tle casuistry which was undermining the morality of the age, and
destroying the authority of Saint Augustine on some of the most vital
principles which entered into the creed of the Catholic Church. Thus
Jonathan Edwards, the ablest theologian which this country has seen,
controverted the fashionable Arminianism of his day. Thus some great
intellectual giant will certainly and in due time appear to demolish
with scathing irony the theories and speculations of some of the
progressive schools of our day, and present their absurdities and
boastings and pretensions in such a ridiculous light that no man with
any intellectual dignity will dare to belong to their fraternity, unless
he impiously accepts--sometimes with ribald mockeries--the logical
sequence of their doctrines.

Now it was not the Manicheans or Donatists who were the most dangerous
people in the time of Augustine,--nor were their doctrines likely to be
embraced by the Christian schools, especially in the West; but it was
the Pelagians who in high places were assailing the Pauline theology.
And they advocated principles which lay at the root of most of the
subsequent controversies of the Church. They were intellectual men,
generally good men, who could not be put down, and who would thrive
under any opposition. Augustine did not attack the character of these
men, but rendered a great service to the Church by pointing out, clearly
and luminously, the antichristian character of their theories, when
rigorously pushed out, by a remorseless logic, to their
necessary sequence.

Whatever value may be attached to that science which is based on
deductions drawn from the truths of revelation, certain it is that it
was theology which most interested Christians in the time of Augustine,
as in the time of Athanasius; and his controversy with the Pelagians
made then a mighty stir, and is at the root of half the theological
discussions from that age to ours. If we would understand the changes of
human thought in the Middle Ages, if we would seek to know what is most
vital in Church history, that celebrated Pelagian controversy claims our
special attention.

It was at a great crisis in the Church when a British monk of
extraordinary talents, persuasive eloquence, and great attainments,--a
man accustomed to the use of dialectical weapons and experienced by
extensive travels, ambitious, ardent, plausible, adroit,--appeared among
the churches and advanced a new philosophy. His