aul's idea when he writes: "And if by grace, it is not now
by works: otherwise grace is no more grace."(6) It is likewise the meaning
of St. Augustine when he says, in his Homilies on the Gospel of St. John,
that grace is "something gratuitously given ... as a present, not in
return for something else."(7)

2. NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL GRACE.--Grace is not necessarily supernatural.
Sacred Scripture and the Fathers sometimes apply the word to purely
natural gifts. We petition God for our daily bread, for good health, fair
weather and other temporal favors, and we thank Him for preserving us from
pestilence, famine, and war, although these are blessings which do not
transcend the order of nature.(8)

a) Our petitions for purely natural favors are inspired by the conviction
that creation itself, and everything connected therewith, is a gratuitous
gift of God. This conviction is well founded. God was under no necessity
of creating anything: creation was an act of His free-will. Again, many of
the favors to which human nature, as such, has a claim, are free gifts
when conferred upon the individual. Good health, fortitude, talent, etc.,
are natural graces, for which we are allowed, nay obliged, to petition
God. The Pelagians employed this truth to conceal a pernicious error when
they unctuously descanted on the magnitude and necessity of grace as
manifested in creation. It was by such trickery that their leader
succeeded in persuading the bishops assembled at the Council of Diospolis
or Lydda (A. D. 415) that his teaching was quite orthodox. St. Augustine
and four other African bishops later reported to Pope Innocent I, that if
these prelates had perceived that Pelagius meant to deny that grace by
which we are Christians and sons of God, they would not have listened to
him so patiently, and that, consequently, no blame attached to these
judges because they simply took the term "grace" in its ecclesiastical
sense.(9)

b) Generally speaking, however, the term "grace" is reserved for what are
commonly called the supernatural gifts of God, the merely preternatural as
well as the strictly supernatural.(10) In this sense "grace" is as sharply
opposed to purely natural favors as nature is opposed to the supernatural.

The importance of the distinction between supernatural and purely natural
grace will appear from an analysis of the concept itself. Considered as
gifts of God, the strictly supernatural graces (_e.g._, justification,