was a new and unlawful attempt of the civil magistrate to take cognizance of an ecclesiastical cause' a boldness consistent with his peaceful virtues, and derived from the now acknowledged dignity of his profession. The deed was perpetrated in his absence, and he then protested against the act, and withdrew from the communion of the murderers. The memory

of this excellent prelate has been disfigured by the credulous historian, who intended to be his eulogist; and we would willingly believe, that the stupendous miracles_so profusely attributed to him were created by the veneration of the vulgar, or even by the enthusiasm of the writer, not by the deliberate imposture of a pious Christian *.

Sulpicius proceeds to say, that the death of Priscillian was so far from repressing the heresy of which he had been the author, that it conduced greatly to confirm and extend it; for his followers, who before had reverenced him as a pious man, began to worship him as a martyr. The bodies of those who had suffered death were carried back to Spain, and interred with great solemnity; and to swear by the name of Priscillian was practised as a religious act.' Such were the immediate consequences of his execution; it does not appear, however, that his opinious took any deep or lasting root, or ever again became the occasion of offence or confusion to the Church.

III. The same age, almost the same year, which witnessed the death of one heretic for opinions, among which was a rigid, undue

admiration of bodily austerities and religious seclusion, beheld Jovinian. with less surprise the banishment of another heretic, for daring

to raise his voice in disparagement of those same practices. Jovinian had received his education in an Italian convent, but the common feelings and principles of nature were not extinguished in him. He left his retirement, and published a volume in which he rashly endeavoured to show, that those who followed the rules of the Gospel, amid the temptations and perplexities of social life, possessed as just a claim to the rewards of futurity as those who observed the same rules in solitude; that pleasures are not necessarily sins; that temperance is as excellent a virtue as abstinence; and that the chaste enjoyments of marriage are as agreeable to the eye of a benevolent Deity, as the mortifications of unnatural celibacyt. Jerome, 'the monk of the age,' poured out in reply much passionate declamation in praise of the established superstitions, and some calumnious invective against the person of the reformer; and as the current already ran too strongly in his favour, his clamours were echoed by the zealous multitude, while the wise were constrained to sorrow and silence. Among Christian Churches the foremost in the extinction of reason and true Christianity was the Church of Rome. Her impatience to crush the dangerous

*Men of probity in other respects, and fully persuaded of the truth of Christianity, (and such I take Martin, Paulinus, and Sulpicius to have been) having found in the populace a strong taste for the marvellous, and no capacity for better proofs, judged it expedient rather to leave them to their prejudices, and to make use of those prejudices to confirm them in the true faith, than to undertake the vain task of curing them of their superstition, and run the risk of plunging them into vice and unbelief. Therefore they humoured the trick, and complied with the fashion for the good of those who were deceived.' Le Clerc, Bibl. Chois., ap. Jortin, ad aun. 402. This seems to be the simplest solution of the difficulty.

+ He was also charged with the speculative error, that all who have been regenerated by baptism, with perfect faith, were indefectible, and could not fail of their heavenly recompense. He may have held this opinion-but the points on which the controversy turned, were those which much more nearly affected the practice of mankind.

It should be mentioned that the reply of Jerome was not written till after the condemnation of the offender, in consequence of some progress which the opinions are said for the moment to have made at Rome.

innovator was emulated by St. Ambrose at Milan; and the opinions of Jovinian were formally condemned, in the year 390, by a Council there held by that Prelate. But the work was not yet complete; the Emperor Honorius was prevailed upon to interpose the secular authority in the same cause; and the following was his proclamation- The complaint of some Bishops mentions as a grievance that Jovinian assembles sacrilegious meetings without the walls of the most holy city. Wherefore we ordain that the above-mentioned be seized and whipped, together with his abettors and attendants, and confined to some place of banishment; and that the machinator himself be immediately sent away to the island of Boa.' Boa was a wretched rock, near the Illyrian coast; and in this exile, Jovi nian, during the remainder of his life, expiated the crime of proclaiming in the fourth century truths which no one had dreamed of disputing in the second, and which are defended with almost equal clearness by the authority of reason and of revelation.

This example did not prevent another and a bolder attempt at Reformation-for as the corruptions of that time had not yet subVigilantius. sided into habits; as they could not yet plead prescription and long familiar practice; as they were not yet consecrated by the claims of hereditary reverence, it was natural that the voice of reason should sometimes raise itself in faint opposition to their progress. Very early in the following century Vigilantius, a native of Gaul, who had performed the functions of presbyter in Spain, and afterwards, by his travels through Egypt and Palestine, enlightened and enriched a vigorous understanding and character, boldly avowed his disgust at the growing abuses of the day. Nor did he confine his attack to one or two points; he directed it against the castles and strong holds of superstition. He denied that the tombstones of the martyrs were proper objects of homage and worship; he denied the holiness of places so sanctified, and censured the pilgrimages that were made to them. He derided the prodigies by which the temples of the martyrs were so much celebrated, and condemned the vigils performed in them; and he even ventured to assert that the custom of burning tapers at their tombs, in the face of day, was a foolish imitation of the Pagan practice. He denied the efficacy of prayers addressed to departed saints, and spake lightly of fasting and mortifications, and celibacy, and the various and useless austerities of the monastic life. And lastly, he disparaged the merit of that suspicious charity which lavished large sums for devout purposes, in fancied atonement for unrepented sin. The clamorous guardian of ecclesiastical depravity was again awakened by this second invasion of abuses so dear to him; and immediately, from his monastery at Bethlehem, he assailed the Reformer with such overbearing vehemence of plausible and popular argument, that the good Vigilantius deemed it wiser to retire from the conflict than to expose himself to unprofitable martyrdom. And in fact we find that this heresy (so it was designated) gained so little ground, that the interference of a Council was not required to extinguish it. The principal credit of both these triumphs is due to St. Jerome than whom the Church, in her whole history, has not ever listened to a more pernicious counsellor.

IV. The controversy to which we next proceed was on a subject of the deepest and most permanent importance to the whole The Pelagian Christian world; and though, through the perverse misControversy. application of human ingenuity, dissensions have flowed from it, to the great disturbance of former ages, and to the division even of the present, we cannot affect either surprise or

regret, that a question of so much moment should have agitated thus early the minds of pious men-for it went to the bottom of the Christian doctrine respecting the original corruption of human nature, and the necessity of divine grace, to enlighten the understanding and to purify the

heart.

It is in all cases extremely difficult, in the statement of those antient controversies, to do justice to the arguments, or even to the opinions, maintained by either party-because these, in the process of the dispute, became closely, often inseparably, connected with consequences imputed to them by the adversary as necessary, and disclaimed by the advocate as unfair and arbitrary. So that those very subtilties of reasoning, which professed to unfold and explain the difference, did in fact only produce perplexity. In the Pelagian controversy this difficulty is increased by two causes: first, that we know little of the opinions of the heretic, except from the writings of his opponents; secondly, that the fear of public condemnation, and perhaps temporal punishment, occasionally led him into unworthy equivocation; so that his expressions are sometimes such as seemingly to convey an assertion of orthodoxy at variance with the whole drift of his previous argument. Again, the mere facts of the controversy have been variously related, according as the opinions of the relators have been tinged, however slightly, by the opposite colours of Pelagianism or Fatalism. We must endeavour, however, to disentangle the truth from these intricacies.

Pelagius was a native of Britain, probably of Wales; the associate of his travels, his heresy, and his celebrity, was Celestius, an Irishman: both were monks; both, too, were men of considerable talents, and no just suspicions have ever been thrown on the sanctity of their moral conduct. They arrived at Rome in the very beginning of the fifth century, and remained there in the undisturbed, and perhaps obscure, profession of their opinions till the year 410, when they retired, on the Gothic invasion, the former to Palestine, the latter to Carthage. Here the peculiar doctrines of Celestius did not long escape detection; they first attracted the attention of the Deacon, Paulinus of Milan, who arraigned and caused them to be condemned in a Council held at Carthage in the year 412*. It does not appear that Augustin assisted at this Council, as he was still engaged in pursuing his advantages over the Donatists; however, he did not delay to enter the field against the new adversary, and very soon afterwards assailed the infant heresy, both by his sermons and writings†.

The errors here charged against Celestius were comprised in seven articles—1. That Adam was created mortal, and would have died, whether he had sinned or not; 2. that the sin of Adam injured himself alone, not the human race; 3. that infants, at their birth, are in the condition of Adam before his sin; 4. that neither the death nor sin of Adam is the cause of man's mortality, nor the resurrection of Christ of his resurrection; 5. that man may be saved by the Law as well as by the Gospel; 6. that before the coming of Christ there had been men without sin; 7. that infants inherit eternal life without baptism. These were partly disclaimed or explained away, but enough remained to shew the real nature of his opinions, though we may observe that the words free-will and grace do not yet appear in the controversy.

†The natural causes of the opposition of the Church to the Pelagian opinions are ingeniously and reasonably discussed by Guizot (Cours d'Histoire Moderne, Leçon V.) We shall transcribe one passage, which deserves attention, and which cannot be condensed: Augustin, who was the chief among the doctors of the Church, was peculiarly called upon to maintain the general system of its belief. Now, the notions of Pelagius and Celestius appeared to him to be in contradiction with some of the fundamental points of Christian faith, especially the doctrine of original sin and that of redemption. He attacked them, then, in three characters;-as philosopher, because their science of human nature was, in his view, narrow and incomplete; as practical reformer and governor of the

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Dissatisfied with the easy triumph which attended his exertions in his own Church, he followed the fugitive into the East, and having ascertained that Pelagius maintained the same errors in Palestine, he occasioned him to be accused before two Councils; the one at Jerusalem *, the other at Diospolis. John, Bishop of Jerusalem, was favourable to the cause, perhaps to the tenets of Pelagius; and thus, partly by his influence, partly from the absence of any fixed rule of orthodoxy on those particular subjects in the Eastern Church, partly from the very modified statement of his own opinions delivered to the Councils by Pelagius, that sectarian, in spite of the violent opposition of Jerome, was acquitted in both. This event took place in 415; and in the year following, Augustin, undaunted by this repulse, again assembled Councils in Africa and Numidia, and again condemned the offensive doctrines.

The scene of action was then transferred to Rome, on the appeal, as it would seem, of the two heretics, and with the hope, perhaps, (not a reasonable hope,) that the authority of the Church of Jerusalem would have as much weight at the Vatican, as that of the Church of Carthage. Zosimus had been just raised to the pontificate; to him the controversy was referred, with great shew of humility, by Celestius; and whether deceived by the artful composition of the creed presented to him for approval, or overlooking the importance of a question to which his attention had not previously been much directed, or flattered by the personal appeal to his justice and the acknowledged submission to the Chair of St. Peter, or influenced by all these reasons, Zosimus pronounced the innocence of the disputed doctrine.

Augustin was not even thus discouraged; and his ardent religious feelings, as well as his reputation, were now too deeply interested in the controversy to allow him to rest here. Once more he assembled his Bishops, and after the public renewal of former declarations, he proceeded to inform the Pope more clearly as to the real nature and importance of the question; as to the errors which had been actually professed by the heretics; and those which, though disingenuously disavowed, followed of course from them. Zosimus does not appear to have been much moved by these representations; but in the mean time a more powerful avenger had been roused by the perseverance of the Africans. An imperial Edict descended from Constantinople, which banished both the delinquents from Rome, and menaced with perpetual exile and confiscation of estates all who should maintain their doctrines in any place. This decisive blow was struck in the March of 418; in the May following, another and still

Church, because they weakened, in his mind, the most efficacious method of reform and government; as logician, because their ideas did not exactly square with the consequences which flowed from the essential principles of the faith. Observe, then, what gravity the dispute assumed from that moment; everything was engaged in it—philosophy, politics, and religion; the opinions of St. Augustin, and his business, his vanity, and his duty. He abandoned himself entirely to it, publishing treatises, writing letters, collecting com munications which flowed in upon him from all quarters, profuse in regulations and counsels, and carrying into all his writings and all his measures, that mixture of passion and mildness, of authority and sympathy, of expanse of mind and logical strictness, which gave him such singular power.'

*On this occasion, being asked if he really maintained opinions which Augustin had condemned, he replied, 'What is Augustin to me? Many were offended, for Augustin was the most venerable authority of the age; and some immediately proposed to excommunicate the spiritual rebel: but John averted the blow, and kindly addressed Pelagius, It is I who am Augustin here; it is to me that you shall answer.' Pelagius spoke Greek, and is said to have thus obtained some advantages over his accuser Orosius, who was ignorant of that language.

more numerous Council* met at Carthage for the purpose of completing the triumph; and then the Bishop of Rome was at length prevailed upon to place, in conjunction with his clergy, the final seal of heresy on the Pelagian opinions. The opinions themselves did not, indeed, expire from these successive wounds, but have frequently reappeared under different forms and modifications; but no further attempts were made to extend them by their original authors.

The sum of those opinions was this:-1. That the sins of our first parents are imputed to themselves alone, and not to their posterity; that we derive no corruption from their fall; that we inherit no depravity from our origin; but enter into the world as pure and unspotted as Adam at his creation. It was a necessary inference from this doctrine, that infant baptism is not a sign or seal of the remission of sins, but only a mark of admission into the kingdom of Christ. 2. That our own powers are sufficient for our own justification; that as by our own free-will we run into sin, so, by the same voluntary exercise of our faculties, we are able to repent, and reform, and raise ourselves to the highest degree of virtue and piety; that we are, indeed, assisted by that external† grace of God which has taught us the truths of revelation; which opens to us our prospects, and enlightens our understanding, and animates our exertions after godliness; but that the internal and immediate operation of the Holy Spirit is not necessary, either to awaken us to religious feeling, or to further us in our progress towards holiness; in short, that man, by the unassisted agency of his natural perfections under the guidance of his own free-will, is enabled to work out his own salvation.

Regarding these doctrines, it is sufficient for a Christian to examine, whether or not they are in accordance with the obvious interpretation of Scripture; and the long experience of a fruitless controversy must at length have convinced us respecting such inscrutable subjects, that if we advance one step beyond the safe and substantial ground of revelation, we become entangled in the mazes of metaphysical disputation. In these matters, we are not to inquire what is probable, but what is written; and it has become a question, whether the presumptuous arrogance of reason, which is objected to the system of Pelagius, did not lead his opponents, who believed themselves humble, equally far away from that entire submission to the Gospel, which is the only true humility.

Augustin maintained the Church doctrines of original sin and saving grace with great force and zeal, and the most unaffected sincerity; and his writings on this subject continued for above twelve centuries to distribute the waters of regeneration over the barren surface of the Roman Catholic Church. But Augustin himself, in the ardour of his opposition to free-will, did he not overstep the just limits of reason, and advance into the contrary extreme of fatalism? It is true that he warmly disclaimed that doctrine, when nakedly objected to him as the obvious and inevitable result of those which he professed; but it was not without some sacrifice of logical severity that he declined the formidable conclusion. Nevertheless, more rigid logicians and more daring theologians were found, who pressed to their utmost consequences the opinions of their master, and

* Two hundred and three, or, as some assert, two hundred and fourteen Bishops were present.

Pelagius artfully perplexed the subject, by his assertion of six different kinds of grace; and if there be any of his expressions which may seem to imply more than we here give them credit for, they are, at least, so vague, and, we think, purposely so vague, as to make it impossible to attach any definite meaning to them,