the primary assumption common to all
Augustinian systems that man is devoid of any native capacities which
have to do with spiritual salvation. He begins instead with man as he
knows him--a sadly marred and hampered being, but still possessed of a
potentially Divine nature, and capable of co-operating, by inward
choices and decisions, with the ceaseless effort of God to win him
completely to Himself. His little book, _What does it mean when the
Scripture says God does and works Good and Evil_, is throughout a
protest against the idea of "election," which, he says, involves "a
limitation of the Love of God," and it is a penetrating account of the
way in which man by his free choices makes his eternal destiny.[15]
"God compels nobody, for He will have no one saved by compulsion."[16]
"God has given freewill to men that they may choose for themselves,
either the good or the bad. Christ said to His disciples, 'Will ye
{23} go away?' as though He would say, 'You are under no
compulsion.'"[17] "God," he says again in the _Widerruf_, "forces no
one, for love cannot compel, and God's service is, therefore, a thing
of complete freedom."[18]

It is freedom, too, which explains the fact of sin. God is in no way
the author of sin; He is wholly good; He can do nothing but what is
good; He ordains no one to sin; He is the instigator of no evil at all.
All the sin and moral evil of the world have come from our own evil
choices and purposes. "The thing which hinders and has always hindered
is that our wills are different from God's will. God never seeks
Himself in His willing--we do. There is no other way to blessedness
than to lose one's self-will."[19] "He who surrenders his
selfishness," he says in another treatise, "and uses the freedom which
God has given him, and fights the spiritual battle as God wills that
such battles are to be fought and as Christ fought His, can in his
measure be like Christ."[20] The whole problem of salvation for him
is, as we shall see, to bring about such a transformation in man that
sin ceases, and the least thing thought, said, or done out of harmony
with the will of God becomes bitter and painful to the soul.[21] "To
be a Christian," he once wrote, "is to be in measure like Christ, and
to be ready to be offered as He gave Himself to be offered. I do not
say that we _are_ perfect as Christ was, but I say rather that we are
to seek the perfection which Christ never lost. Christ calls Himsel