e shadow of Alaric's siege began to
fall upon the city. In those eight years he lived an exemplary life. He
urged upon others the necessity of so living, and the uselessness of
religious observance combined with laxity of life. It is easy to see how
this admirable line of teaching might be diverted, by the pressure of
controversion, into a declaration that all men could, if they pleased, so
live; that it was a matter of will, not of grace, a man's turning to God
and living as a believer should live. This was quite different from the
controversy between faith and works, which some have believed to exist
between St. Paul and St. James. It was the controversy between the
necessity of the grace of God for a man to live as he should, and the
comparative subordination of grace to the sufficient power of the will of
man. Pelagius held that if the will was not free, man was a mere puppet:
if the will was not free, man was not responsible. From this position,
which is one side of a great truth, he passed to the denial of the need
for God's grace, that is, he denied the other side of the same great
truth; or he so defined grace as to make it a mere matter of suitable
circumstances.

A great controversy on a great subject can scarcely stop short at its
first limits. Other points rise, unexpected results follow. I venture to
say that it is impossible to go on pressing one side of this great and
lasting controversy on the freedom of the will, to the disregard of the
other side, without arriving at results which shock the reverent common
sense of the devout Christian.

It is clear, for example, that when Pelagius asserted the freedom of man's
will to turn to God, he denied the Catholic doctrine of original sin, and
denying that, he denied so far the need for baptism. Indeed he taught
directly, it was in fact the key of his position, that when man sinned he
sinned after the example which Adam had set, not because he had received
the taint of sin by his descent from Adam. When pressed on this question
of the need of baptism, he allowed that there was the need, but he put it
on a different basis from that which his opponents took. It was not
necessary for salvation, he maintained; but for those who desired to
reach the full Christian heaven, a state different from that of ordinary
salvation, for them it was necessary. Entrance to that higher order of the
heavenly life was not to be obtained without baptism. When pressed again,
on the q