed
on works as their reward, but on such works as are
sanctified by the Spirit of Christ, and are the gifts
of God."
Another confusion in our Author's mind respects
the sacrament of baptism, to which he seems uni-
formly to attribute the actual communication of the
divine life, and the positive infusion of the new prin-
ciple of grace ; though no writer can more strongly
insist on the necessity of a spiritual change in every
human being, in order to salvation. To attribute
too much to baptism as an opus operatum^ is not,
however, a defect peculiar to Roman Catholics.— It
is blind human nature fond of substituting the sign
for the thing signified.