Against Two Letters of the Pelagians

I had indeed known of you through your most widespread fame, and had learned from very frequent and very truthful reports how full you are of the grace of God, most blessed and venerable Pope Boniface. But after my brother Alypius also saw you in bodily presence, and, received by you most kindly and most sincerely, exchanged conversations with you at the prompting of love, and, living with you, though only for a short time, and joined to you with great affection, poured out both himself and me into your mind and brought you back to me in his own, the knowledge of your holiness has become so much the greater in me as the friendship has become more certain. For you do not disdain, you who do not mind high things, although you preside more highly, to be a friend of the lowly and to repay the love spent on you. For what else is friendship, which took its name from nowhere but from love, and which is faithful nowhere but in Christ, in whom alone it can also be everlasting and happy? Therefore, having received through that brother, through whom I have come to know you more intimately, greater confidence, I have ventured to write something to your Blessedness about those matters which at this time stir up the episcopal care, if there is any in me, to watchfulness for the Lord's flock with a fresher goad.

For the new heretics, enemies of the grace of God which is given to small and great through Jesus Christ our Lord, although they are now shown more clearly to be avoided by a more open condemnation, still do not rest from assailing with their writings the hearts of the less cautious or the less learned. They would certainly have to be answered, so that they might not confirm themselves or their followers in that abominable error, even if we did not fear that they might deceive any Catholic by plausible speech. But since they do not cease to roar around the folds of the Lord's flock and to search out entrances from every side for plundering the sheep redeemed at so great a price, and since the pastoral watchtower is common to all of us who discharge the office of bishop (although you stand out in it on a loftier summit), I do what I can for my small part of the charge, as far as the Lord deigns to grant me with the help of your prayers, so as to set healing and protecting writings against their pestilent and insidious writings, by which the madness with which they rage may either itself be healed or be kept from harming others.

Now these answers which I give to two letters of theirs (namely to one which Julian is said to have sent to Rome, I suppose in order to find or make through it whatever followers he could, and to another which eighteen so-called bishops who share his error dared to write to Thessalonica, not to just anyone, but to the bishop of that very place, to tempt him with their cunning and to draw him over to their side if it could be done), these answers, I say, which in this disputation I give to those two letters of theirs, I have decided to direct above all to your Holiness, not so much to be learned as to be examined and, where perhaps something displeases you, to be corrected. For my brother told me that you yourself deigned to give him these letters, which could not have come into your hands except through the most watchful diligence of our brothers, your sons. And I give thanks for your most sincere goodwill toward me, in that you did not wish those letters of the enemies of the grace of God to be hidden from me, in which you found my name set down slanderously and plainly. But I hope in the Lord our God that it is not without the reward which is in heaven that they tear me with the tooth of reviling, those to whom I oppose myself on behalf of little children, so that they may not be abandoned, lost, to the deceitful flatterer Pelagius, but be offered to the truthful Savior Christ to be set free.

So now let us answer Julian's letter. "Those Manichees," he says, "with whom we are not now in communion, that is, all those with whom we disagree, say that by the sin of the first man, that is, of Adam, free choice perished, and that no one any longer has the power of living well, but that all are compelled into sin by the necessity of their flesh." He calls Catholics Manichees, in the manner of that Jovinian who a few years ago, as a new heretic, destroyed the virginity of holy Mary and made the marriages of the faithful equal to consecrated virginity. And he made this charge against Catholics for no other reason than that he wished them to appear as accusers or condemners of marriage.

But by defending free choice they cast it headlong, so that confidence may be placed in it rather than in the Lord's help for doing righteousness, and so that each may glory in himself and not in the Lord. But which of us says that by the sin of the first man free choice perished from the human race? Freedom indeed perished through sin, but that freedom which existed in paradise, of having full righteousness with immortality. For this reason human nature needs divine grace, as the Lord says: "If the Son sets you free, then you will be free indeed", free, of course, to live well and righteously. For free choice has so far from perished in the sinner that it is through it that all sin, above all those who sin with delight and love of sin and are pleased by what pleases them. Hence the apostle too says: "When you were slaves of sin, you were free of righteousness." See, they are shown to have been quite unable to serve even sin except by another freedom. So they are not free from righteousness except by the choice of the will, but they are not made free from sin except by the grace of the Savior. For this reason the admirable teacher distinguished even the words themselves: "For when you were slaves of sin," he says, "you were free of righteousness. What fruit then did you have in those things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now, having been set free from sin and made slaves of God, you have your fruit unto sanctification, and the end, eternal life." He called them "free" of righteousness, not "set free"; but from sin he did not say "free", lest they attribute this to themselves, but most watchfully preferred to say "set free", referring this to that saying of the Lord: "If the Son sets you free, then you will be free indeed." Since, then, the sons of men do not live well unless they have been made sons of God, why is it that this man wishes to attribute to free choice the power of living well, when this power is not given except by the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, as the gospel says: "But as many as received him, to them he gave power to become sons of God"?

But lest perhaps they say that they were helped to this end, that they might have power to become sons of God, but that, in order to deserve to receive this, they first received him by free choice, helped by no grace (for this is indeed the aim by which they strive to destroy grace, contending that it is given according to our merits), lest, then, they divide this gospel saying so as to place merit in the words "But as many as received him", and then grace not given freely but paid back to this merit in what follows, "he gave them power to become sons of God": if they are asked what "received him" means, will they say anything other than "believed in him"? So, that they may know that this too belongs to grace, let them read what the apostle says: "In nothing be terrified by your adversaries, which is to them a cause of perdition, but of your salvation, and that from God; for to you it has been given for Christ's sake not only to believe in him but also to suffer for him" (he plainly said that both were given); and likewise what he says: "Peace to the brothers, and love with faith, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." Let them read also what the Lord himself says: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him." And lest anyone think that "come to me" means something other than "believe in me", a little later, when he was speaking of his body and blood and very many were scandalized at his word, he said: "The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe." Then the evangelist added: "For Jesus knew from the beginning who were believers and who would betray him. And he said: That is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it has been given him by my Father." He repeated, that is, the saying in which he had said, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him." And he made plain that he had said this on account of believers and unbelievers, explaining what he had said, "unless the Father who sent me draws him", by repeating the very same thing in other words when he said, "unless it has been given him by my Father." For he is drawn to Christ to whom it is given to believe in Christ. The power, then, to become sons of God is given to those who believe in him, when this very thing is given, that they believe in him. And unless this power is given by God, there can be none from free choice, because it will not be free for good if the Liberator has not set it free; but it has free choice for evil, if a deceiver, hidden or open, has implanted in it the delight of wickedness, or it has persuaded itself.

So it is not the case, as some say that we say and as this man dares moreover to write, that all are compelled into sin as if unwilling by the necessity of their flesh; but if they are already of an age to use the choice of their own mind, they are both held in sin by their own will and cast headlong by their own will from sin into sin. For even he who persuades and deceives does not act in them except so that they commit sin by will, either through ignorance of the truth or through delight in iniquity, or through both evils, blindness and weakness. But this will, which is free in evil things because it delights in evil things, is therefore not free in good things, because it has not been set free. Nor can a man will anything good unless he is helped by him who cannot will evil, that is, by the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord; for "whatever is not from faith is sin." And therefore the good will which withdraws itself from sin is a believing will, because "the righteous lives by faith"; and to believe in Christ belongs to faith, and no one can believe in him, that is, come to him, unless it has been given him. No one, therefore, can have a righteous will unless, with no merits preceding, he has received true grace, that is, free grace from above.

This these proud and haughty men do not want, not defenders of free choice by cleansing it but those who cast it headlong by exalting it, who are indignant with us for saying these things for no other reason than that they disdain to glory in the Lord. Pelagius, however, feared the Palestinian episcopal judgment and, when it was charged against him that he said that the grace of God is given according to our merits, he denied that he said so and condemned with anathema those who did say it. Yet in the books which he wrote afterward he is found to defend nothing else, thinking that he had deceived his human judges by lying, or by covering his meaning somehow with ambiguous words.

But now let us see what follows. "They say also," he says, "that these marriages which are now contracted were not instituted by God; this is read in the book of Augustine, to which I have just replied in four books. The enemies of our cause have taken up the sayings of this Augustine in hatred of the truth." To these most slanderous words of his I see that I must reply briefly, because he repeats them later, where he himself wishes to suggest what they say, as it were, against these views of ours. There, as far as the matter seems to require, I must contend with him with the Lord's help. For now, then, I answer that marriage was instituted by God both then, when it was said, "Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother and will cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh", and now, because it is written: "By the Lord a woman is joined to a man." For nothing else happens even now than that a man cleaves to his wife and the two are in one flesh. For it was about these very marriages which take place now that the Lord was consulted by the Jews, whether it was lawful to put away a wife for any cause, and, having quoted this testimony of the law, he added: "What therefore God has joined together, let man not separate." The apostle Paul also used this testimony of the law when he admonished husbands to love their wives. Far be it, then, that this man has read anything in my book against these divine testimonies; but either by not understanding or rather by slandering he tries to twist what he read into another sense. As for my book, to which he mentions that he replied in four books, I wrote it after the condemnation of Pelagius and Caelestius. I thought this should be said because he says that my words were taken up by his enemies in hatred of the truth, so that no one may suppose that it was because of this book of mine that the enemies of the grace of Christ were condemned as new heretics. And in that book there is a defense of marriage rather than a censure of it.

"They say also," he says, "that the movement of the genitals and the union of spouses were devised by the devil, and that for this reason those who are born innocent are guilty and are made by the devil, not by God, because they are born from this diabolical union. This is Manichaean beyond any ambiguity." On the contrary, as we say that marriage was instituted by God for the orderly begetting of children, so we say that the sowing of children to be begotten could not have taken place without the movement of the genitals and without the union of spouses, even in paradise, if children had been begotten there. But whether such movement and union would have been as it now is, with shameful lust, if no one had sinned, that is a question about which we shall dispute more carefully later, if God wills.

Yet what these men want, what they aim at, where they are trying to bring the matter, his following words make plain, where he says that we say: "for this reason those who are born innocent are guilty and are made by the devil, not by God, because they are born from this diabolical union." Since, then, we neither call the union of spouses diabolical, especially of believing spouses, which comes about for the sake of begetting children who are afterward to be regenerated, nor say that any human beings are made by the devil, but by God, in so far as they are human beings; and yet we say that even from believing spouses guilty ones are born, like a wild olive from an olive, because of original sin, and for this reason are under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ, since the devil is the author of guilt, not of nature; while they, on the other hand, saying that little children contract no original sin and therefore are not under the devil, what are they laboring to bring about, except that that grace of God should be made void in little children by which he "rescued us", as the apostle says, "from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love"? For they deny that little children are in the power of darkness even before the help of the Lord the Liberator, praising the work of the Creator in them in such a way as to destroy the mercy of the Redeemer. And because we confess this mercy both in adults and in little children, he says that this is Manichaean beyond any ambiguity, when it is most ancient Catholic teaching, by which this new heretical dogma of theirs is overthrown.

"They say," he says, "that the saints in the Old Testament were not without sins, that is, that they were not free from crimes even through amendment, but were overtaken by death in their guilt." On the contrary, we say that, whether before the law or in the time of the Old Testament, they were set free from sins, not by their own strength, for "cursed is everyone who places his hope in man" (and without doubt those whom the divine psalm marks out, "who trust in their own strength", are under this curse); nor by the Old Testament, which "bears children for slavery", although it was given by God for the sake of a definite dispensation; nor by the law itself, holy and just and good, in which is written "You shall not covet", since the law was not given "which could give life" but "was added because of transgression, until the offspring should come to whom the promise was made"; but that they were set free by the blood of the Redeemer himself, who is the "one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus". But these enemies of the grace of God, which is given to small and great through Jesus Christ our Lord, say that the ancient men of God were of perfect righteousness for this reason: so that they may not be believed to have needed the incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Christ, by faith in whom they were saved.

"They say also," he says, "that the apostle Paul, or all the apostles, were always polluted by immoderate lust." Who, even a profane person, would dare to say this? But no doubt he slanders in this way because they contend that what the apostle said, "I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh; for to will is present with me, but to accomplish the good I do not find", and other such things, he did not say of himself, but brought in the person of someone else, who suffered these things. For this reason the passage itself in his letter must be carefully considered and examined, lest the error of these men lurk in some obscurity of it. Although, then, the apostle argues more broadly here, defending grace in a great and long conflict against those who gloried in the law, we touch on a few points relevant to the matter. So he says: "For no flesh will be justified by the law before him; for through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested without the law, witnessed by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction; for all have sinned and lack the glory of God, justified freely by his grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus." And again: "Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that a man is justified by faith without the works of the law." And again: "For the promise to Abraham or to his offspring, that he would be heir of the world, was not through the law but through the righteousness of faith. For if those who are of the law are heirs, faith is emptied and the promise made void. For the law works wrath; for where there is no law, there is no transgression either." And in another place: "But the law came in, that the offense might abound; but where the offense abounded, grace superabounded." Likewise in another place: "For sin will not have dominion over you; for you are not under law but under grace." And likewise in another place: "Or do you not know, brothers (for I speak to those who know the law), that the law has dominion over a man for as long as he lives? For the woman under a husband is bound by the law to her living husband; but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of the husband." And a little later: "Therefore, my brothers, you too have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, who rose from the dead, that we may bear fruit to God. For when we were in the flesh, the passions of sins, which are through the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death; but now we have been released from the law of death in which we were held, so that we serve in newness of spirit and not in oldness of the letter." By these and similar testimonies that teacher of the Gentiles shows clearly enough that the law could not take away sin but rather increased it, which grace takes away, since the law knows how to command, to which weakness succumbs, grace how to help, by which love is poured in. For lest anyone, because of these testimonies, find fault with the law and contend that it is evil, the apostle saw what might occur to those who understand badly, and put the same question to himself: "What then shall we say?" he says. "Is the law sin? Far from it. But I did not know sin except through the law." He had already said this above: "Through the law comes knowledge of sin"; not, then, the removal, but the knowledge.

From here, however, he now begins (and this is why we have undertaken to consider these things) to introduce his own person and to speak as if about himself. Here the Pelagians do not want the apostle himself to be understood, but hold that he transferred to himself another, that is, a man still placed under the law, not yet set free by grace. Here indeed they ought already to grant that no one is justified in the law, as the same apostle says elsewhere, but that the law serves for the knowledge of sin and for the transgression of the law itself, so that, sin being known and increased, grace may be sought through faith. They are not afraid, however, that these things should be understood of the apostle, since he could say them also of his past; but they fear the things that follow. For here he says: "I would not have known concupiscence if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet.' But sin, taking occasion through the commandment, worked in me all concupiscence; for without the law sin is dead. I, however, was alive once without the law; but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died. And the commandment, which was for life, was found to be for death to me. For sin, taking occasion through the commandment, deceived me, and through it killed me. So the law indeed is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good. Did what is good, then, become death to me? Far from it! But sin, that it might appear sin, worked death for me through what is good, so that sin might become sinful beyond measure through the commandment." All these things, as I said, the apostle may be seen to have recalled from his past life, so that by the words "I, however, was alive once without the law" he meant his earliest age from infancy before the years of reason to be understood, and by adding "But when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died" he would show himself as then capable of receiving the command, but not of carrying it out, and therefore a transgressor of the law.

Nor should it trouble us that he wrote to the Philippians that "as to the righteousness which is in the law" he was "without complaint". For he could have been inwardly, in depraved affections, a transgressor of the law, and yet fulfill the visible works of the law, either from fear of men or of God himself, but from dread of punishment, not from love of and delight in righteousness. For it is one thing to do good by the will to do good, and another to be so inclined by the will to do evil that one would even do it if it could be permitted with impunity. For in this way a man certainly sins inwardly in the will itself who refrains from sin not by will but by fear. Knowing that he had been such in his inner self before the grace of God, which is given through Jesus Christ our Lord, the apostle confesses this most openly elsewhere. For writing to the Ephesians he says: "And you, when you were dead in your offenses and sins, in which you once walked according to the age of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit who now works in the sons of unbelief, among whom we all also once lived in the desires of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and of the affections, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest; but God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, made us alive together with Christ, by whose grace we have been saved." Again to Titus: "For we too," he says, "were once foolish and unbelieving, going astray, serving various desires and pleasures, living in malice and envy, abominable, hating one another." Such was Saul when he says that he was without complaint as to the righteousness which is in the law. For that he had not advanced in the law after this abominable life, so as to be without complaint, and changed his ways, he shows plainly in what follows, since he does not say that he was changed from these evils except by the grace of the Savior; for, adding this very thing here too, as to the Ephesians, he says: "But when the kindness and humanity of God our Savior shone forth, not from works of righteousness which we did, but according to his mercy he saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out most richly upon us through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life."

And what he says in this place of the letter to the Romans, "But sin, that it might appear sin, worked death for me through what is good", agrees with what he said above: "But I did not know sin except through the law; for I would not have known concupiscence if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet'", and further above: "Through the law comes knowledge of sin." For he said this here too: "that it might appear sin", so that we should understand his earlier words, "For without the law sin is dead", only in this sense: that it lies hidden as if it did not exist, does not appear, is wholly unknown, as though buried in some darkness of ignorance. And when he says, "I, however, was alive once without the law", what does he say but "I seemed to myself to be alive"? And when he adds, "But when the commandment came, sin revived", what else is this than "it stood out and appeared"? Yet he did not say "lived" but "revived". For it had once lived in paradise, when what was committed against the command given was plainly apparent; but when it is contracted by those who are born, it lies hidden as if dead, until its evil, resisting righteousness, is felt through its prohibition, when one thing is commanded and approved, another delights and dominates. Then sin in a manner revives in the knowledge of the man who is born, which had once already lived in the knowledge of the man first made.

But what follows is not so easily understood of Paul. "For we know," he says, "that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal." He does not say "I was", but "I am". Was the apostle, then, carnal when he wrote this? Or does he say it with respect to the body? For he was still in the body of this death, what he says elsewhere not yet having come about: "It is sown a natural body, it rises a spiritual body." For then a man will be spiritual wholly, that is, in both parts of which he consists, when the body too is spiritual. Nor is it absurd that in that life even the flesh should be spiritual, if in this life, in those who still mind carnal things, even the spirit itself could be carnal. So he said "But I am carnal" for this reason, that the apostle did not yet have a spiritual body, just as he could say "But I am mortal", which would certainly be understood to have been said only with respect to the body, which had not yet been clothed with immortality. Likewise what he added, "sold under sin": lest anyone suppose that he had not yet been redeemed by the blood of Christ, this too can be understood according to what he says: "And we ourselves, having the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves, awaiting the adoption, the redemption of our body." For if he says he is sold under sin in this respect, that his body has not yet been redeemed from corruption, or that he was once sold in the first transgression of the command, so as to have a corruptible body which weighs down the soul, what prevents the apostle from being understood here to speak of himself, since he speaks in such a way that it can be understood of himself as well, even if in his own person he wishes not himself alone to be understood, but all who know that they are in conflict, with spiritual love, against the affection of the flesh, without consenting to it?

Or are we perhaps afraid of what follows: "For what I work, I do not know; for I do not do what I will, but what I hate, that I do", lest anyone from these words suspect that the holy apostle consents to the concupiscence of the flesh for evil works? But we must consider what he adds: "But if I do what I do not will, I consent to the law that it is good." For he says that he consents to the law rather than to the concupiscence of the flesh (for this he calls by the name of sin). So he said that he does and works, not with the affection of consenting and fulfilling, but by the very movement of desiring. From this, then, he says, "I consent to the law that it is good": I consent, because I do not will what it does not will. Then he says: "But now it is no longer I who work it, but the sin that dwells in me." What is "but now" except "now at last under grace", which has freed the delight of the will from consent to cupidity? For "it is not I who work it" is best understood only as meaning that he does not consent to present his members to sin as weapons of iniquity. For if he both desires and consents and acts, how is it not he himself who works it, even if he grieves that he works it and groans deeply at being overcome?

Now does not what follows show most clearly from what standpoint he is speaking? "For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh." For if he had not explained by adding "that is, in my flesh", what he said, "in me", might perhaps have been taken otherwise. And so he turns this over, repeating and impressing the same point: "For to will is present with me, but to accomplish the good is not." For this is to accomplish the good: that a man should not even desire; but the good is incomplete when he desires, even if he does not consent to the desire for evil. "For I do not do the good that I will," he says, "but the evil that I do not will, that I do. But if I do what I do not will, it is no longer I who work it, but the sin that dwells in me." He repeated this, impressing it and as it were rousing the very slow from sleep: "I find, then, a law," he says, "for me, when I will to do good, that evil is present with me." That law, then, is a good to one who wills to do good, but evil is present from concupiscence, to which he does not consent who says, "It is no longer I who work it."

And what follows declares both more openly: "For I delight in the law of God according to the inner man, but I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind and taking me captive in the law of sin which is in my members." But his saying "taking me captive" may trouble us, if there is no consent. Hence, because of these three things, namely the two we have already discussed, his saying "But I am carnal" and "sold under sin", and this third, "taking me captive in the law of sin which is in my members", the apostle may seem to be describing one who still lives under the law, not yet under grace. But just as we explained those two as said on account of the flesh still corruptible, so this too can be understood: that he said "taking me captive" by the flesh, not by the mind, by motion, not by consent, and "taking me" captive because in the flesh itself too there is not an alien nature, but our own. So just as he himself explained what he said, "For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh", so we ought to take this place too according to his explanation, as if he had said: "taking me captive (that is, my flesh) in the law of sin which is in my members."

Then he adds that for the sake of which all has been said: "Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord." And from this he concludes: "So then I myself with the mind serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin": with the flesh, that is, the law of sin by desiring, but with the mind the law of God by not consenting to that same concupiscence. "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." For no one is condemned except him who consents to the concupiscence of the flesh for evil. "For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death", namely, so that the concupiscence of the flesh may not claim your consent for itself. And what follows shows the same sense more and more; but a limit must be observed.

It had once seemed to me also that a man under the law was described in this discourse of the apostle; but afterward these words compelled me, where he says: "But now it is no longer I who work it." For to this belongs also what he says afterward: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." And also because I do not see how a man under the law could say, "I delight in the law of God according to the inner man", since the very delight in good, by which one does not consent even to evil, not from fear of punishment but from love of righteousness (for this is to "delight in"), must be ascribed to nothing but grace.

For as to his saying, "Who will set me free from the body of this death?", who would deny that the apostle, when he said this, was still in the body of this death? From it the ungodly are certainly not set free, since the same bodies are given back to them for eternal torments. To be set free from the body of this death, then, is to receive the body, every languor of the concupiscence of the flesh having been healed, not for punishment but for glory. With this place that other agrees well enough: "And we ourselves, having the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves, awaiting the adoption, the redemption of our body." For surely we groan with this groaning in which we say, "Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?" Also where he says, "For what I work, I do not know", what else is this than "I do not will it, I do not approve, I do not consent, I do not do it"? Otherwise it contradicts what he said above: "Through the law comes knowledge of sin", and "I did not know sin except through the law", and "Sin, that it might appear sin, worked death for me through what is good." For how has he come to know through the law a sin which he does not know? How does a sin appear which is not known? So "I do not know" was said in the sense of "I do not do it", because I myself do not commit it by any consent, in the way in which the Lord will say to the ungodly, "I do not know you", from whom beyond doubt nothing can be hidden; and as it was said, "him who did not know sin", that is, had not committed it; for he was not ignorant of what he rebuked.

When these and similar things in this context of the apostolic writing have been carefully considered, the apostle is rightly understood to have signified, in his own person, not himself alone, but also others established under grace, yet, like himself, not yet established in that perfect peace in which death will be swallowed up in victory. Of this he says afterward: "But if Christ is in you, the body indeed is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. If, then, the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit dwelling in you." When our mortal bodies have been given life, then, not only will there be no consent to sinning, but not even the concupiscence of the flesh, to which one does not consent, will remain. Only that man could be without it, resisting the spirit, in mortal flesh, who came to men not through it. And therefore, of the apostles, since they were men and carried in the mortality of this life the body which is corrupted and weighs down the soul, far be it from us to say, as this man slanders, that they were always polluted by immoderate lust; but we say that they were free from consent to depraved lusts, yet that concerning the concupiscence of the flesh, which they bridled by restraining it, they groaned with such humility and piety that they wished rather not to have it than to master it.

As for what he added, that we say that Christ too was not free from sins, but lied through the necessity of the flesh and was stained with other offenses, let him see from whom he heard it or in whose writings he read it; perhaps indeed he did not understand something and, deceived by malice, turned it into slanderous senses.

"They say also," he says, "that baptism does not give full forgiveness of sins nor take away crimes, but shaves them, so that the roots of all sins are retained in the evil flesh." Who but an unbeliever would affirm this against the Pelagians? We say, then, that baptism gives forgiveness of all sins and takes away crimes, and does not shave them, nor so that the roots of all sins are retained in the evil flesh, as of hair shaved on the head, from which the sins may grow again, to be cut back once more. For I have found that they also use this comparison in their slander, as though we thought and said this.

But concerning this concupiscence of the flesh I believe they are deceived or deceive, with which even one who has been baptized (and this if he advances most diligently and is led by the Spirit of God) must contend with a devout mind. But this, even if it is called sin, is certainly called so not because it is sin, but because it was made by sin, just as a piece of writing is called someone's hand because a hand made it. But sins are the things which are unlawfully done, said, or thought according to the concupiscence of the flesh or through ignorance; and these, when done, hold men guilty even afterward, if they are not forgiven. And this very concupiscence of the flesh is forgiven in baptism in such a way that, although it has been contracted by those who are born, it does no harm to those who are reborn. Yet from them, if they beget children carnally, it is contracted again and will again harm those who are born, unless it is forgiven in the same way to those who are reborn; and it remains in them, doing no harm to the life to come, since its guilt, contracted by generation, has been forgiven by regeneration; and therefore it is no longer sin, but is called so, either because it was made by sin, or because it is moved by the delight of sinning, even though, when the delight of righteousness prevails, no consent is given to it. Nor is it because of it, whose guilt has already been consumed by the washing of regeneration, that the baptized say in the prayer, "Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors", but because of the sins which are committed, whether in consenting to it, when through it one is overcome by whatever pleases, or when through ignorance evil pleases as if it were good. And they are committed whether by acting, or by speaking, or, what is easiest and quickest, by thinking. From all these, who even among the faithful will boast that he has a chaste heart, or who will boast that he is clean from sin? That which follows in the prayer, indeed, is said on account of it: "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." For each one, as it is written, "is tempted by his own concupiscence, being drawn away and enticed; then concupiscence, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin."

All these offspring of concupiscence, and the ancient guilt of concupiscence itself, have been forgiven by the washing of baptism; and whatever this concupiscence now brings forth, if they are not those offspring which are called not only sins but also crimes, is cleansed by that covenant of the daily prayer in which we say, "Forgive, as we forgive", and by sincerity in almsgiving. For no one is so foolish as to say that that command of the Lord does not apply to the baptized: "Forgive, and it will be forgiven you; give, and it will be given to you." But no minister could rightly be ordained in the church if the apostle had said "if anyone is without sin" where he says "if anyone is without crime", or if he had said "having no sin" where he says "having no crime". For many baptized believers are without crime; but I would not say that anyone is without sin in this life, however much the Pelagians, because we say this, puff themselves up against us and burst with madness: not because anything of sin remains that is not forgiven in baptism, but because, while we remain in the weakness of this life, there do not cease to be committed daily sins which are forgiven daily to those who pray faithfully and act mercifully. This is the soundness of the Catholic faith, which the Holy Spirit sows everywhere, not the vanity of heretical depravity and the presumption of spirit.

Now then, as to the rest, let us see how, after he thought fit slanderously to charge us with what we believe and to invent what we do not believe, he himself professes his own faith, or that of the Pelagians. "Against these things," he says, "we argue daily, and for this reason we refuse to give our consent to the prevaricators: because we say that free choice exists naturally in all and could not perish by the sin of Adam, which is confirmed by the authority of all the Scriptures." If you said these things as you ought, not against the grace of God, you would not be giving consent to prevaricators, but would be correcting your own opinion. But on this we have argued above as much as we could and as much as seemed sufficient.

"We say," he says, "that these marriages which are now contracted throughout the world were instituted by God, and that spouses are not guilty, but that fornicators and adulterers are to be condemned." This is true and Catholic; but what you wish to draw from it, that those who are born contract from the union of male and female no sin to be expiated by the washing of regeneration, this is false and heretical.

"The movement of the genitals," he says, "that is, virility itself, without which there can be no union, we say was instituted by God." To this we answer that the movement of the genitals and, to use his word, the virility without which there can be no union, God instituted in such a way that it had nothing shameful. For it was not right that his creature should blush at the work of its Creator; but the disobedience of the members was rendered as a just punishment to the first human beings when they disobeyed, and at this they blushed when they covered with fig leaves the shameful parts, which before had not been shameful.

For after the sin they did not sew themselves tunics, to cover the whole body, but loincloths, which some of our translators, less carefully, have rendered "coverings". This is indeed true; but "covering" is a general word, by which every garment and covering may be understood. And therefore the ambiguity should have been avoided, so that, as the Greek put perizōmata, by which only the shameful parts of the body are covered, so the Latin too should either have put the Greek word itself, since custom already uses it for a Latin word, or have named them, as some did, "succinctoria", or, as others did better, "campestria". For this name comes from the fact that, in the ancient Roman manner, young men covered their private parts when they exercised naked on the Campus; hence those who cover the same members by girding them are still today called "campestrati". And yet, if what had been used to sin was to be covered after the sin, they ought not to have been clothed even with tunics, but to have covered the hand and the mouth, because they sinned by taking and eating. What, then, does it mean that, when the forbidden food had been taken and the transgression of the command had been committed, their gaze is directed to those members? What unknown novelty is felt there that compels itself to be noticed? This is signified by the opening of the eyes. For their eyes were not closed, either when he was giving names to the cattle and birds or when she saw that the tree was beautiful and good; but they were opened, that is, made attentive to looking, as it is written of Hagar, Sarah's maidservant, that she opened her eyes and saw a well, which she certainly did not have closed. That they should suddenly be so ashamed of their nakedness, which they surely looked upon every day without being confounded, that they could no longer bear those members naked but at once took care to cover them, was it not because both he, in open movement, and she, in hidden, felt those members disobedient against the choice of their will, which they certainly ought to have ruled by the will's command like the others? This they deservedly suffered, because they too had not been obedient to their Lord. They blushed, then, at having so failed to render service to their Creator that they deserved to lose mastery in those members from which children were to be begotten.

This kind of shame, this necessity of blushing, is certainly born with every human being and is in a manner commanded by the very laws of nature, so that even chaste marriages feel modesty in this matter; nor does anyone make such bad and shameful progress that, because he has learned that God is the maker of nature and the author of marriage, he would therefore, when about to have intercourse with his wife, not blush at these movements if anyone saw him, and not seek a private place where he can avoid the sight not only of strangers but of all his own household. So let human nature be permitted to acknowledge the evil that befell it by its own fault, so that it is not forced either, what is most shameless, not to blush at these movements of its own, or, what is most ungrateful, to blush at the works of its Creator. Yet chaste marriages make good use of this evil for the sake of the good of begetting children; but to consent to lust for the sake of carnal pleasure alone is sin, although for married people it is allowed by way of pardon.

But decide, Pelagians, keeping the honor and fruitfulness of marriage intact, what kind of life you wish to imagine for those human beings in paradise if no one had sinned, and choose one of these four things. For beyond doubt, either they would have lain together as often as they pleased; or they would have bridled lust when intercourse was not necessary; or lust would have arisen at the command of the will at the time when chaste prudence foresaw that intercourse was necessary; or, with no lust at all existing there, the genitals too, like each of the other members for its own tasks, would have served their own task at the commands of those who willed it, without any difficulty. Choose which of these four you like. But I think you will reject the first two, where lust is either served or resisted. For so noble an honor does not admit the first, nor so great a happiness the second. For far be it that the glory of that great blessedness should either perform a most shameful slavery by always following lust as it leads, or not have the fullest peace by resisting it. Far be it, I say, that that mind should be pleased to satisfy by consenting a concupiscence of the flesh rising not at the fit time for begetting but with disordered agitation, or that that tranquility should need to restrain it by refusing consent.

But whichever of the other two you choose, there is no need to toil in any dispute against you. For even if you refuse to choose the fourth, where there is the highest tranquility of all the members obeying without any lust, since the impetus of your disputations has already made you its enemies, you will at least be pleased by what we put in the third place: that that carnal concupiscence, whose movement arrives at the final pleasure which delights you so much, would never in paradise have arisen at the command of the will except when it was necessary for begetting. If you like to place this in paradise, and it seems to you that in that happiness children could have been begotten through such a concupiscence of the flesh, which would neither anticipate nor delay nor exceed the command of the will, we do not object. For our purpose it is enough for us that it is not now such in human beings as you grant it could have been in that place of happiness. For what it is like now, the sense of all mortals surely confesses, though with shame: it troubles even the chaste against their will, and those who chastise it with temperance, with disordered and untimely restlessness, and often withdraws itself from those who want it and thrusts itself on those who do not, so that by its disobedience it testifies that it is nothing other than the punishment of that ancient disobedience. Hence rightly the first human beings were confounded by it then, when they covered their shameful parts, and now everyone who considers himself in any way a human being, modest or immodest, is confounded by it: far be it that this is at the work of God, but at the punishment of the first and ancient sin. But you, not for a religious reason but out of spirited contention, not from human modesty but from your own fury, lest even the concupiscence of the flesh be believed to have been vitiated and original sin to be contracted from it, try in your disputing to call back into paradise just such a concupiscence as it now is, and contend that it could have existed there, one which either shameful consent would always follow or pitiable refusal of consent would sometimes restrain. But we do not care much what you like to think about it. Yet whatever human being is born through it, if he is not reborn, is without doubt condemned, and must be under the devil if he is not set free from there by Christ.

"We maintain," he says, "that human beings are the work of God, and that no one is compelled against his will by his power either to evil or to good, but that by his own will he does either good or evil; and that in a good work he is always helped by the grace of God, but to evil he is incited by the suggestions of the devil." To this we answer that human beings are the work of God in so far as they are human beings, but are under the devil in so far as they are sinners, unless they are rescued from there by him who was made mediator between God and men for no other reason than that he could not be a sinner by descent from men; and that no one is compelled against his will by the power of God either to evil or to good, but that when God forsakes a man he goes into evil according to his merits, and when God helps him he is converted to good without merits. For a man is not good if he is unwilling; but by the grace of God he is helped even to this, that he wills, since it is not written in vain: "For it is God who works in you both to will and to work, for good will", and: "The will is prepared by the Lord."

But you think that a man is helped by the grace of God in a good work in such a way that you believe it does nothing in arousing his will to that good work. Your own words declare this well enough. For why did you not say that a man is aroused to a good work by the grace of God, as you said that he is "incited to evil by the suggestions of the devil", but said "in a good work he is always helped by the grace of God"? As though, having undertaken a good work by his own will, with no grace of God, he is helped by God in the work itself, namely in return for the merits of the good will, so that grace is paid as due, not given as undue; and so grace is no longer grace, but it is that which Pelagius at the Palestinian judgment condemned with a feigned heart: that the grace of God is given according to our merits. Tell me, I beg you, what good did Paul, still Saul, will, and not rather great evils, when, breathing slaughter, he went to lay waste the Christians with horrible blindness and fury of mind? For what merits of good will did God convert him from those evils to good things by a wonderful and sudden calling? Why should I speak of merits, when he himself cries out: "Not from works of righteousness which we did, but according to his mercy he saved us"? What of what I have already mentioned that the Lord said: "No one can come to me" (which is understood as "believe in me") "unless it has been given him by my Father"? Is this given to one already willing to believe, in return for the merits of a good will, or rather is the will itself aroused from above, as Saul's was, so that he may believe, even if he is so turned away from the faith as even to persecute believers? For why does the Lord command us to pray for those who persecute us? Do we pray for this, that the grace of God be paid back to them in return for their good will, and not rather that their evil will itself be changed into good? As we believe that the saints whom he was persecuting then did not pray in vain for Saul, that his will might be converted to the faith which he was laying waste. And his conversion, indeed, wrought from above, appeared also by a manifest miracle; but how many enemies of Christ are daily drawn suddenly to Christ by the hidden grace of God! If I had not taken this word from the gospel, how much this man would have said about me on account of it, when even now he struggles not against me, but against him who cries: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him"! For he did not say "leads", so that we might in some way understand that the will goes first. Who is drawn, if he was already willing? And yet no one comes unless he wills. He is drawn, then, in wonderful ways, so that he wills, by him who knows how to work inwardly in the very hearts of men: not so that men believe unwillingly, which cannot happen, but so that from unwilling they become willing.

That this is true we do not suspect by human conjecture, but recognize by the most evident authority of the divine Scriptures. We read in the books of Chronicles: "And indeed in Judah the hand of God was at work to give them one heart, to do the command of the king and of the princes by the word of the Lord." Likewise the Lord says through the prophet Ezekiel: "I will give them another heart, and I will give them a new spirit, and I will pluck out their heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, so that they may walk in my commandments and keep my ordinances and do them." And what is it that Queen Esther prays, saying: "Put a well-ordered speech in my mouth, and make my words shine in the sight of the lion, and turn his heart to hatred of him who fights against us"? Why does she say this to God in prayer, if God does not work the will in the hearts of men? But perhaps the woman prayed foolishly. Let us see, then, whether the petitioner's desire went before in vain and the effect of the one who heard did not follow. Look, she goes in to the king (not to say much), and because she was not going in in her proper turn, being driven by great necessity, he looked at her, as it is written, like a bull in the onset of his indignation. "And the queen was afraid, and her color changed through faintness, and she bowed herself upon the head of her maid who went before her. And God turned and changed his indignation into gentleness." What need is there now to recall what follows, where the divine Scripture testifies that God fulfilled what she had asked, by working in the king's heart what else but the will by which he commanded, and what the queen had asked of him was done? God had already heard her so that it should be done, he who, before the king heard the speech of the woman making her request, turned his heart with a most hidden and most effective power, and changed it from indignation to gentleness, that is, from a will to harm to a will to favor, according to that saying of the apostle: "God works in you both to will." Did the men of God who wrote these things, or rather the Spirit of God himself, by whose authorship they were written through them, attack the free choice of man? Far from it; but it commended both the most just judgment and the most merciful help of the Almighty in all things. For it is enough for a man to know that there is no iniquity with God. But as to how he arranges these things, making some according to merit vessels of wrath, others according to grace vessels of mercy, "who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?" If, then, we belong to the honor of grace, let us not be ungrateful by attributing to ourselves what we have received. "For what do we have that we have not received?"

"We say," he says, "that the saints of the Old Testament passed from here to eternal life with perfect righteousness, that is, that by zeal for virtue they withdrew from all sins, since even those whom we read to have sinned somewhat, we know nevertheless to have amended afterward." However great the virtue he proclaims the ancient righteous to have had, nothing saved them but faith in the Mediator, who shed his blood for the forgiveness of sins. For theirs is the voice: "I believed, therefore I spoke." Hence the apostle Paul too says: "But having the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, 'I believed, therefore I spoke', we too believe, and therefore we also speak." What is "the same spirit" but that which those righteous men also had who said these things? The apostle Peter also says: "Why do you wish to put a yoke on the Gentiles which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear? But we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, just as they also are." This you do not want, enemies of this grace, that the ancients be believed to have been saved by the same grace of Jesus Christ; but you divide the times according to Pelagius, in whose books this is read, and you say that before the law men were saved by nature, then through the law, finally through Christ, as though for the men of the two earlier times, namely before the law and under the law, the blood of Christ were not necessary; making void what was said: "For there is one God, and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus."

"We confess," he says, "that the grace of Christ is necessary for all, both adults and little children, and we anathematize those who say that one born of two baptized parents ought not to be baptized." We know in what sense you say this, not according to the apostle Paul but according to the heretic Pelagius: namely, that baptism is necessary for little children not for the forgiveness of sins but only for the kingdom of heaven. For you give them, outside the kingdom of God, a place of salvation and eternal life, even if they have not been baptized; nor do you pay attention to what is written: "He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned." For this reason, in the church of the Savior, little children believe through others, just as they contracted from others the sins which are forgiven them in baptism. Nor do you consider that those cannot have life who have had no share in the body and blood of Christ, as he himself says: "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will not have life in you." Or if you are compelled by the words of the gospel to confess that little children departing from the body cannot have life and salvation unless they have been baptized, ask why the unbaptized are compelled to undergo the punishment of the second death by the judgment of him who condemns no one undeservedly, and you will find what you do not want: original sin.

"We also condemn," he says, "those who say that baptism does not wipe out all sins, because we know that full cleansing is conferred through these very mysteries." This we too say; but you do not say that little children too are loosed through these very mysteries from the bonds of their first birth and of their guilty descent. For this reason you too, like other heretics, must be separated from the church of Christ, which has held this from ancient times.

Now as for his concluding the letter by saying: "Let no one, then, lead you astray, and let the ungodly not deny that they hold these views; but if they speak the truth, let either a hearing be granted, or at least let those very bishops who now dissent condemn what I said above that they hold with the Manichees, as we condemn those things which they cast at us, and full concord is made. But if they are unwilling, know that they are Manichees and keep away from their company": this is to be despised rather than refuted. For which of us hesitates to say anathema to the Manichees, who say that neither human beings nor marriage were instituted by the good God, nor the law given which was ministered to the Hebrew people through Moses? But we also, not undeservedly, say anathema to the Pelagians, who are such enemies of the grace of God which came through Jesus Christ our Lord that they say it is given not freely but according to our merits, and so grace is no longer grace; and they place so much in free choice, by which man has been sunk into the depths, that they say a man merits grace by using it well, when no one can use it well except through grace, which is not paid as a debt but given by God's free mercy; and they contend that little children are already saved in such a way that they dare to deny that they need to be saved by the Savior. And holding and sowing these execrable dogmas, they still demand a hearing besides, when, being condemned, they ought to do penance.

Now let us consider the other letter, not Julian's only, but common to him and many Pelagian bishops, which they sent to Thessalonica, and, with the Lord's help, answer it as we can. So that this work of ours may not become longer than the need of the case demands, what need is there to refute also those things which do not contain the insidious poisons of their dogma, but by which they only seem to ask for the agreement of the Eastern bishops in their support, or on behalf of the Catholic faith against the profanity, as they call it, of the Manichees, striving for nothing else than that, by setting up a horrible heresy of which they pretend to be the adversaries, the enemies of grace may lie hidden under the praise of nature? For who ever raised a question with them on that point? Or to which Catholic are they displeasing because they condemn those whom the apostle foretold would depart from the faith, "having their conscience seared, forbidding to marry, abstaining from foods" which they think unclean, and not thinking that all things were made by God? Who ever compelled them to deny that every creature of God is good, and that there is no substance which the supreme God did not make, except God himself, who was not made by anyone? It is not these things in them, which are clearly Catholic, that are censured and condemned. For the impiety of the Manichees, excessively foolish and harmful, is detested not only by the Catholic faith but also by all heretics who are not Manichees. Hence these Pelagians too do well in saying anathema to the Manichees and contradicting their errors. But they do two evils for which they too are to be anathematized: one, that they accuse Catholics under the name of Manichees; the other, that they themselves also bring in a heresy of new error. For it is not because they do not suffer from the disease of the Manichees that they are of sound faith. There is not one kind of pestilence, in minds any more than in bodies. So, just as a physician of the body would not at once have pronounced a man free from danger of death because he had declared him not dropsical, if he had seen him sick with another mortal disease, so the truth does not congratulate these men because they are not Manichees, if they are mad with another kind of perversity. Therefore what we anathematize with them is one thing, what we anathematize in them is another. For we detest with them what rightly displeases them too, yet in such a way that we detest in them that for which they themselves rightly displease us.

The Manichees say that the good God is not the creator of all natures; the Pelagians say that God is not the cleanser, savior, and liberator of human beings of all ages. The Catholic Church refutes both, defending God's creation against the Manichees, so that no nature is denied to have been established by him, and against the Pelagians, so that lost human nature is sought out in all ages. The Manichees censure the concupiscence of the flesh not as an accidental fault but as a nature evil from eternity; the Pelagians praise it besides, as no fault at all, but a natural good. The Catholic Church refutes both, saying to the Manichees, "It is not a nature but a fault", and saying to the Pelagians, "It is not from the Father but from the world", so that both may allow it to be healed like a bad state of health, the former by ceasing to believe it incurable, the latter by ceasing to proclaim it praiseworthy. The Manichees deny that the beginning of evil in man, created good, came from free choice; the Pelagians say that even an evil man has sufficient free choice to do the good commandment. The Catholic Church refutes both, saying to the former, "God made man upright", and to the latter, "If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed." The Manichees say that the soul, a particle of God, has sin through the mixture of an evil nature; the Pelagians say that the righteous soul, not indeed a particle but a creature of God, has no sin even in this corruptible life. The Catholic Church refutes both, saying to the Manichees, "Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad" (which would not be said to a man, who cannot make a nature, unless sin were not a nature but a fault), and saying to the Pelagians, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." With these mutually opposed diseases the Manichees and Pelagians fight each other, with unlike will but like vanity, separated by differing opinion but near in perverse mind.

Now they attack the grace of Christ together, they make his baptism void together, they dishonor his flesh together, but these things too in different ways and for different reasons. For the Manichees hold that divine help comes by the merits of a good nature, the Pelagians by the merits of a good will. The former say, "God owes this to the labors of his members"; the latter say, "God owes this to the virtues of his servants." For both, then, the reward is reckoned not according to grace but according to debt. The Manichees say that the washing of regeneration, that is, the water itself, is superfluous, and contend with profane heart that it does no good; the Pelagians assert that what is said in holy baptism for the expiation of sins gives no help to infants, since they have no sin. And so, in the baptism of little children, as far as the forgiveness of sins is concerned, the Manichees destroy the visible element, the Pelagians even the invisible sacrament. The Manichees dishonor the flesh of Christ by blaspheming the virgin birth; the Pelagians by making the flesh of those to be redeemed equal to the flesh of the Redeemer. For this is precisely why Christ was born, certainly not in the flesh of sin, but in the likeness of the flesh of sin: because the flesh of other human beings is born flesh of sin. The Manichees, then, utterly detesting all flesh, take away from the flesh of Christ its evident reality; but the Pelagians, asserting that no flesh of sin is born, take away from the flesh of Christ its proper dignity.

So let the Pelagians stop charging Catholics with what they are not, and rather hasten to amend what they themselves are; and let them not wish to be considered lovable because they oppose the hateful error of the Manichees, but let them rightly recognize that they are hateful because they do not turn away from their own error. For two errors can be contrary to each other, yet both are to be detested, because both are contrary to the truth. For if the Pelagians are to be loved because they hate the Manichees, the Manichees too are to be loved because they hate the Pelagians. But far be it that our Catholic mother should choose to love one party out of hatred of the other, when, with the Lord's warning and help, she ought to avoid both and desires to heal both.

They even accuse the Roman clergy, writing that, struck by the terror of a command, they did not blush to commit the crime of prevarication, so as to pronounce afterward, against their earlier judgment, by which they had supported the Catholic dogma in the proceedings, that the nature of human beings is evil. On the contrary, the Pelagians had supposed with a false hope that the new and execrable Pelagian or Caelestian dogma could be pressed upon the Catholic minds of certain Romans, when those talents, although perverted by an abominable error, yet not contemptible, since they seemed to deserve to be earnestly corrected rather than readily condemned, were treated somewhat more gently than the stricter discipline of the church required. For when so many and such important ecclesiastical writings were passing back and forth between the apostolic see and the African bishops, and proceedings in this case had even been drawn up before that see, with Caelestius present and answering, what letter of Pope Zosimus of venerable memory, what interlocutory statement, is found in which he commanded that it must be believed that man is born without any fault of original sin? He never said this at all, never wrote it at all. But when Caelestius had put this in his statement of faith, though only among those things about which he confessed that he was still in doubt and wished to be instructed, what was approved in a man of very keen talent, who would certainly have benefited very many if he had been corrected, was the will to amend, not the falsity of the dogma. For this reason his statement was called Catholic, because this too belongs to a Catholic mind: if it happens to think otherwise than the truth demands, not to define such things as most certain, but to reject them when they are detected and shown to be wrong. For the apostle was speaking not to heretics but to Catholics when he said: "Let as many of us, then, as are perfect think this; and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal this too to you." This was thought to have happened in his case when he answered that he agreed with the letter of Pope Innocent of blessed memory, by which all doubt on this matter was removed. And so that this might be done more fully and clearly in his case, a letter was awaited which was to come from Africa, in which province his cunning had become known somewhat more plainly. After this letter came to Rome, containing the point that it was not enough, for slower and more anxious people, that he professed in general terms to agree with the letter of Bishop Innocent, but that he ought openly to anathematize the wrong things he had put in his statement, lest, if he did not do so, many of little understanding should believe that those poisons of the faith in his statement had been approved by the apostolic see, because it had said that his statement was Catholic, rather than corrected, because he had himself answered that he agreed with the letter of Pope Innocent: then, when his presence was demanded, so that by definite and clear answers either the man's cunning or his correction might come to light and remain doubtful to no one, he withdrew himself and refused the examination. Nor was there any longer to be delay, as indeed there was none, in doing what would benefit others, even if it could not benefit the obstinacy and madness of those who were too perverse. But if (God forbid!) the judgment on Caelestius or Pelagius in the Roman church had then been such that those dogmas of theirs which Pope Innocent had condemned in them and with them were pronounced worthy of approval and to be held, the mark of prevarication would rather have had to be branded on the Roman clergy for this. But now, since first the letter of the most blessed Pope Innocent, answering the letters of the African bishops, condemned this very error which these men are trying to press on others; and since his successor, the holy Pope Zosimus, never said, never wrote, that what these men think about little children is to be held, and moreover, by repeated interlocutory statements, bound Caelestius, when he was trying to clear himself, to agree with the aforesaid letter of the apostolic see: surely whatever was meanwhile done more gently with Caelestius, the firmness of the most ancient and most robust faith being always kept, was a most merciful persuasion to correction, not a most ruinous approval of depravity. And the fact that Caelestius and Pelagius were afterward condemned by the same bishop, with authority renewed, was the reason of a severity briefly suspended and now necessarily to be brought forth, not a prevarication against a truth previously known, or a new knowledge of the truth.

But what need is there for us to linger longer speaking on this matter, when the proceedings and the letters sent on both sides are extant, in which all those things can be learned or recalled as they were done? For in the questions of your holy predecessor and the answers of Caelestius, by which he professed that he agreed with the letter of the blessed Pope Innocent, who does not see how Caelestius was bound and tied by a most wholesome bond, so that he might not dare any longer to maintain that original sin is not forgiven in the baptism of little children? For these are the words of the venerable Bishop Innocent on this matter to the Council of Carthage: "For he who once suffered free choice, while he used his goods too inconsiderately, falling, was sunk in the depths of transgression and found nothing by which he might rise from there; and, deceived forever by his own freedom, he would have lain under the weight of this ruin, had not the coming of Christ afterward raised him up by his grace, who through the purification of the new regeneration cleansed every past fault by the washing of his baptism." What is clearer and plainer than this judgment of the apostolic see? Caelestius professed that he agreed with it when, your holy predecessor having said to him, "Do you condemn all the things that have been spread abroad in your name?", he himself answered, "I condemn them according to the judgment of your predecessor Innocent of blessed memory." Now among the other things that had been spread abroad in his name, the deacon Paulinus had charged Caelestius with saying that the sin of Adam harmed him alone and not the human race, and that newborn infants are in the state in which Adam was before the sin. Accordingly, if he had condemned Paulinus's charges according to the judgment of the blessed Pope Innocent with a truthful heart and mouth, what would remain for him thereafter from which to contend that there is no fault in little children from the past transgression of the first man, to be cleansed through the purification of the new regeneration by holy baptism? But he showed by the final outcome that he had answered this deceitfully, when he withdrew himself from examination, lest, according to the African rescripts, he should be compelled to recall and anathematize the very words on this question which he had put in his statement.

What of what the same pope wrote back on this very case to the bishops of Numidia also, since he had received letters from both councils, that is, from the Council of Carthage and from that of Milevis: does he not speak most openly about little children? For these are his words: "But what your Fraternity asserts that they preach, that little children can be granted the rewards of eternal life even without the grace of baptism, is utterly foolish. For unless they eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, they will not have life in themselves. And those who maintain this for them without regeneration seem to me to wish to annul baptism itself, when they preach that these have what we believe is conferred on them only by baptism." What does the ungrateful man say to this, whom the apostolic see had spared with most kindly gentleness, as though corrected by his own profession? What does he say to this? After the end of this life, will little children, even if while they live they are not baptized in Christ, be in eternal life or not? If he says "They will", how then did he answer that he condemned what had been spread abroad in his name according to the judgment of Innocent of blessed memory? See, Pope Innocent of blessed memory says that little children do not have life without the baptism of Christ and without participation in the body and blood of Christ. If he says "They will not", how then, not receiving eternal life, are they certainly condemned in consequence by eternal death, if they contract no original sin?

What do these men say to this, who dare even to write their slanderous impieties, dare even to send them to the Eastern bishops? Caelestius is held to have given his consent to the letter of the venerable Innocent; the very letter of the aforesaid bishop is read, writing that unbaptized little children cannot have life. And who will deny that it follows that those who do not have life have death? Whence, then, this miserable punishment in infants, if there is no original guilt? How then are the Roman clergy accused of prevarication under Bishop Zosimus by these deserters of the faith and assailants of grace, as though they had thought otherwise in the later condemnation of Caelestius and Pelagius than they thought in the earlier one under Innocent? For since, by the letter of the venerable Innocent about little children remaining in eternal death unless they were baptized in Christ, the antiquity of the Catholic faith shone out clearly, surely whoever had departed from that judgment would rather have been a prevaricator of the Roman church. Since, thanks be to God, this did not happen, but that judgment was kept by the constantly repeated condemnation of Caelestius and Pelagius, let these men understand that they themselves are what they accuse others of, and let them at last be healed of prevarication against the faith. For the Catholic faith does not say that the nature of human beings is evil, in so far as man was first established by the Creator; nor is what God creates in it now, when he makes human beings from human beings, its evil, but what it contracts from that fault of the first man.

Now we must look at the things which they briefly set down in their letter as charges against us, and to which this is our answer. We do not say that by the sin of Adam free choice perished from the nature of human beings, but that it has power for sinning in human beings subject to the devil; but that it has no power for living well and piously unless the will itself of man has been set free by the grace of God and helped to every good of action, speech, and thought. We say that no one but the Lord God is the maker of those who are born, and that marriage was instituted not by the devil but by him; yet that all are born under sin because of the fault of their descent, and therefore are under the devil until they are reborn in Christ. Nor do we assert fate under the name of grace, because we say that the grace of God is not preceded by any merits of human beings. But if some like to call the will of Almighty God by the name of fate, we indeed avoid profane novelties of words, but we do not love to contend about words.

But why they thought fit to charge us with asserting fate under the name of grace, when I was thinking about it somewhat more attentively, I first examined their words which follow. For they thought this charge should be made against us in this way: "Under the name of grace," they say, "they assert fate, so that they say that, unless God has breathed into an unwilling and resisting man the desire for good, and that imperfect, he can neither turn away from evil nor lay hold of good." Then, somewhat later, where they themselves recall what they maintain, I noticed what they said on this matter: "We confess," they say, "that baptism is necessary for all ages; also that grace helps the good purpose of each person, but does not implant the zeal for virtue in one who resists, because there is no respect of persons with God." From these words of theirs I understood that they either think, or wish it to be thought, that we assert fate under the name of grace for this reason: because we say that the grace of God is given not according to our merits, but according to the most merciful will of him who said: "I will have mercy on whom I have had mercy, and I will show mercy to whom I have been merciful." To which is added in consequence: "So then it is not of him who wills nor of him who runs, but of God who has mercy." From this someone equally foolish could think or say that the apostle is an asserter of fate. But here these men reveal themselves plainly enough. For since they slander us, saying that we assert fate under the name of grace, because we say that the grace of God is not given according to our merits, beyond doubt they confess that they themselves say it is given according to our merits. So their blindness could not hide and disguise that they think and hold what Pelagius, when it was charged against him, condemned with crafty fear in the episcopal judgment in Palestine. For it was charged against him, from the words of his disciple Caelestius, that he too said that the grace of God is given according to our merits. Detesting this, or as if detesting it, with his mouth only, he did not delay to anathematize it; but, as his later books indicate and as the assertion of these followers of his lays bare, he kept it with a feigned heart, until afterward what he had then covered from fear by the cunning of denial, his boldness brought out even in writing. And still the Pelagian bishops do not fear, are not even ashamed, to send their letters to the Catholic Eastern bishops, in which they accuse us of being asserters of fate because we do not say that the grace of God is given according to our merits, which Pelagius, fearing the Eastern bishops, did not dare to say and was compelled to condemn.

Is it really so, sons of pride, enemies of the grace of God, O new Pelagian heretics: whoever says that all the good merits of man are preceded by the grace of God, and that the grace of God is not given to merits, lest it not be grace, if it is not given freely but paid as due to those who merit it, seems to you to assert fate? Do not you yourselves also, with whatever intention, say that baptism is necessary for all ages? Did you not in this very letter of yours put this statement about baptism and that about grace side by side? Why did not baptism, which is given to infants, remind you by that very nearness what you ought to think about grace? For these are your words: "We confess that baptism is necessary for all ages; also that grace helps the good purpose of each person, but does not implant the zeal for virtue in one who resists, because there is no respect of persons with God." In all these words of yours I say nothing for the moment of what you said about grace. Give an account of baptism: why you say that it is necessary for all ages, tell us why it is necessary for little children. Surely because it confers some good on them, and that something is neither small nor middling, but great. For even if you deny that they contract original sin to be forgiven in baptism, yet you do not deny, indeed you even proclaim, that by that washing of regeneration they are adopted from sons of men into sons of God. Tell us, then: all the little children baptized in Christ who have departed from the body, by what preceding merits did they receive this so sublime gift? If you say that they merited this by the piety of their parents, it will be answered to us: why is this good sometimes denied to the children of the pious and granted to the children of the ungodly? For sometimes offspring born of religious parents, at a tender age and freshly from the womb, is overtaken by death before it is washed in the washing of regeneration, and an infant born of enemies of Christ is baptized in Christ through the mercy of Christians; a baptized mother mourns her own child unbaptized, and a chaste woman picks up another's child, exposed by an unchaste mother, to be baptized. Here certainly the merits of the parents are absent; absent, as you admit, are also those of the little children themselves. For we know that you do not believe this of the human soul, that before the earthly body it lived somewhere and did something good or evil, by which it might deserve this difference in the flesh. What cause, then, procured baptism for this little one and denied it to that one? Do they have fate, because they have no merit? Or is there with the Lord respect of persons in their case? For you have mentioned both, first fate, afterward respect of persons, so that, since both must be refuted, there might remain what you want to bring in against grace: merit. Answer, then, about the merits of little children: why some depart from their bodies baptized, others unbaptized, and why they neither possess nor lack so excellent a good by the merits of their parents, so as to become sons of God from sons of men by no merits of their parents, none of their own. You are silent, of course, and you find yourselves rather in what you charge against us. For if, where there is no merit, you say that it follows that there is fate, and for this reason you want man's merit to be understood in the grace of God, lest you be compelled to confess fate, see, it is rather you who assert fate in the baptism of little children, in whom you admit there is no merit. But if you grant that in baptizing little children no merit at all precedes and yet there is no fate, why, when we say that the grace of God is given freely precisely so that it may be grace, not paid as due to preceding merits, do you boast that we are asserters of fate, not understanding that in the justifying of the ungodly, as there are no merits precisely because it is God's grace, so there is no fate precisely because it is God's grace, and so there is no respect of persons precisely because it is God's grace?

For those who affirm fate contend that not only our acts and what befalls us, but even our very wills, depend on the position of the stars at the time when each one is conceived or born, which they call constellations; but the grace of God surpasses not only all the stars and all the heavens, but even all the angels. Then, the asserters of fate attribute both the good and the evil of human beings to fate; but God, in the evil of human beings, pursues their merits with due retribution, while the good he bestows by undeserved grace with merciful will, doing both not through a temporal conjunction of the stars but through the eternal and deep counsel of his severity and goodness. We see, then, that neither belongs to fate. Here, if you answer that this very benevolence of God, by which he does not follow merits but bestows undeserved goods by free goodness, should rather be called fate, when the apostle calls it grace, saying, "By grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves, but it is the gift of God; not from works, lest anyone be lifted up", do you not notice, do you not see clearly, that it is not we who assert fate under the name of divine grace, but rather you who call divine grace by the name of fate?

Likewise, respect of persons is rightly said to exist where the one who judges, leaving aside the merit of the case he is judging, supports one party against the other because he finds something in the person worthy of honor or pity. But if someone has two debtors and wishes to forgive the debt to one and exact it from the other, he gives to whom he wills but defrauds no one; nor is this to be called respect of persons, since there is no injustice. Otherwise, to those who understand little, there may seem to be respect of persons where the lord of the vineyard gave the workers who had worked there one hour as much as those who had borne the burden of the day and the heat, making equal in wages those between whom there had been so great a difference in labor. But what did he answer to those who murmured against the householder about this apparent respect of persons? "Friend," he says, "I do you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go. I wish to give to this last one as to you. Or is it not lawful for me to do what I wish? Or is your eye evil because I am good?" Here, surely, the whole justice is this: "I wish." "To you," he says, "I have paid; to this man I have given; and in order to give to him I took nothing from you, nor did I lessen or deny what I owed." "Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish? Or is your eye evil because I am good?" So, just as there is no respect of persons here, because one is honored freely in such a way that the other is not defrauded of what is due, so also, when according to the purpose of God one is called and another is not called, a free good is given to the one called, of which good the calling itself is the beginning, and to the one not called evil is paid back, because all are guilty from the fact that through one man sin entered into the world. And in that comparison of the workers, where those who worked one hour and those who worked twelve times as much received one denarius (the latter, by human but vain reasoning, ought to have received twelve denarii for the amount of their labor), both were made equal in good; not some set free and others condemned, since even those who labored more had it from the householder himself both that they were so called as to come and that they were so fed as not to faint. But where it is said, "So then he has mercy on whom he wills and hardens whom he wills", he who makes one vessel for honor, another for dishonor, the good is given undeservedly and freely, because the one to whom it is given is from the same lump; but the evil is paid back deservedly and as due, because in the lump of perdition evil is not evilly repaid for evil; and it is evil to him to whom it is repaid, because it is his punishment, but it is good to him by whom it is repaid, because it is his right action. Nor is there any respect of persons in the case of two debtors equally guilty, if to one is forgiven, from the other exacted, what is equally owed by both.

But so that what we are saying may become clear by the evidence of an example, let us suppose twins born of some prostitute and exposed so that others might pick them up: one of them died without baptism, the other baptized. What shall we say was fate or fortune here, which are nothing at all? What respect of persons, since there is none with God, even if there could be any in these infants, who certainly had nothing by which one might be preferred to the other, and no merits of their own, either good, by which one might deserve to be baptized, or evil, by which the other might deserve to die without baptism? Or were there merits of the parents, where the father was a fornicator and the mother a prostitute? But whatever they were, they were certainly not different for these two who died in so different a condition, but common to both. If, then, neither fate did this, because no stars decree these things, nor fortune, because it is not fortuitous chances that bring them about, nor a difference of persons or of merits, what remains, as far as the baptized one is concerned, but the grace of God, which is given freely to the vessels made for honor; and, as far as the unbaptized one is concerned, the wrath of God, which is paid back to the vessels made for dishonor in accordance with the merits of the lump itself? But in the one who was baptized we compel you to confess the grace of God, and we prove that no merit of his preceded; as for the one who died without baptism, why he lacked the sacrament which you too admit is necessary for all ages, and what was punished in him in this way, that is for you to see, who will not have it that there is original sin.

For us, in the case of these two twins, who beyond doubt had one and the same condition, the difficulty of the question why one died thus and the other thus, the apostle, as it were, solved by not solving it. For when he himself too had put forward something of the kind about two twins, of whom, "not from works", because they had not yet done anything good or evil, "but from him who calls", it was said, "The elder will serve the younger", and "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated"; and when he had brought the dread of this depth so far as to say, "So then he has mercy on whom he wills and hardens whom he wills", he at once perceived what this would stir up and set against himself the words of an objector, to be restrained by apostolic authority. For he says: "You will say then to me: Why does he still find fault? For who resists his will?" And he answered the one saying this: "O man, who are you to answer back to God? Does the thing formed say to him who formed it, 'Why have you made me thus?' Or does the potter not have power over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honor and another for dishonor?" Then, following up so great and hidden a secret, he opened it as far as he judged it should be opened to men, saying: "But if God, willing to show his wrath and to make known his power, endured with much patience the vessels of wrath, fitted for perdition, and in order to make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he prepared for glory." This is not only the help of God's grace, but also its lesson: help, namely, in the vessels of mercy, but in the vessels of wrath a lesson. For in them he shows his wrath and makes known his power, because his goodness is so powerful that he uses well even evil things; and in them he makes known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, since what the justice of the one who punishes exacts from the vessels of wrath, the grace of the one who sets free remits to the vessels of mercy. Nor would the benefit that is given freely to some be apparent, unless God, by condemning others from the same lump, equally guilty, with just punishment, showed what was due to both. "For who distinguishes you?" says the same apostle to a man glorying as if of himself and of his own good. "For who distinguishes you?" From the vessels of wrath, of course, from the lump of perdition, which through one man sent all into condemnation. "Who distinguishes you?" And, as if he had answered, "My faith distinguishes me, my purpose, my merit", he says: "For what do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you glory as if you had not received it?", that is, as if that by which you are distinguished were your own. So he distinguishes you who bestows that by which you are distinguished, removing the punishment that is due, bestowing the grace that is not due. He distinguishes, who, when darkness was over the abyss, said, "Let there be light", and there was light, and divided, that is, distinguished, between the light and the darkness. For when there was darkness alone, he found nothing to distinguish; but by making light he distinguished, so that it may be said to the justified ungodly: "For you were once darkness, but now light in the Lord"; and so let him who glories glory not in himself but in the Lord. He distinguishes, who, of those not yet born and who had done nothing good or evil, "so that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not from works but from him" who calls, said, "The elder will serve the younger", and commending this very thing afterward through the prophet said, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated." For he spoke of election where God does not find something made by another for him to choose, but himself makes what he may find, as it is written of the remnant of Israel: "A remnant has come about through the election of grace. But if by grace, then no longer from works; otherwise grace is no longer grace." For this reason you are surely foolish: when the Truth says, "not from works, but from him who calls it was said", you say that Jacob was loved from future works which God foreknew he would do, and so you contradict the apostle who says "not from works", as though he could not have said "not from works, but from future works". But he says "not from works" in order to commend grace; "but if by grace, then no longer from works; otherwise grace is no longer grace." For grace goes before, not due but free, so that good works may come about through it; lest, if good works went before, grace should be paid as if to works, and so grace be no longer grace.

But so that every hiding place of your fog might be taken from you, I proposed such twins, who were neither helped by the merits of their parents and both died at the very beginning of infancy, one baptized, the other without baptism, lest you should say that God foreknew their future works, as you say of Jacob and Esau against the apostle. For how did he foreknow as future those works which, since they were to die in infancy, he rather foreknew, because his foreknowledge cannot be deceived, would not come about? Or what does it profit those who are snatched from this life "lest wickedness change their understanding or deceit beguile their soul", if even sin that was not done, said, or thought is punished as though it had been committed? But if it is most absurd, most senseless, most insane that any human beings should be condemned for those sins whose guilt, as you say, they could not contract from their parents, and which they could not only not commit but not even think, then that unbaptized twin brother of the baptized one returns to you and silently asks you why he was separated from his brother's happiness, why he was punished with that unhappiness, so that, while the other was adopted among the sons of God, he himself did not receive the sacrament necessary, as you admit, for all ages, if, just as there is no fortune or fate or respect of persons with God, so there is no gift of grace without merits and no original sin. To this infant you utterly lower your tongue and voice; to him who does not speak you have nothing to say.

Now let us see, as we can, that very thing which they want to precede in man, so that he may be held worthy of the help of grace, and so that grace may not be granted to his merit as undue but paid back as due, and so grace be no longer grace; let us nevertheless see what it is. "Under the name of grace," they say, "they assert fate, so that they say that, unless God has breathed into an unwilling and resisting man the desire for good, and that imperfect, he can neither turn away from evil nor lay hold of good." We have already shown how empty their talk about fate and grace is. Now what we must attend to is whether God breathes into an unwilling and resisting man the desire for good, so that he is no longer resisting, no longer unwilling, but consenting to the good and willing the good. For these men want the desire for good in man to begin from man himself, so that the grace of accomplishing may also follow as the merit of this beginning. If, that is, they want even this; for Pelagius says that what is good is fulfilled "more easily" if grace helps. By this addition, that is, by adding "more easily", he certainly signifies that he holds that, even if the help of grace is lacking, the good can be fulfilled, though with more difficulty, through free choice. But let us not prescribe what these men think on this matter from that author of the heresy (let us allow them, with their free choice, to be free even of Pelagius himself), and let us rather attend to these words of theirs which they set down in this letter to which we are replying.

For they thought fit to charge us with saying that God breathes into an unwilling and resisting man the desire, not of any good whatever, but even of imperfect good. Perhaps, then, they themselves preserve a place for grace at least in this way: they think that without it a man can have the desire of good, but of imperfect good, while of the perfect good he can have it not merely more easily through grace, but not at all except through it. But even so they say that the grace of God is given according to our merits, which Pelagius in the East, fearing to be condemned, condemned in ecclesiastical proceedings. For if the desire for good begins from us without the grace of God, that very beginning will be a merit, to which the help of grace comes as if by debt; and so the grace of God will not be given freely, but will be given according to our merit. But the Lord, to answer the future Pelagius, did not say, "Without me you can do anything only with difficulty", but said, "Without me you can do nothing." And to answer these future men too, in that very same gospel saying, he did not say, "Without me you can accomplish nothing", but "do". For if he had said "accomplish", these men could say that God's help is necessary not for beginning the good, which is from us, but for accomplishing it. But let them hear the apostle too. For when the Lord says, "Without me you can do nothing", in this one word he includes beginning and end; but the apostle, as an expounder of the Lord's saying, distinguished both more openly, saying: "Since he who began a good work in you will accomplish it until the day of Christ Jesus." But in the holy Scriptures, in the same apostle, we find more on the point of which we are speaking. For we are speaking now of the desire for good, and if they want it to begin from us and be accomplished by the Lord, let them see what they answer to the apostle when he says: "Not that we are sufficient to think anything as from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God." He says "to think anything", certainly anything good; and to think is less than to desire. For we think everything we desire, yet we do not desire everything we think, since sometimes we think even what we do not desire. Since, then, to think is less than to desire (for a man can think of a good which he does not yet desire, and by advancing afterward desire what earlier he thought of without desiring it), how is it that for what is less, that is, for thinking something good, we are not sufficient as from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, while for what is more, that is, for desiring something good, we are sufficient from free choice without divine help? For here too the apostle does not say, "Not that we are sufficient to think what is perfect as from ourselves", but he says "to think anything", to which the contrary is "nothing". Hence that saying of the Lord: "Without me you can do nothing."

But evidently, by not understanding well what is written, "It belongs to man to prepare the heart, and from the Lord is the answer of the tongue", they are deceived into thinking that to prepare the heart, that is, to begin the good, belongs to man without the help of God's grace. Far be it that the children of the promise should understand it so, as though, when they hear the Lord saying, "Without me you can do nothing", they would refute him by saying, "See, without you we can prepare the heart"; or, when they hear from the apostle Paul, "Not that we are sufficient to think anything as from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God", as though they would refute him too by saying, "See, we are sufficient from ourselves to prepare the heart, and therefore also to think something good." For who can prepare the heart for good without a good thought? Far be it that anyone should understand it so, except proud defenders of their own choice and deserters of the Catholic faith. For it is written, "It belongs to man to prepare the heart, and from the Lord is the answer of the tongue", for this reason: because man prepares the heart, yet not without the help of God, who so touches the heart that man prepares the heart. But in the answer of the tongue, that is, in the divine tongue answering the prepared heart, man has no part of the work, but the whole is from the Lord God.

For just as it is said, "It belongs to man to prepare the heart, and from the Lord is the answer of the tongue", so also it is said, "Open your mouth, and I will fill it." For although we cannot open the mouth except with the help of him without whom we can do nothing, yet we open it with his help and by our own work, but the Lord fills it without our work. For what is it to prepare the heart and to open the mouth but to prepare the will? And yet in the same Scriptures we read, "The will is prepared by the Lord", and "You will open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise." See, God admonishes us to prepare the will in what we read, "It belongs to man to prepare the heart", and yet, that man may do this, God helps, because "the will is prepared by the Lord". And he says "Open your mouth" by commanding in such a way that no one can do it unless he himself does it by helping, to whom it is said, "You will open my lips." Or are these men so foolish as to contend that the mouth is one thing and the lips another, and say with wonderful vanity that man opens the mouth, God the man's lips? But God restrains them even from this absurdity, where he says to Moses his servant: "I will open your mouth and instruct you in what you ought to say." So in that saying where it is said, "Open your mouth, and I will fill it", one of the two seems to belong to man and the other to God; but in this one, where it is said, "I will open your mouth and instruct you", both belong to God. Why is this, except that in one of these he works together with the man who acts, and the other he does alone?

Therefore God does many good things in man which man does not do; but man does none which God does not cause man to do. Accordingly, the desire for good would not be from the Lord to man if it were not good; but if it is good, it is ours only from him who is supremely and unchangeably good. For what is the desire for good but love, of which the apostle John speaks without ambiguity, saying, "Love is from God"? Nor is its beginning from us and its perfection from God; but if love is from God, the whole of it is ours from God. For may God turn away this madness, that in his gifts we make ourselves first and him second, since "his mercy will go before me", and he is the one to whom it is faithfully and truly sung: "For you went before him with blessings of sweetness." And what is more fittingly understood here than that very desire for good of which we are speaking? For the good begins to be desired when it has begun to grow sweet; but when the good is done from fear of punishment, not from love of righteousness, the good is not yet done well, nor is it done in the heart which seems to be done in the work, since the man would rather not do it if he could with impunity. So the blessing of sweetness is the grace of God, by which it comes about in us that what he commands us delights us and we desire it, that is, love it. And in this, if God does not go before us, it is not only not accomplished, but not even begun from us. For if without him we can do nothing, surely we can neither begin nor accomplish, since, that we may begin, it is said, "His mercy will go before me", and, that we may accomplish, it is said, "His mercy will follow me."

What is it, then, that in what follows, where they recall what they themselves hold, they say that they confess "also that grace helps the good purpose of each person, but does not implant the zeal for virtue in one who resists"? For they say this as if a man had a good purpose and zeal for virtue from himself without the help of God, by which preceding merit he would be worthy to be helped by God's grace following. For perhaps they think that the apostle said, "We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to purpose", in such a way that he wanted the purpose of man to be understood, a purpose which, as a good merit, the mercy of God who calls would follow; not knowing that "who are called according to purpose" was said so that the purpose of God, not of man, would be understood, by which he chose before the foundation of the world those whom "he foreknew and predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son". For not all who are called are called according to purpose, since "many are called, few are chosen". Those, then, are called according to purpose who were chosen before the foundation of the world. Of this purpose of God was said also what I have already mentioned about the twins Esau and Jacob: "so that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not from works but from him who calls, it was said to her that the elder will serve the younger." This purpose of God is mentioned also in that place where he writes to Timothy: "Labor with the gospel according to the power of God, who saves us and calls us with his holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before eternal ages, but has now been made manifest through the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ." This, then, is the purpose of God, of which it is said, "All things work together for good for those who are called according to purpose." But the good purpose of man is indeed helped by grace following, yet it would not itself exist unless grace went before. Also man's zeal which is called good, although, when it has begun to exist, it is helped by grace, yet does not begin without grace, but is breathed in by him of whom the apostle says: "But thanks be to God, who gave the same zeal for you in the heart of Titus." If God gives it that each should have zeal for others, who else will give it that he should have it for himself?

Since this is so, I see nothing commanded to man by the Lord in the holy Scriptures for the purpose of proving free choice which is not found either to be given by his goodness or to be asked for, in order to show the help of grace; nor does a man at all begin to be changed from evil to good through the beginning of faith unless the undeserved and free mercy of God works this in him. Recalling his own thought about this, someone says, as we read in the Psalms: "Will God forget to be merciful, or will he shut up his compassion in his anger? And I said: Now I have begun; this change is of the right hand of the Most High." So when he had said, "Now I have begun", he did not say, "This change is of my choice", but "of the right hand of the Most High". Let the grace of God, then, be so thought of that from the beginning of his good change to the end of its completion he who glories may glory in the Lord; because, just as no one can accomplish good without the Lord, so no one can begin it without the Lord. But let this be the end of this book, so that the reader's attention may be refreshed and restored for what follows.

There still follow the things which they slanderously charge against us; they do not yet begin to set out what they themselves hold. But so that the length of the volumes might not give offense, we have divided these very charges into two books; the former of these being finished, which is the second book of this whole work, we now begin the other, and join it as the third to the first and second.

They say that we say that the law of the Old Testament was given not in order to justify those who obey it, but to become the cause of greater sin. They entirely fail to understand what we say about the law, because we say what the apostle says, whom they do not understand. For who would say that those who are obedient to the law are not justified, when, unless they were justified, they could not be obedient? But we say that by the law it comes about that what God wills to be done is heard, but by grace that the law is obeyed. "For not the hearers of the law," says the apostle, "are righteous before God, but the doers of the law will be justified." The law, then, makes hearers of righteousness, grace makes doers. "For what was impossible for the law," says the same apostle, "in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin, and concerning sin, condemned sin in the flesh, so that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." See what we say; let them pray that they may at some time understand, not quarrel so that they never understand. For it is impossible to fulfill the law through the flesh, that is, through carnal presumption, by which the proud, "ignorant of the righteousness of God" (that is, the righteousness which is from God to man so that he may be righteous), "and wishing to establish their own", as though the law could be fulfilled through their choice unhelped by God, "have not submitted to the righteousness of God". Therefore the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in those who walk not according to the flesh, that is, according to man ignorant of the righteousness of God and wishing to establish his own, but walk according to the Spirit. And who walks according to the Spirit but whoever is led by the Spirit of God? "For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God." So "the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." Nor is the letter evil because it kills, but it convicts the evil of transgression. "For the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good. Did what is good, then," he says, "become death to me? Far from it. But sin, that it might appear sin, worked death for me through what is good, so that sin might become sinful beyond measure through the commandment." See what "the letter kills" means. "For the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law"; for by prohibiting it increases the desires of sin, and so kills, unless grace gives life by coming to help.

See what we say; see the source from which they charge us with saying that the law was given to be the cause of greater sin, not hearing the apostle say: "For the law works wrath; for where there is no law, there is no transgression either"; and: "The law was added because of transgression, until the offspring should come to whom the promise was made"; and: "If a law had been given which could give life, righteousness would certainly be from the law. But the Scripture has shut up all things under sin, so that the promise might be given from faith in Jesus Christ to those who believe." Hence it is that the Old Testament, from Mount Sinai, where the law was given, bears children for slavery; this is Hagar. "But we," he says, "are not children of the maidservant, but of the free woman." So those are not children of the free woman who received the law of the letter, by which they could be shown to be not only sinners but transgressors besides, but those who received the Spirit of grace, by whom the law itself, holy and just and good, can be fulfilled. See what we say; let them pay attention and not contend, let them be enlightened and not slander.

"They assert also," they say, "that baptism does not truly make men new, that is, does not give full forgiveness of sins; but they contend that men become sons of God in part, but in part remain sons of the world, that is, of the devil." They lie, they lay snares, they shuffle; we do not say this. For we say that all men who are sons of the devil are also sons of the world, but not that all sons of the world are also sons of the devil. For far be it that we should say that the holy patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and others of this kind were sons of the devil when they begot children through marriage, or those believers who until now and still hereafter beget. Yet we cannot contradict the Lord when he says: "The sons of this world marry and are given in marriage." Some, then, are sons of this world and yet are not sons of the devil; for although the devil is the author and prince of all sins, yet not every sin makes men sons of the devil. For even the sons of God sin, since, if they say they have no sin, they deceive themselves and the truth is not in them; but they sin in the condition in which they are still sons of this world; but in so far as they are sons of God by grace, they certainly do not sin, because "everyone who is born of God does not sin". But unbelief makes men sons of the devil, and this is called sin in the proper sense, as if it were the only one, if what kind of sin is not specified, just as when "the apostle" is said, if it is not specified which apostle, only Paul is understood, because he is better known through more letters and labored more than all of them. Hence, when the Lord said of the Holy Spirit, "He will convict the world of sin", he wished unbelief to be understood. For when he explained this he said, "Of sin, because they did not believe in me"; and where he says, "If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin." For it is not that they had no sin before; but he wished that very unbelief to be understood by which they did not believe him even when he was present and speaking, belonging as they did to him of whom the apostle says, "according to the prince of the power of the air, who now works in the sons of unbelief". Those, then, in whom there is no faith are sons of the devil, because they do not have in the inner man that for which whatever is committed through human weakness or ignorance, or through any evil will at all, might be forgiven them. But those are sons of God who, if they say they have no sin, surely deceive themselves and the truth is not in them; and certainly, as follows, when they confess their sins (which the sons of the devil do not do, or do not do according to the faith that is proper to the sons of God), "he is faithful and just to forgive them their sins and to cleanse them from all iniquity". But so that what we say may be more fully understood, let Jesus himself be heard, who was certainly speaking to sons of God when he said: "If you, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!" For if they were not sons of God, he would not say to them, "your Father who is in heaven". And yet he says that they are evil and know how to give good things to their children. Are they evil from the same source from which they are sons of God? Far from it; but they are evil from the fact that they are still sons of the world, though already made sons of God by the pledge of the Holy Spirit.

Baptism, then, washes away all sins, absolutely all, of deeds, words, and thoughts, whether original or added, whether committed in ignorance or knowingly; but it does not take away the weakness which the regenerate man resists when he fights the good fight, but to which he consents when, being a man, he is overtaken in some fault; rejoicing on account of the former in giving thanks, but groaning on account of the latter in offering prayers; saying in the one case, "What shall I render to the Lord for all that he has rendered to me?", in the other, "Forgive us our debts"; saying on account of the former, "I will love you, O Lord, my strength", on account of the latter, "Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am weak"; saying on account of the former, "My eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he will pluck my feet out of the snare", on account of the latter, "My eye is troubled with anger"; and innumerable things of which the divine Scriptures are full, which are said by the sons of God from faith with alternating voices, either exulting over God's good things or grieving over our own evils, as long as they are still sons also of this world, because of the weakness of this life. Yet God distinguishes them from the sons of the devil not only by the washing of regeneration but also by the uprightness of that faith which works through love, because the righteous lives by faith. But this weakness, with which we contend until the death of the body, with failure and progress alternating, and it matters greatly which prevails in us, will be consumed by another regeneration, of which the Lord says: "In the regeneration, when the Son of Man sits on the throne of his majesty, you also will sit on twelve thrones", and so on. For in this place, as no one doubts, he calls the final resurrection "regeneration", which the apostle Paul too calls both adoption and redemption, saying: "But we ourselves also, having the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves, awaiting the adoption, the redemption of our body." Have we not been regenerated, adopted, redeemed through the holy washing? And yet there remains a regeneration, adoption, redemption, which is to come at the end and which we must now wait for patiently, so that then we may no longer be sons of this world in any part. Whoever, then, detracts from baptism what we now receive through it corrupts faith; but whoever attributes to it already now what we shall indeed receive through it, but afterward, cuts off hope. For if anyone asks me whether we have been saved through baptism, I cannot deny it, since the apostle says: "He saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit." But if he asks whether through that same washing he has already saved us in absolutely every way, I shall answer: it is not so. For the same apostle likewise says: "For in hope we have been saved. But hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." The salvation of man, then, has been accomplished in baptism, because what he contracted of sin from his parents has been forgiven, and also whatever he himself sinned personally before baptism; but his salvation will afterward be so great that he cannot sin at all.

Since this is so, from these things are refuted also those which they next charge against us. For what Catholic says what they keep boasting that we say, that the Holy Spirit was not a helper of virtue in the Old Testament, unless we understand the Old Testament in the way the apostle spoke of it: "from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery"? But because the New was prefigured in it, those men of God who understood this at that time are shown, according to the distribution of the times, to have been dispensers and bearers indeed of the Old Testament, but heirs of the New. Or shall we deny that he belongs to the New Testament who says, "Create a clean heart in me, O God, and renew a right spirit within me"? Or him who says, "He set my feet upon a rock and directed my steps, and put a new song in my mouth, a hymn to our God"? Or him, before the Old Testament which is from Mount Sinai, the father of the faithful, of whom the apostle says: "Brothers, I speak in human terms: even a man's covenant, once confirmed, no one annuls or adds to. The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his offspring. He does not say 'and to offsprings', as of many, but as of one, 'and to your offspring', who is Christ. This I say," he says: "a covenant confirmed by God, the law which came four hundred and thirty years afterward does not annul, so as to make the promise void. For if the inheritance is from the law, it is no longer from the promise; but God gave it to Abraham through the promise."

Here certainly, if we ask whether this covenant, which he says was confirmed by God and is not annulled by the law made four hundred and thirty years afterward, is to be understood as the New or the Old, who would hesitate to answer "the New", but hidden in prophetic obscurities until the time should come when it would be revealed in Christ? For if we say "the Old", what will that be which is "from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery"? For there the law was made four hundred and thirty years afterward, by which law he affirms that this covenant of the promise to Abraham cannot be annulled; and he wishes that which was made with Abraham to belong rather to us, whom he wishes to be children of the free woman, not of the maidservant, heirs from the promise, not the law, when he says: "For if the inheritance is from the law, it is no longer from the promise; but God gave it to Abraham through the promise"; so that the law, made four hundred and thirty years afterward, came in for this purpose, that the offense might abound, when the pride of man presuming on his own righteousness is convicted by the sin of transgression; and that, where the offense abounded, grace might superabound, through the faith of man now humbled, failing in the law and fleeing to the mercy of God. Therefore, when he had said, "For if the inheritance is from the law, it is no longer from the promise; but God gave it to Abraham through the promise", as if he were asked, "Why, then, was the law made afterward?", he added and said: "Why then the law?" To which question he at once replied: "It was added because of transgression, until the offspring should come to whom the promise was made." He says the same thing again in this way: "For if those who are of the law are heirs, faith is emptied and the promise made void. For the law works wrath; for where there is no law, there is no transgression either." What he says in that testimony, "For if the inheritance is from the law, it is no longer from the promise; but God gave it to Abraham through the promise", he says in this one: "For if those who are through the law are heirs, faith is emptied and the promise made void", showing clearly enough that what God gave to Abraham through the promise belongs to our faith, which is certainly of the New Testament. And what he says in that testimony, "Why then the law?", answering, "It was added because of transgression", he likewise added in this one: "For the law works wrath; for where there is no law, there is no transgression either."

Whether, then, Abraham, or the righteous before him, or those after him up to Moses himself, through whom was given the covenant from Mount Sinai bearing children for slavery, or the other prophets after him and holy men of God up to John the Baptist, they are children of the promise and of grace, like Isaac the son of the free woman, heirs of God not from the law but from the promise, and fellow heirs with Christ. For far be it that we should deny that the righteous Noah and the righteous of the earlier time, and whoever could be righteous from him to Abraham, whether conspicuous or hidden, belong to the Jerusalem above, which is our mother, although they are found to be earlier in time than Sarah, who bore the prophecy and figure of that free mother. How much more evidently, then, after Abraham, to whom the promise itself was so declared that he was called the father of many nations, are all who pleased God to be held children of the promise! For from Abraham onward it is not that the generation of the righteous is found to be truer, but that the prophecy is found to be clearer.

But to the Old Testament, which is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery, which is Hagar, belong those who, having received the holy and just and good law, think that the letter can suffice them for life, and therefore do not seek the divine mercy by which they may become doers of the law, but, "ignorant of the righteousness of God and wishing to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God". Of this kind was that multitude which murmured against God in the desert and made an idol, and that which, already in the very land of promise, committed fornication after foreign gods. But this multitude is thoroughly reprobate even in the Old Testament itself. Those too, whoever were there, who pursued only the earthly promises which God there makes, and did not know what these very things signify for the New Testament, kept God's commandments out of love of obtaining them and fear of losing them; or rather they did not keep them, but seemed to themselves to keep them; for faith was not working in them through love, but earthly desire and carnal fear. But whoever does the commandments in this way beyond doubt does them unwillingly, and therefore does not do them in his mind; for he would rather not do them at all, if, as regards what he desires and fears, he were permitted to do so with impunity. And therefore he is guilty within, in the will itself, where God himself who commands looks. Such were the children of the earthly Jerusalem, of which the apostle says, "For she is in slavery with her children", belonging to the Old Testament from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery, which is Hagar. Of that same kind were those who crucified the Lord and remained in the same unbelief. From them also are their children, still in the vast multitude of the Jews, although the New Testament has now, as was prophesied, been opened and confirmed through the blood of Christ, and the gospel spread abroad from the river where he was baptized and began his teaching to the ends of the earth. These Jews, according to the prophecies which they read, are dispersed everywhere through all lands, so that from their books too testimony may not be lacking to the Christian truth.

God, then, established the Old Testament too, because it pleased God, until the fullness of time, to veil the heavenly promises under earthly promises set up as a reward, and to give to a people gaping after earthly goods, and therefore having a hard heart, a law which, though spiritual, was nevertheless on tablets of stone. For, apart from the sacraments of the old books, which were commanded only for the sake of signifying (although in them too, since they are to be understood spiritually, the law is rightly called spiritual), as for the rest, which pertain to piety and good morals and are not to be referred by any interpretation to some signification, but are to be done exactly as they are said, surely no one will doubt that that law of God is necessary for rightly ordering life, not only for that people then but also for us now. For if Christ has taken from us that very heavy yoke of many observances, so that we are not circumcised in the flesh, do not sacrifice victims of cattle, do not rest on the Sabbath, as the seven-day cycle returns, even from necessary works, and other things of this kind, but hold them understood spiritually, and, the signifying shadows being removed, keep watch in the light of the very realities which are signified, shall we therefore say that what is written does not apply to us, that whoever finds anything lost belonging to another should return it to him who lost it, and many other similar things by which one learns to live piously and rightly, and above all the Decalogue itself, which is contained on those two tablets of stone, except the carnal observance of the Sabbath, which signifies spiritual sanctification and rest? For who would say that Christians ought not to observe that the one God is served with religious worship, that an idol is not worshiped, that the name of the Lord is not taken in vain, that parents are honored, that adulteries, murders, thefts, and false testimonies are not committed, that another's wife, or anything at all of another's, is not coveted? Who is so ungodly as to say that he does not keep these precepts of the law because he is a Christian and established not under the law but under grace?

But this is plainly the great difference: those placed under the law, whom the letter kills, do these things out of desire of obtaining or fear of losing earthly happiness, and therefore do not truly do them, since the carnal desire by which sin is committed is rather changed or increased by another desire, not healed. These belong to the Old Testament, which bears children for slavery, because carnal fear and desire make them slaves, not evangelical faith and hope and love making them free. But those placed under grace, whom the Spirit gives life, do these things from faith which works through love, in hope of goods not carnal but spiritual, not earthly but heavenly, not temporal but eternal, believing above all in the Mediator, through whom they do not doubt that the Spirit of grace is supplied to them so that they may do these things well, and that they can be pardoned when they sin. These belong to the New Testament, children of the promise, regenerated by God the Father and the free mother. Of this kind were all the ancient righteous, and Moses himself, minister of the Old Testament, heir of the New, because they lived by one and the same faith by which we live, believing in the future incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Christ which we believe has taken place; up to John the Baptist himself, as a kind of boundary of the past dispensation, who, signifying the Mediator himself not by some shadow of the future or allegorical meaning or any prophetic foretelling that he would come, but pointing him out with his finger, said: "Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sin of the world"; as if saying: he whom many righteous men desired to see, in whom they believed as the one to come from the very beginning of the human race, of whom the promises were spoken to Abraham, of whom Moses wrote, to whom the law and the prophets are witnesses: "Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sin of the world." From this John onward, things about Christ began to be past or present which by all those righteous of the earlier time were believed, hoped for, and desired as future. The same faith, therefore, is both in those who were Christians before, not yet in name but in reality, and in these who not only are but are also called so; and in both there is the same grace through the Holy Spirit. Hence the apostle says: "But having the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, 'I believed, therefore I spoke', we too believe, and therefore we also speak."

So the term "Old Testament" is used in one sense, according to the now prevailing usage of speech, for the law and all the prophets who prophesied up to John (which is more distinctly called the old instrument than the old testament), and in another sense as apostolic authority names it, whether expressing this name or signifying it. For it expresses it where it says: "Until this very day, as long as Moses is read, the same veil remains in the reading of the Old Testament, not being lifted, because it is done away in Christ." For here certainly he referred the Old Testament to the ministry of Moses. Likewise he says, "so that we serve in newness of spirit and not in oldness of the letter", signifying that same testament by the name "letter". Likewise in another place: "Who also made us sufficient," he says, "as ministers of a new testament, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." And here by mentioning the new he certainly wished that old one to be understood. But much more evidently, although he said neither "old" nor "new", he distinguished the two testaments themselves by the two sons of Abraham, one of the maidservant, the other of the free woman, which we have already mentioned above. For what more explicit than his saying: "Tell me, you who wish to be under the law: have you not heard the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one of the maidservant and one of the free woman. But the one of the maidservant was born according to the flesh, the one of the free woman through the promise. These things are an allegory; for these are the two testaments, one from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery, which is Hagar (for Sinai is a mountain in Arabia, which corresponds to the present Jerusalem; for she is in slavery with her children), but the Jerusalem above is free, which is our mother." What is clearer, what more certain, what further removed from all obscurity and ambiguity? And a little later: "But we, brothers," he says, "are children of the promise, like Isaac." Likewise a little later: "But we, brothers, are not children of the maidservant but of the free woman, with the freedom with which Christ has set us free." Let us choose, then, whether we call the ancient righteous children of the maidservant or of the free woman. Far be it that we call them children of the maidservant; so if of the free woman, they belong to the New Testament in the Holy Spirit, whom, as giving life, the apostle opposes to the letter that kills. For how do they not belong to the grace of the New Testament, from whose sayings and books we refute and convict these most senseless and most ungrateful enemies of that same grace?

But someone will say: how is that called "old" which was made through Moses four hundred and thirty years afterward, and that called "new" which was made with Abraham so many years before? Let him who is moved by this not contentiously but studiously understand, first, that if the one is called old from the earlier time and the other new from the later, it is their revelations that are considered in these names, not their institutions. For through Moses the Old Testament was revealed, through whom the law was given, holy and just and good, by which should come about not the abolition but the knowledge of sin, by which the proud might be convicted, wishing to establish their own righteousness as though not needing divine help, and, made guilty by the letter, might flee to the Spirit of grace, to be justified not by their own righteousness but by God's, that is, the righteousness which would be theirs from God. For, as the same apostle says, "through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested without the law, witnessed by the law and the prophets." For the law, by the very fact that no one is justified in it, bears witness to the righteousness of God; "for that no one is justified in the law before God is evident, because the righteous lives by faith". So when the law does not justify the ungodly man convicted of transgression, it sends him to the God who justifies, and thus bears witness to the righteousness of God. And the prophets bear witness to the righteousness of God by foretelling Christ, "who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, he who glories may glory in the Lord." This law was hidden from the beginning, when nature itself convicted unjust men of doing to others what they would not have wished done to themselves. But the revelation of the New Testament took place in Christ, when he was manifested in the flesh; in him the righteousness of God appeared, that is, the righteousness which is to men from God. For so he says: "But now the righteousness of God has been manifested without the law." See for what reason that one is called the Old Testament, because it was revealed at an earlier time, and this one the New, because at a later time. Next, because the Old Testament pertains to the old man, from whom man must begin, and the New to the new man, into whom man ought to pass from oldness, therefore in the former there are earthly promises, in the latter heavenly promises; because this too belonged to the mercy of God, that no one should think that even earthly happiness of any kind can be conferred on anyone except by the Lord, the Creator of the universe. But if God is worshiped for the sake of that, it is a servile worship, belonging to the children of the maidservant; but if for the sake of God himself, so that in eternal life God may be all in all, it is a free service, belonging to the children of the free woman, who is our eternal mother in heaven. She formerly appeared as if barren, when she had no evident children; but now we see what was prophesied of her: "Rejoice, barren one, who do not bear; break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor, for many are the children of the desolate, more than of her who has a husband", that is, more than of that Jerusalem which was in a manner married by the bond of the law and is in slavery with her children. In the time of the Old Testament, then, we say that the Holy Spirit, in those who even then were children of the promise like Isaac, was not only a helper, which these men think sufficient for their dogma, but also a giver of virtue, which these men deny, attributing it rather to free choice, contradicting those fathers who knew how to cry out to the Lord with true piety: "I will love you, O Lord, my strength!"

They say also that we define all the apostles or prophets as not fully holy, but say that they were less evil in comparison with worse men, and that this is the righteousness to which God bears witness, so that, just as the prophet says that Sodom was justified in comparison with the Jews, so we too say that the saints exercised some virtue in comparison with criminals. Far be it from us to say this; but either they cannot understand, or they will not pay attention, or out of zeal for slander they pretend not to know what we say. Let them hear, then, either they themselves or rather those whom, as simple and unlearned, they try to deceive. Our faith, that is, the Catholic faith, distinguishes the righteous from the unrighteous not by the law of works but by the law of faith itself, because the righteous lives by faith. Through this distinction it comes about that a man who leads a life without murder, without theft, without false witness, without coveting anything belonging to another, rendering due honor to his parents, chaste even to continence from all intercourse whatever, even marital, most generous in almsgiving, most patient under injuries, who not only does not take what belongs to others but does not even ask back his own when taken, or even, having sold all his goods and distributed them to the poor, possesses nothing of his own; yet with all these apparently praiseworthy morals of his, if he does not hold a right and Catholic faith in God, he departs this life to be condemned. But another man, having indeed good works from right faith, which works through love, yet not as that man of good morals does: he supports his incontinence by the honor of marriage; he both renders and asks the carnal debt of marriage, and lies with his wife, though with her alone, not only for the sake of procreation but also of pleasure, which the apostle grants to married people by way of pardon; he does not accept injuries so patiently, but is carried away in anger by desire for revenge, although, so that he can say "as we also forgive our debtors", he forgives when asked; he possesses property, giving alms from it indeed, but not as generously as that other; he does not take what belongs to others, but asks back his own, though in the church's court, not in the civil one: this man, surely, who seems inferior to the other in morals, because of the right faith which he has in God, by which he lives and according to which he accuses himself in all his offenses and praises God in all his good works, attributing shame to himself and glory to God, and receiving from him both the forgiveness of sins and the love of right deeds, departs from this life to be set free and to be received into the fellowship of those who will reign with Christ. Why, except because of faith? Although faith saves no one without works (for that faith is not reprobate which works through love), yet through it even sins are loosed, because the righteous lives by faith; but without it even works which seem good are turned into sins, for "whatever is not from faith is sin." And because of this very great difference it comes about that, although, as no one doubts, persevering virginal integrity is better than marital chastity, yet a Catholic woman even twice married is preferred to a heretical professed virgin; and she is preferred not in such a way that the Catholic will be better in the kingdom of God, but in such a way that the other will not be there at all. For that man too whom we described as of better morals, if he has right faith, surpasses that other, but both will be there; but if he lacks faith, he is so surpassed by the other that he himself will not be there.

So, since all the righteous, both the more ancient ones and the apostles, lived by right faith, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, and had such holy morals together with faith that, although they could not in this life be of such perfect virtue as there will be after this life, yet whatever of sin crept in from human weakness was continually wiped out by the piety of that very faith (hence it can be that, in comparison with the wicked whom God will condemn, they must be called righteous, since through pious faith they are so far removed in the opposite direction from those ungodly men that the apostle cries: "What part has a believer with an unbeliever?"); but, of course, the new Pelagian heretics seem to themselves to be religious lovers and praisers of the saints if they do not dare to say that they were of imperfect virtue, when the vessel of election confesses this, who, considering where he still was, and that "the body which is corrupted weighs down the soul", says: "Not that I have already received, or am already perfect; brothers, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it myself." And yet a little later he who had denied that he was perfect says: "Let as many of us, then, as are perfect think this", to show that, according to the measure of this life, there is a certain perfection, and that this too is counted to that perfection, if each knows that he is not yet perfect. For what was more excellent in the ancient people than the holy priests? And yet God commanded them to offer sacrifice first for their own sins. And what was holier in the new people than the apostles? And yet the Lord commanded them to say in prayer, "Forgive us our debts." For all the pious, then, groaning under this burden of corruptible flesh and in the weakness of this life, there is one hope: that we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the propitiation for our sins.

Those do not have this advocate who are separated from the righteous, far away in the opposite direction, even if this were the only difference. Far be it that we should say of this righteous advocate, as they slander us, that he lied through the necessity of the flesh; but we say that "in the likeness of the flesh of sin, concerning sin, he condemned sin". Perhaps, not understanding this, blinded by the desire to slander, and not knowing in how many different ways the word "sin" is used in the holy Scriptures, they boast that we affirm sin in Christ. We say, then, that Christ had no sin either in soul or in flesh, and that by taking flesh in the likeness of the flesh of sin he condemned sin concerning sin. This, said somewhat obscurely by the apostle, is resolved in two ways: either because likenesses of things are usually called by the names of the things they are like, so that the apostle may be understood to have wished to call that very likeness of the flesh of sin "sin"; or because sacrifices for sins were called "sins" in the law, all of which were figures of the flesh of Christ, which is the true and only sacrifice for sins, not only for those which are all washed away in baptism, but also for those which afterward creep in from the weakness of this life. On account of these the whole church cries daily to God in prayer, "Forgive us our debts", and they are forgiven us through the singular sacrifice for sins, which the apostle, speaking according to the law, did not hesitate to call "sin". Hence also that saying of his, much more evident and not made uncertain by any fork of ambiguity: "We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. Him who did not know sin he made sin for us, so that we might be the righteousness of God in him." For as to what I mentioned above, "concerning sin he condemned sin", since it is not said "concerning his own sin", someone could understand it in such a way as to say that he condemned sin concerning the sin of the Jews, because it came about from the sin of those who crucified him that he shed his blood for the forgiveness of sins. But this, where it is said that God made Christ himself, who did not know sin, to be sin, does not seem to me to be more fittingly understood than that Christ was made a sacrifice for sins and for this reason called "sin".

But who would bear their charging us with saying that after the resurrection there will be such advances that men will begin there to fulfill the commandments of God which they would not fulfill here, because we say that there will be no sin at all there, nor any conflict with any desire of sin, as though they themselves would dare to deny this? Who will deny that wisdom too and the knowledge of God will then be perfected in us, and such exultation in the Lord that there will be full and true security, unless he is so turned away from the truth that for that reason he cannot arrive at it? But these things will not be in commandments, but in the reward of the commandments which are to be observed here. The contempt of these commandments, indeed, does not lead to the reward there; but the zeal to keep the commandments here is given by the grace of God. And if anything in those commandments is kept less well, grace pardons it; for this reason we say in prayer both "Your will be done" and "Forgive us our debts." Here, then, the commandment is that we should not sin; there the reward is not to be able to sin. Here the commandment is that we should not obey the desires of sin; there the reward is that we should not have the desires of sin. Here the commandment is: "Understand, you who are foolish among the people, and you fools, at last be wise"; there the reward is full wisdom and perfect knowledge ("For now we see through a mirror in an enigma," says the apostle, "but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know as I also have been known"). Here the commandment is: "Exult in God our helper", and "Exult, you righteous, in the Lord"; there the reward is to exult with perfect and ineffable joy. Finally, in the commandment is set, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness", but in the reward, "for they will be satisfied". Satisfied with what, I ask, if not with that for which they hunger and thirst? Who, then, is so estranged not only from divine but also from human sense as to say that there can be as much righteousness in a man while he hungers and thirsts for it as there will be when he is satisfied with it? And when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, if the faith of Christ is awake in us, what must we believe we hunger and thirst for but Christ, "who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, he who glories may glory in the Lord"? And because we now believe in him without seeing him, therefore we thirst and hunger for righteousness. "For as long as we are in the body, we are away from the Lord; for we walk by faith, not by sight." When we see him, arriving indeed at sight, we shall exult with unspeakable joy, and then we shall be satisfied with righteousness; for now we say to him with pious desire: "I shall be satisfied when your glory is made manifest."

But how great, I do not say shameless, but insane, is the pride of those who are not yet equal to the angels of God and think that they can already have a righteousness equal to that of the angels of God; and do not look at so great and holy a man, who certainly hungered and thirsted for the very perfection of righteousness when he did not wish to be lifted up by the greatness of his revelations! And yet, that he might not be lifted up, he was not entrusted to his own choice and will, but received a thorn in the flesh, an angel of Satan, to buffet him. Because of this he asked the Lord three times that it might depart from him, and the Lord said to him: "My grace is sufficient for you; for power is perfected in weakness." What power, but that to which it belongs not to be lifted up? And who doubts that this belongs to righteousness? With the perfection of this righteousness, then, the angels of God are endowed, who always see the face of the Father, and therefore of the whole Trinity, because they see through the Son in the Holy Spirit. And nothing is more sublime than this revelation; yet none of the angels rejoicing in that contemplation needs an angel of Satan to buffet him, lest so great a revelation lift him up. This perfection of virtue the apostle Paul certainly did not yet have, being not yet equal to the angels of God; but there was in him a weakness of lifting himself up, which had to be restrained even by an angel of Satan, lest he be lifted up by the greatness of his revelations. So, although the first pride cast down Satan himself, yet that supreme Physician, who knows how to use even evil things well, applied against the fault of pride a wholesome though troublesome medicine made from an angel of Satan, as an antidote is commonly made even from serpents against the poisons of serpents. What, then, does "My grace is sufficient for you" mean, but "that you may not fail and succumb under the buffeting of the angel of Satan"? And what does "Power is perfected in weakness" mean, but that in this place of weakness the perfection of virtue can go only so far that, with weakness itself present, pride is repressed? This weakness will certainly be healed by the future immortality. For how can there be said to be full health where medicine is still needed, even from the buffeting of an angel of Satan?

From this it has come about that the virtue which is now in a righteous man is called perfect to this extent: that to its perfection belong also both the knowledge in truth and the confession in humility of its very imperfection. For then this small righteousness is perfect according to its measure, in keeping with this weakness, when it understands also what it lacks. And therefore the apostle calls himself both imperfect and perfect: imperfect, namely, in thinking how much he lacks for the righteousness whose fullness he still hungers and thirsts for; but perfect in that he does not blush to confess his imperfection and advances well in order to arrive, just as we can say that a traveler is perfect whose approach is going forward well, although his intention is not accomplished until his arrival has been made. For this reason, when he had said, "as to the righteousness which is in the law, I was without complaint", he at once added: "What were gains to me, these I have counted losses for Christ's sake. Indeed I count all things to be loss because of the surpassing knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord, for whom I have held all things not only as detriments but have counted them as dung, so that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, which is the righteousness from God in faith." See, the apostle says, certainly not falsely, that as to the righteousness which is from the law he was without complaint; and yet these things which were gains to him he casts away for Christ's sake and counts them losses, detriments, and dung, not only these but all the other things which he mentioned above, for the sake not of just any knowledge but of the surpassing knowledge, as he himself says, of Christ Jesus our Lord, which beyond doubt he still had in faith, not yet in sight. For then the knowledge of Christ will be surpassing, when he has been so revealed that what is believed is seen. Hence he says in another place: "For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory." Hence the Lord himself too says: "He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him." Hence John the evangelist says: "Beloved, we are sons of God, and it has not yet appeared what we shall be. We know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is." Then the knowledge of Christ will be surpassing; for now it is indeed hidden in faith, but does not yet appear surpassing in sight.

So the blessed Paul casts away those past things of his own righteousness as detriments and dung, so that he may gain Christ and be found in him, not having his own righteousness, which is from the law. Why "his own", if it is from the law? For that law is not other than God's. Who but Marcion and Mani and other similar plagues have said so? Since, then, that law is God's, he says that the righteousness which is from the law is his own; and this righteousness of his own he did not wish to have, but threw it away as dung. Why so, except that this is what we also showed above, that those are under the law who, "ignorant of the righteousness of God and wishing to establish their own, have not submitted to the righteousness of God"? For they think that they fulfill the law's commands by the powers of their own choice, and, entangled in this pride, they do not turn to the grace that helps. So the letter kills them, either making them openly guilty even to themselves by their not doing what it commands, or by their thinking that they do what they do not do with the spiritual love which is from God. So they remain either openly wicked or deceitfully righteous: in open wickedness evidently crushed, in deceitful righteousness foolishly puffed up. And so, in a wonderful but true way, the righteousness of the law is fulfilled not by the righteousness which is in the law or from the law, but by that which is in the Spirit of grace. For the righteousness of the law is fulfilled, as it is written, in those who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. But the apostle says that as to the righteousness which is in the law he was without complaint in the flesh, not in the spirit; and he says that the righteousness which is from the law was his own, not God's. It must be understood, then, that the righteousness of the law is fulfilled not according to the righteousness which is in the law or from the law, that is, according to man's righteousness, but according to the righteousness which is in the Spirit of grace; therefore according to the righteousness of God, that is, the righteousness which is man's from God. This can be said more plainly and briefly thus: the righteousness of the law is not fulfilled when the law commands and man acts as if by his own strength, but when the Spirit helps and man's will, not free but set free by God's grace, acts. So the righteousness of the law is to command what pleases God and to forbid what displeases him; but righteousness in the law is to serve the letter and to seek no help of God outside it for living rightly. For when he had said, "not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ", he added, "which is from God". This, then, is the righteousness of God, of which the proud are ignorant and wish to establish their own. For it is not called the righteousness of God because God is righteous by it, but because it is man's from God.

According to this righteousness of God, that is, which is ours from God, faith now works through love. And it works toward this: how a man may come to him in whom he now believes without seeing. When he sees him, then what was in faith, through a mirror in an enigma, will be in sight, face to face; then love itself too will be perfected. For it is said very foolishly that God is loved as much before he is seen as he will be loved when he is seen. Further, if in this life, as no pious person doubts, the more we love God the more righteous we certainly are, who doubts that pious and true righteousness will be perfected when the love of God is perfect? Then, therefore, the law will be fulfilled so that nothing at all is lacking, the law whose fullness, according to the apostle, is love. And therefore, when he had said, "not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, which is the righteousness from God in faith", he then added: "to know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings." All these things were not yet full and perfect in the apostle, but, as one set on the way, he was running toward their fullness and perfection. For how had he already known Christ perfectly, who says in another place, "Now I know in part, but then I shall know as I also have been known"? And how had he already known perfectly the power of his resurrection, when it remained for him to know it more fully by experiencing it at the time of the resurrection of the flesh? And how had he already known perfectly the fellowship of his sufferings, not yet having experienced the suffering of death for him? Finally he adds and says, "if in any way I may attain to the resurrection of the dead", and then says, "Not that I have already received, or am already perfect." What, then, does he confess that he has not yet received, and in what is he not yet perfect, except in that righteousness which is from God, which he desired, not wishing to have his own, which is from the law? For this was his starting point, and this was the reason why he said these things, resisting the enemies of the grace of God, for the bestowal of which Christ was crucified; and of their kind are these men too.

For at the place where he undertook to say these things, he began thus: "Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the mutilation. For we are the circumcision, who serve God in spirit" (or, as some manuscripts have, "who serve the Spirit, God", or "the Spirit of God") "and glory in Christ Jesus and do not trust in the flesh." From this it is clear that he is acting against the Jews, who, observing the law carnally and wishing to establish their own righteousness, were being killed by the letter, not given life by the Spirit, and gloried in themselves, while the apostles and all the children of the promise gloried in Christ. Then he added: "Although I too have confidence in the flesh. If anyone else thinks he has confidence in the flesh, I more"; and, listing all the things that have glory according to the flesh, he ended with that point where he says: "as to the righteousness which is in the law, I was without complaint." And when he had said that these things had been altogether losses, detriments, and dung to him, so that he might gain Christ, he added the point at issue: "and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, which is from God." The perfection of this righteousness, then, which will exist only in that surpassing knowledge of Christ, for the sake of which he said that all things were loss to him, he confessed that he had not yet received, and therefore that he was not yet perfect. "But I follow on," he says, "if I may lay hold of that for which I also have been laid hold of by Christ Jesus." "I may lay hold of that for which I also have been laid hold of" is like "I shall know as I also have been known." "Brothers," he says, "I do not consider that I have laid hold of it myself. But one thing: forgetting what lies behind, stretched out toward what lies ahead, I follow according to intention toward the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus." The order of the words is: "But one thing I follow." Of this one thing the Lord is also rightly understood to have reminded Martha, when he said: "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things. But one thing is necessary." Wishing to lay hold of this, as one set on the way, he said that he was following toward the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus. And who would hesitate to say that, when he has laid hold of what he declares he is following, he will then have a righteousness equal to the righteousness of the holy angels, none of whom, certainly, an angel of Satan buffets lest he be lifted up by the greatness of his revelations? Then, warning those who might think themselves already perfect in the fullness of that righteousness, he says: "Let as many of us, then, as are perfect think this" (as if he were saying: if we are perfect according to the capacity of mortal man, in the measure of this life, let us understand that this too belongs to that perfection, that we know we are not yet perfect in that angelic righteousness which will be ours at the manifestation of Christ), "and if in anything you think otherwise," he says, "God will reveal this too to you." How, except to those walking and advancing on the way of right faith, until this pilgrimage is ended and sight is reached? Hence he added in consequence: "Nevertheless, in what we have attained, in that let us walk." Then he concludes that those should be avoided with whom this passage of his discourse began: "Be imitators of me together, brothers," he says, "and observe those who walk so, as you have us for an example. For many walk, of whom I often told you, and now tell you even weeping, as enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction", and so on. These are the very ones of whom he had said at the beginning: "Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers", and what follows. All, then, are enemies of the cross of Christ who, wishing to establish their own righteousness, which is from the law, that is, from the letter only commanding, not the Spirit fulfilling, have not submitted to the righteousness of God. For "if those who are through the law are heirs, faith is emptied." "If righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nothing"; then "the scandal of the cross has been made void." And therefore those are enemies of his cross who say that righteousness is through the law, to which it belongs to command, not to help. But the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, in the Holy Spirit, helps our weakness.

Therefore he who lives according to the righteousness which is in the law, without faith in the grace of Christ, as the apostle recalls that he lived without complaint, must be thought to have no true righteousness; not because the law is not true and holy, but because to wish to obey the letter commanding, without the life-giving Spirit of God, as if from the powers of free choice, is not true righteousness. But the righteousness according to which the righteous lives by faith, since it is man's from God through the Spirit of grace, is true righteousness. And although it is not undeservedly called perfect in some righteous men, according to the capacity of this life, yet it is small compared with that great righteousness which equality with the angels holds. He who did not yet have this said that he was both perfect, on account of the righteousness which was already in him, and imperfect, on account of that which was still lacking. But plainly this lesser righteousness makes merit; that greater one becomes the reward. Hence he who does not pursue this one does not attain that one. Therefore to deny that the fullness of righteousness will exist after the resurrection of man, and to think that there will be as much righteousness in the body of that life as there can be in the body of this death, is singular madness. But that men do not begin there to fulfill the commandments of God which they would not fulfill here is most true. For there will be the fullness of most perfect righteousness, yet not of men pursuing commandments and striving by advancing toward that fullness, but in the twinkling of an eye, as the resurrection of the dead itself will be; since that perfect greatness of righteousness will be given as a reward to those who have done the commandments here, not itself commanded to be done. But I would say "have done the commandments" in such a way that we remember that the commandments themselves pertain to the prayer in which the holy children of the promise daily and truthfully say both "Your will be done" and "Forgive us our debts."

When, then, the Pelagians are pressed by these and similar testimonies and voices of the truth not to deny original sin, not to say that the grace of God by which we are justified is given not freely but according to our merits, and not to say that there is so much righteousness in mortal man, however holy and well-doing, that the forgiveness of sins is not necessary to him even after the washing of regeneration until he ends this life; when, I say, they are pressed not to say these three things, and not by them to alienate those who believe them from the grace of the Savior and persuade them, puffed up into pride, to go headlong into the judgment of the devil, they throw up the clouds of other questions, in which their impiety may lurk among simpler or slower people, or those less learned in the holy Scriptures. These are the clouds of the praise of the creature, the praise of marriage, the praise of the law, the praise of free choice, the praise of the saints: as though any of us found fault with these, and did not rather proclaim all of them with due praises to the honor of the Creator and Savior. But neither does the creature wish to be praised in such a way as not to wish to be healed; and the more marriage is to be praised, the less is the shameful concupiscence of the flesh, which is not from the Father but from the world, to be imputed to it. Marriage certainly found this in human beings; it did not make it, since it exists in very many without marriage, and marriage could have existed without it if no one had sinned. And the law, holy and just and good, is neither itself grace, nor is anything done rightly from it without grace, because it was not given as one that could give life, but was added because of transgression, to convict and shut up men under sin, so that the promise might be given from faith in Jesus Christ to those who believe. And free choice, taken captive, has power only for sin, but for righteousness has no power unless set free and helped by God. And therefore all the saints, whether from that ancient Abel to John the Baptist, or from the apostles themselves to this time and thereafter to the end of the world, are to be praised in the Lord, not in themselves; because the voice of those earlier ones is, "My soul will be praised in the Lord", and the voice of these later ones is, "By the grace of God I am what I am", and to all belongs, "so that he who glories may glory in the Lord", and the confession of all is common: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."

But since, in these five things which I have set out, in which they seek hiding places and about which they weave slanders, they are exposed and defeated by divine proofs, they have devised the scheme of frightening off the unskilled, whomever they could, with the detestable name of the Manichees, so that they may not lend their ears to the truth against their most perverse dogmas; namely, because the Manichees condemn with blasphemy the first three of these five, saying that neither the human creature nor marriage nor the law were established by the supreme and true God. But they do not accept what the truth says, that sin took its beginning from free choice, and that from it comes all evil, whether of angel or of man, since, straying too far from God, they have preferred to believe in a nature of evil, always evil and coeternal with God. The holy patriarchs and prophets too they assail with all the curses they can. See by what means the new heretics think that, by putting forward the name of the Manichees, they escape the force of the truth; but they do not escape. For the truth pursues them and overturns Manichees and Pelagians together. For a man, when he is born, because he is something good in so far as he is a man, refutes Mani and praises the Creator; but in so far as he contracts original sin, he refutes Pelagius and has need of the Savior. For the very statement that this nature is to be healed strikes back at both, because it would not need medicine if it were healthy, which is against Pelagius, nor could it be healed at all if it were an eternal and unchangeable evil, which is against Mani. Likewise, our saying that the concupiscence of the flesh is not to be imputed to marriage, which we praise as established by the Lord, is both against the Pelagians, who put it among things to be praised, and against the Manichees, who attribute it to an evil alien nature, since it is an evil that has befallen our nature, not to be separated by being cut off from God, but to be healed by God's mercy. Likewise, our saying that the law, holy and just and good, was added not to justify the ungodly but to convict the proud, because of transgression, is both against the Manichees, because, according to the apostle, it is praised, and against the Pelagians, because, according to the apostle, no one is justified by the law, and therefore the Spirit of grace freely helps to give life to those whom the letter kills, that is, whom the good law, by commanding, makes guilty through transgression. Likewise, our saying that choice, free for evil, must be set free by the grace of God in order to do good is against the Pelagians; but our saying that evil arose from it, which before was not evil, is against the Manichees. Likewise, our honoring the holy patriarchs and prophets with due praise in God is opposed to the Manichees; but our saying that even they, though righteous and pleasing to God, needed the Lord's propitiation is opposed to the Pelagians. The Catholic faith, then, finds both, like the other heretics, to be adversaries, and convicts both by the authority of the divine testimonies and the light of truth.

The Pelagians add to the clouds of their hiding places, indeed, an unnecessary question about the origin of the soul, so that, by troubling manifest things with the obscurity of other things, they may contrive a place to hide. For they say that we look upon a transmission of souls together with a transmission of sin. Where and when they heard this in the discourses, or read it in the writings, of those who defend the Catholic faith against them, I do not know; for although I find something written on this matter by Catholics, the defense of the truth against these men had not yet been undertaken, nor was it being done in order to answer them. But this I say: original sin is so manifest according to the holy Scriptures, and its forgiveness by the washing of regeneration in little children is so firmly established by the great antiquity and authority of the Catholic faith, and so well known through the clear observance of the church, that whatever is argued about the origin of the soul by anyone's inquiry or assertion, if it is against this, cannot be true. Therefore whoever builds up anything, whether about the soul or about any obscure matter, by which he would destroy this which is most true, most firmly founded, most well known, whether he be a son or an enemy of the church, must either be corrected or be avoided. But let this be the end of this book, so that what follows may have another beginning.

After these things which we have treated and answered, those whose letter we have refuted repeat the same things, but in a different manner. For first they set them out as charges against us, as things we supposedly hold wrongly; but afterward, setting out what they themselves hold, they gave back the same things from the opposite side, adding two things which they had not said: namely, that they say that baptism is necessary for all ages, and that death passed to us through Adam, not crimes. These too are to be treated in their place. Accordingly, since in the former book, which we have just completed, we said that they put forward the obstacles of five things in which their dogmas, hostile to the grace of God and to the Catholic faith, lurk, namely the praise of the creature, the praise of marriage, the praise of the law, the praise of free choice, and the praise of the saints, I think it more convenient to distinguish by kind all the things they maintain, whose contraries they charge against us, and to show which of their statements belongs to which of these five, so that by this very distinction our answer may be clearer and shorter.

The praise of the creature, as far as the human race is concerned, which is now in question, they carry out with these statements: that God is the maker of those who are born, that the sons of men are the work of God, and that all sin comes down not from nature but from the will. To this praise of the creature they apply their saying that baptism is necessary for all ages, namely so that that creature may be adopted among the sons of God, not because it contracts anything from its parents to be expiated by the washing of regeneration. To this praise they join also their saying that the Lord Christ was sprinkled with no stain of sin, as far as his infancy is concerned, because they assert that his flesh was most pure from all contagion of sin, not by his own excellence and singular grace, but by the sharing of the nature that is in all infants. To this belongs also their bringing in the question of the origin of the soul, trying in this way to make all the souls of little children equal to the soul of Christ, since they want them to be likewise sprinkled with no stain of sin. For this reason they also say that nothing evil passed from Adam through the rest except death. "And death," they say, "is not always an evil, since it is a cause of rewards even for the martyrs, and what makes a death to be called good or bad is not the dissolution of bodies, which will be raised in every kind of human being, but the difference of merits, which arises from human freedom." These things they write in this letter about the praise of the creature. Marriage they praise according to the Scriptures, because the Lord says in the gospel: "He who made them from the beginning made them male and female. And he said: Increase and multiply and fill the earth", although this is written not in that place of the gospel but in the law. They also add: "What therefore God has joined together, let man not separate", which words of the gospel we recognize. In praise of the law they say that the old law, according to the apostle, just and holy and good, could confer eternal life on those who kept its commandments and lived righteously by faith, such as the prophets and patriarchs and all the saints. In praise of free choice they say that free choice has not perished, since the Lord says through the prophet: "If you are willing and listen to me, you will eat the good things of the land; if you are unwilling and do not listen to me, the sword will devour you"; and that therefore grace helps the good purpose of each person, but does not implant the zeal for virtue in one who resists, because there is no respect of persons with God. With the praise of the saints they cover themselves, saying that baptism renews men perfectly, since the apostle is a witness, who testifies that the church from the Gentiles is made holy and spotless through the washing of water; that the Holy Spirit also helped good minds in ancient times, as the prophet says to God, "Your good Spirit will lead me in the right way"; that all the prophets and apostles or saints, both of the New and of the Old Testament, to whom God bears witness, were righteous not in comparison with criminals but by the rule of virtues; and that in the time to come there is a reward both of good works and of evil; but that no one can fulfill there the commandments which he despised here, because the apostle said: "We must be manifested before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive the things proper to the body, according to what he has done, whether good or evil." In all these, whatever they say in praise of the creature and of marriage they try to refer to this end, that there should be no original sin; whatever in praise of the law and of free choice, to this end, that grace should help only merit, and so grace be no longer grace; whatever in praise of the saints, to this end, that mortal life in the saints should seem to have no sin, and that it should not be necessary for them to pray to God for the forgiveness of their debts.

Whoever with a Catholic mind shudders at these wicked and damnable dogmas in this threefold division, let him avoid the hiding places and snares of that fivefold one, and be so careful between the two that he so turns away from Mani as not to incline to Pelagius, and again so separates himself from the Pelagians as not to join the Manichees; or, if he is already held by one or the other, let him not so rescue himself from either as to rush into the other. For they seem to be opposed to each other, since the Manichees reveal themselves by censuring those five things, while the Pelagians hide themselves by praising them. Therefore he condemns and avoids both who, according to the rule of the Catholic faith, in human beings who are born so glorifies the Creator for the good creation of flesh and soul (which the Manichee does not want) as yet to confess, because of the fault which passed into them through the sin of the first man, that a Savior is necessary even for little children (which Pelagius does not want); who so distinguishes the evil of shameful concupiscence from the goodness of marriage as neither, like the Manichees, to blame that from which we are born, nor, like the Pelagians, to praise that at which we are ashamed; who so maintains that the law was given through Moses, holy and just and good, by the holy and just and good God (which the Manichee denies against the apostle), as to say that it shows sin but does not take it away, commands righteousness but does not give it (which again Pelagius denies against the apostle); who so asserts free choice as to say that the evil of both angel and man began not from some nature always evil, which does not exist, but from choice itself (which overturns the Manichaean heresy), and yet that the captive will cannot breathe again into wholesome freedom except by the grace of God (which overturns the Pelagian heresy); who so praises in God the holy men of God, not only from the time when Christ was manifested in the flesh onward but also of earlier times (whom the Manichees dare to blaspheme), as yet to believe what they themselves confess about themselves rather than what the Pelagians falsely say. For the voice of the saints is: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."

This being so, what does it profit the new heretics, enemies of the cross of Christ and assailants of divine grace, that they seem sound from the error of the Manichees and die of another pestilence of their own? What does it profit them that, in praise of the creature, they say that the good God, through whom all things were made, is the maker of those who are born, and that the sons of men are his work, whom the Manichees say are the work of the prince of darkness, when between the two, or at the hands of both, God's creature which is in infants perishes? For both refuse to let it be set free by the flesh and blood of Christ: the former because they destroy the very flesh and blood of Christ, as though he did not take them at all in man or from man; the latter because they assert that there is no evil in infants from which they need to be set free through the sacrament of this flesh and blood. Between them, in little children, lies the human creature, good by its making, vitiated by its descent, confessing by its good things the best of makers, seeking by its evils the most merciful Redeemer; having the Manichees as censurers of its good things, the Pelagians as deniers of its evils, and both as persecutors. And although in infancy it cannot speak, yet by its silent appearance and hidden weakness it rebukes the ungodly vanity of both, saying to the former, "Believe that I am created by him who creates good things", and to the latter, "Let me be healed by him who created me." The Manichee says, "Nothing of this infant is to be set free except the good soul; the rest, belonging not to the good God but to the prince of darkness, is to be rejected." The Pelagian says, "On the contrary, nothing of this infant needs to be set free, because we have shown that the whole is sound." Both lie; but the accuser of the flesh alone is now milder, because the praiser is shown to rage against the whole. But neither does the Manichee help the human soul, by blaspheming God, the author of the whole man, nor does the Pelagian allow the divine medicine to help human infancy, by denying original sin. God, then, has mercy through the Catholic faith, which, by refuting both destructions, comes to the infant's help for salvation, saying to the Manichees: "Listen to the apostle crying: 'Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit in you?' and believe that the good God is the creator of bodies too, because the temple of the Holy Spirit cannot be the work of the prince of darkness"; and saying to the Pelagians: "'In iniquities was he conceived, and in sins did his mother nourish him in the womb', this little one whom you see. Why, by defending him as free from all harm, do you not allow him to be set free by pardon? 'No one is clean from filth, not even an infant whose life on earth is one day.' Let the wretched one receive the forgiveness of sins through him who alone, neither small nor great, could have sin."

What does it profit them, then, that they say that all sin comes down not from nature but from the will, and resist by the truth of this statement the Manichees who say that an evil nature is the cause of sin, when, refusing to admit original sin, though it too without doubt comes down from the will of the first man, they make little children depart from the body guilty? What does it profit them to confess that baptism is necessary for all ages, which the Manichees say is superfluous for every age, when these men say that in little children it is false, as far as the forgiveness of sins is concerned? What does it profit them that, as to the flesh of Christ, which the Manichees contend was either nonexistent or feigned, these men maintain against them that it was not only real, but that both it and his soul were sprinkled with no stain of sin, when they make the other infants so equal to his infancy in no unequal purity that his infancy does not seem, in comparison with theirs, to keep its own holiness, and they gain no salvation from it?

In their saying, indeed, that death passed to us through Adam, not crimes, they do not have the Manichees as adversaries, because neither do these assert that original sin passed and passes, together with death, from the first man, at first pure and upright in body and spirit and afterward depraved through free choice, into all thereafter; but they say that the flesh was from the beginning an evil body, created from an evil body and by an evil spirit and together with an evil spirit, while the soul, being good, namely a part of God, comes into man in accordance with the merits of its pollution through the foods and drink in which it was previously bound, and so through intercourse is bound also by the chain of the flesh. And therefore the Manichees agree with the Pelagians that the crime of the first man did not pass into the human race, neither through the flesh, which they say was never good, nor through the soul, which they hold comes into man's flesh with the merits of its pollutions, by which it was defiled before the flesh. But how do the Pelagians say that death alone passed to us through Adam? For if we die because he died, and he died because he sinned, they say that punishment passes without guilt, and that innocent little children are punished with unjust punishment, contracting death without the merits of death. This the Catholic faith knows of the one and only mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who deigned to undergo death for us, that is, the punishment of sin, without sin. For just as he alone became son of man for this purpose, that through him we might become sons of God, so he alone undertook punishment for us without evil merits, so that through him we might obtain grace without good merits; because, as nothing good was owed to us, so nothing evil was owed to him. Commending, then, his love toward those to whom he was going to give an undue life, he willed to suffer for them an undue death. This singular prerogative of the Mediator the Pelagians try to make void, so that this would no longer be singular in the Lord, if Adam suffered a due death because of guilt in such a way that little children, contracting no guilt from him, suffer an undue death. For although much good is conferred on the good through death, for which reason some have fittingly discoursed even on the good of death, yet what is to be proclaimed from this too but the mercy of God, in that the punishment of sin is turned to good uses?

But these men say these things because they want to twist people to their own sense from the words of the apostle. For where the apostle says, "Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed into all men", there they want it to be understood that not sin passed, but death. What, then, is it that follows: "in whom all sinned"? For the apostle says that all sinned either in that one man, of whom he had said, "Through one man sin entered into the world", or in that sin, or else in death. For it should not trouble us that he did not say "in which" (feminine) but "in whom" (masculine) all sinned; for "death" in the Greek language is of the masculine gender. Let them choose, then, whichever they like. Either "in that man all sinned" was said because, when he sinned, all were in him; or all sinned in that sin, because what all were to contract by being born became, in general, the deed of all; or it remains for them to say that all sinned in that death. But how this can be understood I do not clearly see. For men die in sin; they do not sin in death; for when sin goes before, death follows, not sin when death goes before. For "the sting of death is sin", that is, the sting by whose pricking death comes about, not the sting with which death pricks; just as poison, if it is drunk, is called the cup of death because death is brought about by that cup, not because the cup is brought about by death or given by death. But if "sin" cannot be understood in those words of the apostle, "in which all sinned", because in the Greek, from which the letter was translated, "sin" is put in the feminine gender, it remains that all are understood to have sinned in that first man, because all were in him when he sinned; hence sin is contracted by being born, and is not loosed except by being reborn. For so holy Hilary too understood what is written, "in whom all sinned"; for he says: "'In whom', that is, in Adam, all sinned." Then he added: "It is clear that all sinned in Adam as in a lump; for he himself, having been corrupted by sin, all whom he begot were born under sin." Writing this, Hilary pointed out without ambiguity how "in whom all sinned" was to be understood.

But why does the same apostle say that we are reconciled to God through Christ, except because we had been made enemies? And what is this but sin? Hence the prophet too says: "Your sins separate you from God." Because of this separation, then, the Mediator was sent, to take away the sin of the world, through which we were separated as enemies, so that, reconciled, we might be made sons instead of enemies. From this certainly the apostle was speaking; from this it came about that he inserted his statement that sin entered through one man. For these are his preceding words: "But God commends his love toward us," he says, "in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more, then, having now been justified in his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved in his life; and not only so, but also glorying in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation." Then he adds: "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into this world, and through sin death, and so it passed into all men, in whom all sinned." Why do the Pelagians shuffle? If reconciliation through Christ is necessary for all, sin passed through all, by which we were enemies, so that we needed to be reconciled. This reconciliation is in the washing of regeneration and in the flesh and blood of Christ, without which not even little children can have life in themselves. For just as there was one unto death because of sin, so there is one unto life because of righteousness; since "as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive", and "as through the offense of one unto all men to condemnation, so also through the righteousness of one unto all men to justification of life." Who has grown so deaf against these apostolic words with such hardness of abominable impiety that, having heard them, he contends that death without sin passed to us through Adam, except the assailants of the grace of God, the enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, if they persist in this obstinacy? But let it suffice to have said this because of that serpentine cunning of theirs by which they wish to corrupt simple minds and turn them away from the chastity of the Catholic faith, as if by praise of the creature.

Further, as to the praise of marriage, what does it profit them that, against the Manichees, who assign marriage not to the true and good God but to the prince of darkness, they resist with words of true piety, saying that the Lord says in the gospel: "He who made them from the beginning made them male and female. And he said: Increase and multiply and fill the earth. What therefore God has joined together, let man not separate"? What does it profit them to lead astray by means of truth to falsehood? For they say this so that infants may be believed to be born free from all harm, and so may not need to be reconciled to God through Christ, having no original sin; whereas reconciliation is necessary for all through one who came into the world without sin, just as enmity came about for all through one, through whom sin entered into the world. This is believed in the Catholic way for the saving of human nature, with the praise of marriage kept safe; for the praise of marriage is the just union of the sexes, not the unjust defense of faults. And therefore, when these men, by praising marriage, wish to bring people over from the Manichees to themselves, they desire to change their disease, not to heal it.

Again, in the praise of the law, what does it profit them that they say what is true against the Manichees, when from this they wish to lead to what they falsely hold against Catholics? For they say: "We confess that even the old law, according to the apostle, is just and holy and good, and that it could confer eternal life on those who kept its commandments and lived righteously by faith, such as the prophets and patriarchs and all the saints." By these most cunningly placed words they praise the law against grace. For it was not that law, however holy and just and good, but faith which is in Christ, that could confer eternal life on all those men of God. For this faith works through love, not according to the letter which kills but according to the Spirit who gives life; and to this grace of God the law, by terrifying with transgression, leads like a tutor, so that there may thus be conferred on man what it itself could not confer. For to these words of theirs, in which they say that the law could confer eternal life on the prophets and patriarchs and all the saints who kept its commandments, the apostle replies: "If righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nothing." "If the inheritance is from the law, it is no longer from the promise." "If those who are through the law are heirs, faith is emptied and the promise made void." "But that no one is justified in the law before God is evident, because the righteous lives by faith; but the law is not from faith, but he who does these things will live in them." This testimony from the law, cited by the apostle, is understood either with respect to temporal life, for fear of losing which men did the works of the law, not from faith, since transgressors of the law were commanded by that same law to be put to death by the people; or, if "He who does these things will live in them" is to be understood more deeply as written with respect to eternal life, the command of the law was expressed in this way so that the weakness of man, failing in itself to do what the law commands, might rather seek help from the grace of God by faith, by whose mercy faith itself too is given. For faith is had as God has apportioned to each the measure of faith. For if men do not have from themselves, but receive, the spirit of power and love and self-control (hence the same teacher of the Gentiles says, "For we have not received a spirit of fear, but of power and love and self-control"), surely the spirit of faith too is received, of which he says, "But having the same spirit of faith." The law, then, speaks truly: "He who does these things will live in them." But in order that he may do them and live in them, it is not the law, which commands this, but faith, which obtains this, that is necessary. And yet this faith, in order that it may deserve to receive these things, is itself given freely.

But nowhere do these enemies of grace contrive more hidden snares for attacking that same grace more vehemently than where they praise the law, which without doubt is to be praised. For in all their disputations, by different turns of speech and variety of words, they want the law to be understood as grace, namely that we have from the Lord God the help of knowledge, by which we may know what is to be done, not the inspiration of love, so that we may do with holy love what we know, which is properly grace. For knowledge of the law without love puffs up, it does not build up, according to the same apostle, who says most plainly: "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up." This saying is like the one in which it was said: "The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." For "knowledge puffs up" is like "the letter kills", and "love builds up" is like "the Spirit gives life", because "the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." So knowledge of the law makes a proud transgressor, but through the gift of love one delights to be a doer of the law. "We do not, then, make the law void through faith, but we establish the law", which by terrifying leads to faith. For the law works wrath precisely so that, to one terrified and turned to fulfilling the righteousness of the law, the mercy of God may give grace through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the wisdom of God, of whom it is written: "She carries the law and mercy on her tongue": the law, by which to terrify; mercy, by which to help; the law through a servant, mercy through himself; the law as in the staff which Elisha sent to raise the widow's son, and he did not rise ("for if a law had been given which could give life, righteousness would certainly be from the law"), but mercy as in Elisha himself, who, bearing the figure of Christ, was joined to the dead boy in giving him life, as a sign of the great sacrament, the New Testament.

Likewise, as to their praising free choice against the Manichees by citing the prophetic testimony, "If you are willing and listen to me, you will eat the good things of the land; but if you are unwilling and do not listen to me, the sword will consume you", what does this profit them? For they do not so much defend free choice against the Manichees as exalt it against Catholics. For they want "If you are willing and listen to me" to be understood in such a way that the merit of the grace that follows lies in the will that goes before, and so grace is no longer grace, since it is not free when it is paid as due. But if they understood "If you are willing" in such a way as to confess that even the good will itself is prepared by him of whom it is written, "The will is prepared by the Lord", they would be using this testimony as Catholics, and they would not only overcome the old heresy of the Manichees but would not found the new one of the Pelagians.

What does it profit them that, in praise of free choice itself, they say that grace helps the good purpose of each person? This would be accepted without hesitation as said in a Catholic sense, if they did not place merit in the good purpose, to which merit a reward would then be paid according to debt, not according to grace; but if they understood and confessed that even the good purpose itself, which grace following helps, could not have existed in man unless grace went before. For how is there a good purpose in man without the Lord first having mercy, when it is itself the good will which is prepared by the Lord? And as for their adding at once, after saying that grace also helps the good purpose of each person, "but does not implant the zeal for virtue in one who resists", this could be well understood if it were not said by these men, whose meaning is known. For to one who resists, the hearing of the divine calling is first procured by the grace of God itself, and then in him, no longer resisting, the zeal for virtue is kindled. But in all that anyone does according to God, his mercy goes before him; and this these men do not want, because they want to be not Catholics but Pelagians. For it greatly delights proud impiety that even what it is compelled to confess as given by the Lord should seem not given to it but paid back; so that, namely, the sons of perdition, not of the promise, may be believed to have made themselves good, and God to have paid a due reward to those already made good by themselves, for this work of theirs.

For their very swelling has so stopped up the ears of their heart that they do not hear: "For what do you have that you did not receive?"; they do not hear: "Without me you can do nothing"; they do not hear: "Love is from God"; they do not hear: "God has apportioned the measure of faith"; they do not hear: "The Spirit breathes where he wills", and "Those who are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God"; they do not hear: "No one can come to me unless it has been given him by my Father"; they do not hear what Ezra writes: "Blessed is the Lord God of our fathers, who put this into the heart of the king, to glorify his house which is in Jerusalem"; they do not hear what the Lord says through Jeremiah: "And I will put my fear in their heart, so that they may not depart from me; and I will visit them to make them good"; and above all that saying through the prophet Ezekiel, where God shows plainly that he is moved by no good merits of men to make them good, that is, obedient to his commandments, but rather that he repays them these good things for evil ones, doing this for his own sake, not for theirs. For he says: "Thus says the Lord: I do this not for your sake, house of Israel, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you went. And I will sanctify my great name, which has been profaned among the nations and which you have profaned in their midst; and the nations will know that I am the Lord, says Adonai the Lord, when I am sanctified in you before their eyes. And I will take you from the nations and gather you from all lands and bring you into your own land. And I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you will be cleansed from all your uncleannesses, and I will cleanse you; and I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; and the heart of stone will be taken from your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and make you walk in my ordinances and keep my judgments and do them." And some time after, through the same prophet: "Not for your sake do I do this, says the Lord God; let it be known to you. Be ashamed and blush for your ways, house of Israel. Thus says the Lord God: On the day when I cleanse you from all your iniquities, I will also establish the cities, and the waste places will be rebuilt, and the desolate land will be tilled, instead of being desolate before the eyes of everyone who passes by; and they will say: That desolate land has become like a garden of delight, and the cities that were waste and desolate and dug up are fortified and inhabited. And the nations that are left round about you will know that I the Lord have built up what was destroyed and planted what was desolate; I have spoken and I have done it. Thus says the Lord: This further I will be sought by the house of Israel to do for them: I will multiply them like sheep, men, like holy sheep, like the sheep of Jerusalem on her feast days; so will those desolate cities be full of sheep, men; and they will know that I am the Lord."

What is left to the dead skin from which it could be puffed up and disdain, when it glories, to glory in the Lord? What is left to it, when, whatever it says it has done, so that, with this merit of man arising from man going before, God afterward does what man is worthy of, it will be answered, it will be cried back, it will be contradicted: "I do it, but for the sake of my holy name; not for your sake do I do it, says the Lord God"? Nothing so overturns the Pelagians who say that the grace of God is given according to our merits (which indeed Pelagius himself condemned, though not by correcting himself, but by fearing the Eastern judges); nothing so overturns this presumption of those who say: "We act, so that we may deserve that the Lord act with us." Not Pelagius, but the Lord himself answers you: "I do it, and not for your sake, but for the sake of my holy name." For what good can you do from a heart that is not good? But that you may have a good heart, "I will give you," he says, "a new heart, and I will give you a new spirit." Can you say: "We first walked in his ordinances and kept his judgment and did them, so that we might be worthy that he should give us his grace"? For what good would you do, being evil men, and how would you do these good things unless you were good? But who makes men good except him who said, "And I will visit them to make them good", and who said, "And I will put my Spirit in you and make you walk in my ordinances and keep my judgments and do them"? Are you not yet awake? Do you not yet hear: "I will make you walk", "I will make you keep", and finally, "I will make you do"? Why do you still puff yourselves up? We indeed walk, it is true; we keep, we do; but he makes us walk, keep, and do. This is the grace of God making us good; this is his mercy going before us. What do the waste, desolate, and dug-up places deserve? Yet they will be rebuilt and tilled and fortified. Is it for the merits of their wasting, desolation, and digging up? Far from it. For those merits are evil, these gifts good. So good things are repaid for evil; free, then, not due, and therefore grace. "I," says the Lord, "I the Lord." Does not this voice press you down, O human pride, you who say, "I act so that I may deserve to be built up and planted by the Lord"? Do you not hear: "Not for your sake do I do it; I the Lord have built up what was destroyed, planted what was desolate; I the Lord have spoken and done it", yet not for your sake, but for the sake of my holy name? Who multiplies men like sheep, like holy sheep, like the sheep of Jerusalem? Who makes those desolate cities full of sheep, men, but he who follows and says, "And they will know that I am the Lord"? But with what sheep, men, does he fill the cities, as he promised: those he finds, or those he makes? Let us ask the psalm. See, it answers; let us listen: "Come, let us worship and fall down before him, and weep before the Lord who made us; for he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand." He himself, then, makes the sheep with which to fill the desolate cities. What wonder? For to that one sheep, that is, the church, whose members are all the sheep, men, it is said: "For I am the Lord who makes you." Why do you put forward free choice to me, which will not be free to do righteousness unless you are a sheep? He who makes men sheep, then, himself sets human wills free for the obedience of piety.

But why does he make these men sheep and not those, he with whom there is no respect of persons? That is the question to which the blessed apostle said, to those who raised it with more curiosity than capacity: "O man, who are you to answer back to God? Does the thing formed say to him who formed it, 'Why have you made me thus?'" That is the question which belongs to that depth which the same apostle, wishing to look into it, in a manner took fright at and exclaimed: "O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and unsearchable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Or who has first given to him, and it will be repaid him? For from him and through him and in him are all things; to him be glory for ever and ever." So let those not dare to search into this inscrutable question who, defending merit before grace and therefore against grace, want to give to God first, so that it may be repaid to them (to give first, that is, something or other from free choice, so that grace may be repaid as a reward); and let them wisely understand or faithfully believe that even what they think they gave first they received from him from whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things. But why this one receives and that one does not, when neither deserves to receive and whichever of them receives, receives undeservedly, let them measure their own strength and not search into things too strong for them. Let it suffice them to know that there is no iniquity with God. For when the apostle had found no merits by which Jacob preceded his twin brother before God, he says: "What then shall we say? Is there iniquity with God? Far from it. For he says to Moses: I will have mercy on whom I have had mercy, and I will show mercy to whom I have been merciful. So then it is not of him who wills nor of him who runs, but of God who has mercy." Let his free mercy, then, be welcome to us, even if this deep question remains unsolved. Yet it is solved thus far, as far as the same apostle solves it, saying: "But if God, willing to show his wrath and to make known his power, endured with much patience the vessels of wrath, fitted for perdition, and in order to make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he prepared for glory." For wrath is not paid except as due, lest there be iniquity with God; but mercy, even when it is given undeservedly, is not iniquity with God. And from this the vessels of mercy understand how freely mercy is given to them, in that on the vessels of wrath, with whom they share a common cause and lump of perdition, due and just wrath is repaid. And let this now be enough against those who wish to destroy the bounty of grace through the freedom of choice.

As to their refusing, by the praise of the saints, to let us hunger and thirst for righteousness with the disposition of that tax collector, and wanting us instead to belch, as if sated and full, with the vanity of that Pharisee: what does it profit them that, against the Manichees, who destroy baptism, they say that men are perfectly renewed by baptism, and cite for this the testimony of the apostle, who testifies that the church from the Gentiles is made holy and spotless through the washing of water, when with a proud and perverse mind they put forth their disputations against the prayers of the church itself? For they say this so that it may be believed that the church, after holy baptism, in which the forgiveness of all sins takes place, no longer has sin; whereas against them, from the rising of the sun to its setting, it cries to God with all its members: "Forgive us our debts." What of the fact that, if they are asked about themselves in this matter, they cannot find what to answer? For if they say they have no sin, John answers them that they deceive themselves and the truth is not in them; but if they confess their sins, since they wish to be members of the body of Christ, how will that body, that is, the church, be perfectly, as they think, without spot or wrinkle already at this time, when its members confess, not falsely, that they have sins? Therefore both are true: in baptism all sins are forgiven, and through that very washing of water in the word the church is presented to Christ without spot or wrinkle; for unless it were baptized, it would say fruitlessly "Forgive us our debts", until it is brought to glory, where more perfectly there will be no spot or wrinkle in it.

And it must be confessed that the Holy Spirit, even in ancient times, not only helped good minds, which these men too grant, but also made them good, which they do not grant. That all the prophets and apostles or saints, both those of the gospel and the ancient ones, to whom God bears witness, were righteous not in comparison with criminals but by the rule of virtues, there is also no doubt. This is opposed to the Manichees, who blaspheme the patriarchs and prophets; but what is opposed also to the Pelagians is that all of them, asked about themselves while they lived in this body, would answer with one most harmonious voice: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." And in the time to come it is not to be denied that there is a reward both of good works and of evil, and that no one is commanded to fulfill there the commandments which he despised here; but the fullness of complete righteousness, where there can be no sin, for which the saints hunger and thirst here, is hoped for here in the commandment and received there in the reward, alms and prayers obtaining that whatever of the commandments has been less fulfilled here may go unpunished through the forgiveness of sins.

Since this is so, let the Pelagians stop pretending, by their most insidious praises of these five things, that is, the praise of the creature, the praise of marriage, the praise of the law, the praise of free choice, and the praise of the saints, that they wish to rescue people from the snares of the Manichees, so that they may entangle them in their own nets: that is, so that they may deny original sin and begrudge little children the help of Christ the physician; and say that the grace of God is given according to our merits, and so grace is no longer grace; and say that the saints in this life did not have sin, and so the prayer be made void which he taught the saints who had no sin, and through whom every sin is forgiven to the saints when they pray. To these three evils they seduce incautious and unlearned people by the fraudulent praise of those five goods. On all these I think I have sufficiently answered their most cruel, most impious, and most proud vanity.

But since they say that their enemies have taken up our words in hatred of the truth, and that throughout the whole West a dogma no less foolish than impious has been taken up, and they complain that a signature was extorted from simple bishops, sitting in their own places without the gathering of a synod, to confirm it, when rather the church of Christ, both Western and Eastern, has shuddered at their profane novelties of words, I think it belongs to my care not only to bring the holy canonical Scriptures as witnesses against them, which we have already done sufficiently, but also to bring forward some proofs from the writings of the saints who treated those Scriptures before us with most widespread fame and great glory: not that the authority of any disputant is made equal by us to the canonical books, as though there were nothing at all which one Catholic may think better or more truly than another Catholic likewise; but so that those who think these men are saying something may be reminded how, on these matters, before the new empty talk of these men, the Catholic bishops followed the divine oracles; and may know that the right Catholic faith, founded from ancient times, is being defended by us against the recent presumption and ruin of the Pelagian heretics.

The most blessed Cyprian, most glorious also with the crown of martyrdom, most well known not only to the African and Western churches but also to the Eastern, through his fame proclaiming him and his writings spreading far and wide, even Pelagius, the heresiarch of these men, mentions with certainly due honor, where, writing a book of Testimonies, he asserts that he is imitating him, saying that he is doing for Romanus what Cyprian did for Quirinus. Let us see, then, what Cyprian thought about original sin, which entered into the world through one man. In his letter On Works and Alms he speaks thus: "When the Lord at his coming had healed those wounds which Adam had borne and cured the ancient poisons of the serpent, he gave a law to the healed man and commanded him to sin no more, lest something worse befall him if he sinned. We were confined and shut into a narrow place by the requirement of innocence. Nor would the weakness and feebleness of human frailty have anything to do, unless the divine goodness, coming to our help again by showing works of righteousness and mercy, had opened a certain way of guarding salvation, so that by alms we may wash away whatever stains we afterward contract." By this testimony this witness refutes two falsehoods of theirs: one, by which they say that the human race contracts no faults from Adam which need to be cured and healed through Christ; the other, by which they say that the saints have no sin after baptism. Again in the same letter he says: "Let each one set before his eyes the devil with his servants, that is, with the people of perdition and death, leaping forth into the midst and challenging the people of Christ, in the presence of Christ himself as judge, to a trial of comparison, saying: 'For these whom you see with me I received no blows, I endured no scourges, I bore no cross, I shed no blood, I did not redeem my household with the price of passion and blood; but neither do I promise them a heavenly kingdom, nor do I call them back again to paradise with immortality restored.'" Let the Pelagians answer: when were we in the immortality of paradise, and how were we expelled from there, so that we are called back there by the grace of Christ? And when they cannot find what to answer here in favor of their perversity, let them pay attention to how Cyprian understood what the apostle says, "in whom all sinned"; and let the Pelagians, new heretics, not dare to bring against any Catholic the slander of the Manichees, old heretics, lest they be convicted of doing so wicked a wrong to the ancient martyr Cyprian too.

For he says this also in the letter entitled On Mortality, thus: "The kingdom of God, dearest brothers, has begun to be near; the reward of life and the joy of eternal salvation and perpetual gladness and the possession of paradise, lately lost, are now coming as the world passes away." This again in the same: "Let us embrace," he says, "the day which assigns each of us to his own dwelling, which, rescuing us from here and releasing us from the snares of the world, restores us to paradise and the kingdom." Likewise in the letter On Patience: "Let the sentence of God be considered," he says, "which at the very beginning of the world and of the human race Adam, forgetful of the command and transgressor of the law given, received. Then we shall know how patient we ought to be in this world, we who are so born that we toil here with afflictions and conflicts. 'Because you listened,' he says, 'to the voice of your wife and ate from that tree, of which alone I had commanded you not to eat, cursed will be the ground in all your works. In sorrow and groaning you will eat from it all the days of your life; it will bring forth thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the fodder of the field. In the sweat of your face you will eat your bread, until you return to the earth from which you were taken; for you are earth, and to earth you will go.' By the bond of this sentence we are all bound and tied, until, death being accomplished, we depart from this world." And likewise in the same: "For since," he says, "in that first transgression of the command, strength of body departed together with immortality, and weakness came with death, and strength cannot be regained unless immortality too has been regained, we must always wrestle and contend in this frailty and weakness of the body. And this wrestling and contest cannot be sustained except by the strength of patience."

In the letter, moreover, which he wrote with sixty-six of his fellow bishops to Bishop Fidus, by whom he had been consulted, because of the law of circumcision, whether it was lawful to baptize an infant before the eighth day, this case is treated in such a way as if the Catholic Church, by divine foresight, were already refuting the Pelagian heretics who were to come so long after. For the one who had consulted was not in doubt on this point, whether those who are born contract original sin, to be washed away by being reborn (far be it that the Christian faith should ever have doubted this); but he was in doubt whether the washing of regeneration, by which he did not doubt that original sin was to be loosed, should be given before the eighth day. Answering this consultation, the most blessed Cyprian says: "But as to the case of infants, who you said ought not to be baptized within the second or third day after they are born, and that the law of ancient circumcision should be considered, so that you did not think one who is born should be baptized and sanctified within the eighth day, it seemed far otherwise to our whole council. For in what you thought should be done, no one agreed; but we all judged rather that the grace of the merciful God should be denied to no human being who is born. For since the Lord says in his gospel, 'The Son of Man did not come to destroy souls but to save them', as far as lies in us, if it can be, no soul is to be lost." And a little later: "Nor ought any of us," he says, "to shudder at what the Lord has deigned to make. For although the infant is still newly born, yet it is not such that anyone ought to shudder at kissing it in giving grace and in making peace, since in kissing an infant each of us ought, for his own religion, to think of the very hands of God still fresh, which in a man just formed and newly born we in a manner kiss, when we kiss what God has made." Likewise a little later: "Moreover, if anything could hinder men from obtaining grace," he says, "graver sins could rather hinder adults and those advanced and older in years. But further, if even to the gravest offenders, who have sinned much before against God, when they afterward believe, forgiveness of sins is granted, and no one is kept from baptism and grace, how much more ought an infant not to be kept from it, who, newly born, has not sinned at all, except that, born carnally according to Adam, he has contracted the contagion of the ancient death by his first birth; who comes the more easily to receive forgiveness of sins for this very reason, that not his own but another's sins are forgiven him!"

What will those who are not only deserters but also persecutors of the grace of God say to this? What will they say to this? In what way is the possession of paradise given back to us? How are we restored to paradise, if we were never there? Or how were we there, except that we were in Adam? And how do we come under the sentence pronounced against the transgressor, if we do not contract guilt from the transgressor? Finally, he judges that infants are to be baptized even before the eighth day, lest, through the contagion of the ancient death contracted by their first birth, the souls of little children should perish. How do they perish, if those who are born, even of believers, are not held by the devil until they are reborn in Christ and, rescued from the power of darkness, are transferred into his kingdom? And who says that the souls of those who are born will perish unless they are reborn? Surely he who so praises the Creator and the creature, the maker and the work, that he checks and corrects the recoil of human feeling, by which men disdain to kiss little children fresh from the womb, by interposing reverence for the Creator himself, saying that in the kiss of that age one should think of the fresh hands of God. Did he, then, by confessing original sin, condemn either nature or marriage? Did he, because he applied the cleansing of regeneration to the one born guilty from Adam, therefore deny that God is the maker of those who are born? Did he, because, fearing that souls of any age might perish, he judged with the council of his colleagues that they are to be set free by the sacrament of baptism even before the eighth day, therefore accuse marriage, when in the infant, whether born of marriage or of adultery, yet because a human being is born, he showed the fresh hands of God worthy even of the kiss of peace? If, then, the holy bishop and most glorious martyr Cyprian could judge that original sin in infants is to be healed by the medicine of Christ, with the praise of the creature kept safe and the praise of marriage kept safe, why does this novel pestilence, though it does not dare to call him a Manichee, think it must charge Catholics who defend these things with another's crime, in order to cover its own? See, a most celebrated interpreter of the divine oracles, before even the faintest odor of the Manichaean pestilence had touched our lands, without any censure of the divine work or of marriage, confesses original sin: not saying that Christ was sprinkled with any stain of sin, yet not comparing to him the flesh of sin in the others who are born, to whom through the likeness of the flesh of sin he gives the help of cleansing; nor is he frightened by the obscure question of the origin of souls from confessing that those who are set free by the grace of Christ return to paradise. Does he say that the condition of death passed from Adam to men without the contagion of sin? For he says that little children, however fresh from the womb, are helped through baptism not in order to avoid the death of the body, but because of sin, which entered into the world through one man.

Now how Cyprian proclaims the grace of God against these men appears plainly where he discusses the Lord's Prayer. For he says: "We say, 'Hallowed be your name', not that we wish for God that he be hallowed by our prayers, but that we ask of God that his name be hallowed in us. For by whom is God hallowed, who himself hallows? But because he himself said, 'Be holy, for I too am holy', we ask and beg this: that we who have been hallowed in baptism may persevere in what we have begun to be." And in another place in the same letter he says: "We add also and say, 'Your will be done in heaven and on earth', not that God may do what he wills, but that we may be able to do what God wills. For who resists God, so that he does not do what he wills? But because we are resisted by the devil, so that our mind and action may not obey God in all things, we pray and ask that the will of God be done in us. And for it to be done in us there is need of God's will, that is, of his help and protection; because no one is strong by his own powers, but he is safe by the indulgence and mercy of God." Likewise elsewhere: "We ask," he says, "that the will of God be done in heaven and on earth, and both belong to the completion of our safety and salvation. For since we possess the body from earth and the spirit from heaven, we ourselves are earth and heaven, and in both, that is, in body and spirit, we pray that God's will be done. For there is a struggle between flesh and spirit, and a daily conflict as they disagree with each other, so that we do not do the very things we will, while the spirit seeks heavenly and divine things, the flesh desires earthly and worldly things. And therefore we ask that between these two, by the help and aid of God, concord may come about, so that, while the will of God is carried out both in the spirit and in the flesh, the soul which has been reborn through him may be preserved. This the apostle Paul openly and plainly declares in his own words: 'The flesh desires against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, so that you do not do the very things you will.'" And a little later: "It can also be understood in this way, dearest brothers," he says: "since the Lord commands and teaches us to love even our enemies and to pray also for those who persecute us, we ask also for those who are still earth and have not yet begun to be heavenly, that concerning them too the will of God may be done, which Christ accomplished by preserving and restoring man." And likewise elsewhere: "We ask that this bread be given to us daily," he says, "lest we who are in Christ and receive the Eucharist daily as the food of salvation, if some graver offense intervenes and we are kept from communion and, not communicating, are barred from the heavenly bread, be separated from the body of Christ." And some way further on in the same: "But when we ask," he says, "that we may not come into temptation, we are reminded of our weakness, while we ask thus, so that no one may insolently exalt himself, no one proudly and arrogantly take anything to himself, no one count as his own the glory either of confession or of suffering; since the Lord himself, teaching humility, said, 'Watch and pray, that you may not come into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak'; so that, when a humble and submissive confession goes before and all is given to God, whatever is asked suppliantly with fear and honor of God may be granted by his goodness." Likewise in To Quirinus, the work in which Pelagius wants to seem his imitator, he says in the third book: "We must glory in nothing, since nothing is ours." Adding the divine testimonies to this heading, among others he put that apostolic one by which the mouths of these men above all must be shut: "For what do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you glory as if you had not received it?" Likewise in the letter On Patience: "For this virtue," he says, "we have in common with God; from there patience begins, from there its splendor and dignity take their source; the origin and greatness of patience proceed from God as its author."

Does this holy and so memorable instructor of the churches in the word of truth deny that there is free choice in human beings, because he attributes to God all that we live rightly? Does he find fault with the law of God, because he indicates that man is not justified by it, since he declares that what it commands must be obtained from the Lord God by prayers? Does he assert fate under the name of grace, although he says that we must glory in nothing, since nothing is ours? Does he, like these men, believe the Holy Spirit to be a helper of virtue in such a way as if virtue itself, which is helped by him, arose from us, when, asserting that nothing is ours, he recalls that the apostle said for this reason, "For what do you have that you did not receive?"; and says that the most excellent virtue, that is, patience, does not begin from us and then is helped by the Spirit of God, but takes its source from him, its origin from him? Finally, he confesses that neither a good purpose nor zeal for virtue nor good minds begin to exist in human beings without the grace of God, when he says that we must glory in nothing, since nothing is ours. What is so placed in free choice as what the law says: that an idol is not to be worshiped, adultery not committed, murder not perpetrated? But these and similar things are crimes, and if anyone commits them he is removed from the communion of the body of Christ. And yet, if the most blessed Cyprian thought that our will suffices for not committing these, he would not so understand what we say in the Lord's Prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread", as to declare that we ask this lest, some graver offense intervening, while we are kept from communion and, not communicating, are barred from the heavenly bread, we be separated from the body of Christ. Let the new heretics answer, surely: what good merits go before in men who are enemies of the Christian name? For not only do they not have good merit, but they have even the worst merit. And yet Cyprian understands what we say in the prayer, "Your will be done in heaven and on earth", in such a way that we pray even for them, who for this reason are understood as "earth". We pray, then, not only for the unwilling but also for those who resist and attack. What, then, do we ask but that from unwilling they become willing, from resisting consenting, from attacking loving? From whom but from him of whom it is written, "The will is prepared by the Lord"? Let those who disdain it learn to be Catholics: if they do not do something evil, and if they do something good, to glory not in themselves but in the Lord.

Let us now look at that third point, which every member of Christ and his whole body shudders at in these men no less: that they contend that there are or have been righteous men in this life who have no sin at all. By this presumption they most openly contradict the Lord's Prayer, in which all the members of Christ cry, with truthful heart and daily voices, "Forgive us our debts." Let us see, then, what Cyprian, most glorious in the Lord, thought on this point too, what he not only said but also committed to writing and memory for the instruction of churches, not of the Manichees certainly, but of Catholics. In the letter On Works and Alms he says: "Let us acknowledge, then, dearest brothers, the wholesome gift of divine indulgence, and for cleansing and purging our sins, we who cannot be without some wound of conscience, let us heal our wounds with spiritual remedies. Nor let anyone so flatter himself about a pure and spotless heart that, relying on his innocence, he thinks no medicine need be applied to his wounds, since it is written, 'Who will boast that he has a chaste heart, or who will boast that he is clean from sins?' And again John sets it down in his letter and says: 'If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.' But if no one can be without sin, and whoever says he is blameless is either proud or foolish, how necessary, how kind is the divine clemency, which, knowing that some wounds are not lacking afterward even to the healed, has given saving remedies for curing and healing wounds anew!" Again in the same: "And since daily," he says, "there cannot fail to be sin in the sight of God, daily sacrifices were not lacking by which sins could be wiped away." Likewise in the letter On Mortality: "We have," he says, "a conflict with avarice, with unchastity, with anger, with ambition; with carnal vices, with worldly enticements, there is a constant and troublesome struggle. The mind of man, besieged and surrounded on every side by the assault of the devil, scarcely meets each, scarcely resists. If avarice is thrown down, lust rises up; if lust is suppressed, ambition takes its place; if ambition is despised, anger exasperates, pride puffs up, drunkenness entices, envy breaks concord, jealousy cuts off friendship; you are driven to curse, which the divine law forbids; you are compelled to swear, which is not lawful. So many persecutions does the soul suffer daily, by so many dangers is the heart pressed: and does it please us to stand long here among the swords of the devil, when we ought rather to long and wish to hasten to Christ with the help of a speedier death?" Likewise in the same: "The blessed apostle Paul," he says, "sets it down in his letter and says, 'To me to live is Christ and to die is gain', counting it the greatest gain to be no longer held by the snares of the world, no longer to be liable to any sins and vices of the flesh." Likewise in On the Lord's Prayer, explaining what we ask when we say "Hallowed be your name", he says among other things: "For we need daily hallowing, so that we who sin daily may purge our offenses by constant hallowing." Again in the same, when explaining our saying "Forgive us our debts": "How necessarily," he says, "how providently and wholesomely are we reminded that we are sinners, who are compelled to pray for our sins, so that, while pardon is sought from God, the soul may remember its own conscience! Lest anyone please himself as if innocent and perish the more by exalting himself, he is instructed and taught that he sins daily, when he is commanded to pray daily for his sins. So finally John too warns in his letter, saying: 'If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; but if we confess our sins, he who forgives us our sins is faithful and just.'" Rightly, too, in To Quirinus he set out on this matter his most complete statement, to which he added the divine testimonies, that no one is without filth and without sin. There he also put those testimonies by which original sin is confirmed, which these men try to turn into I know not what other new and perverse senses: whether what holy Job says, that no one is without filth, not even one whose life on earth is one day, or what is read in the psalm, "In wickedness I was conceived, and in sins my mother nourished me in the womb." To these testimonies, on account of those also who are saints already of a more mature age, since not even they are without filth and sin, he added also that saying of the most blessed John which he often recalls in many other places too, "If we say that we have no sin", and the rest of that same saying, which is not kept silent by any Catholics against these men, who deceive themselves and the truth is not in them.

Let the Pelagians say, if they dare, that this man of God was perverted by the error of the Manichees, because he so praises the saints as yet to confess that no one in this life reaches such perfection of righteousness as to have no sin at all, confirming his statement by the clear truth and divine authority of canonical testimonies. For does he deny that all sins are forgiven in baptism, because he confesses that frailty and weakness remain, from which he says we sin after baptism and have an unceasing conflict with carnal vices until the end of this life? Or did he not remember what the apostle had said about the spotless church, because he warned that no one ought so to flatter himself about a pure and spotless heart that, relying on his innocence, he thinks no medicine need be applied to his wounds? I suppose that the new heretics grant this Catholic man knowledge that the Holy Spirit helped good minds even in ancient times; indeed also, what they themselves do not want, that men could not have good minds except through the Holy Spirit. I suppose that Cyprian knew that all the prophets and apostles, or any saints who have pleased the Lord at any time, were righteous not in comparison with criminals, as these men slander us for saying, but by the rule of virtues, as they boast of saying; yet he says: "No one can be without sin, and whoever says he is blameless is either proud or foolish." And for no other reason does he understand what is written, "Who will boast that he has a chaste heart, or who will boast that he is clean from sins?" I suppose that Cyprian did not need to be taught by these men what he knew very well: that in the time to come there is a reward of good works and a punishment of evil ones; but that no one can fulfill there the commandments which he despised here. And yet even of the apostle Paul himself, certainly no despiser of the divine commandments, he understands and asserts that he said, "To me to live is Christ and to die is gain", for no other reason than that he counted it the greatest gain, after this life, to be no longer held by the snares of the world, no longer to be liable to any sins and vices of the flesh. The most blessed Cyprian perceived, then, and saw clearly in the truth of the divine Scriptures, that even the life of the apostles themselves, however good, holy, and righteous, endured some bonds of worldly snares and was liable to some sins and vices of the flesh; and that therefore they desired death, so as to be free of these evils and to arrive at that perfect righteousness which would not suffer these things and would no longer be something to be done under command but something to be received as reward. For when what we pray for in saying "Your kingdom come" has come, it is not that there will be no righteousness in that kingdom of God, since the apostle says: "For the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." These three, indeed, are commanded among the other divine precepts. Here righteousness is commanded us when it is said, "Do righteousness"; peace is commanded when it is said, "Have peace among yourselves"; joy is commanded when it is said, "Rejoice in the Lord always." Let the Pelagians, then, deny that these will exist in the kingdom of God, where we shall live without end; or let them go so far in madness, if they please, as to contend that righteousness, peace, and joy will be there such as they are here for the righteous. But if they will both exist and not be such, surely here their exercise is to be attended to as a command, there their perfection is to be hoped for as a reward, where, held by no worldly snares and liable to no sins and vices of the flesh (on account of which the apostle, as Cyprian took this testimony, said that to die was gain for him), we may love God perfectly, whose contemplation will be face to face; and may love our neighbor perfectly too, when, the thoughts of the heart being made manifest, no suspicion of any evil can trouble anyone about anyone.

But now, to refute these men more fully, let us add to the most glorious martyr Cyprian the most blessed Ambrose, since Pelagius too so praised him as to say that not even his enemies could find anything to criticize in his books. Since, then, the Pelagians say that there is no original sin with which infants are born, and charge Catholics, who resist them on behalf of the most ancient and firm faith of the church, with the crime of the Manichaean heresy, let Ambrose answer them on this matter, a Catholic man of God, praised even by Pelagius himself for the truth of his faith. Expounding the prophet Isaiah, he says: "Therefore Christ is spotless, because he was not stained even by the usual condition of being born." And in another place in the same work, speaking of the apostle Peter: "He himself offered," he says, "what he had before thought to be a sin, asking that not only his feet but also his head be washed for him, because he had at once understood that by the washing of the feet, of those who fell in the first man, the filth of guilty descent is abolished." Likewise in the same work: "It was kept, then," he says, "that no one born of a man and a woman, that is, through that union of bodies, should be seen to be free of offense; but he who is free of offense is free also of conception of this kind." Likewise, writing against the Novatians: "All of us human beings," he says, "are born under sin, whose very origin is in fault, as you have read, David saying: 'See, in iniquities I was conceived, and in offenses my mother bore me.'" Likewise in the Apology of the Prophet David: "Before we are born," he says, "we are stained by contagion, and before the enjoyment of light we receive the injury of our very origin; we are conceived in iniquity." Likewise, speaking of the Lord: "For it was fitting," he says, "that he who was not to have the sin of bodily fall should feel no natural contagion of generation. Rightly, then, did David tearfully lament in himself the very defilements of nature, and that stain began in man before life." Likewise in On Noah's Ark: "Through the one Lord Jesus," he says, "salvation is declared as coming to the nations, who alone could be righteous when every generation was going astray, precisely because, born of a virgin, he was not held at all by the privilege of guilty generation. 'See,' he says, 'in iniquities I was conceived, and in offenses my mother bore me', says he who was thought righteous above others. Whom, then, should I now call righteous, except one free of these bonds, whom the bonds of common nature do not hold?" See, a holy man, most approved in the Catholic faith even by the testimony of Pelagius, refutes with such clarity the Pelagians who deny original sin; and yet he does not, with the Manichees, either deny that God is the maker of those who are born or accuse marriage, which God instituted and blessed.

The Pelagians say that merit begins from man through free choice, and that God, following, repays it with the aid of grace. Here too let the venerable Ambrose refute them, saying in his Exposition of the Prophet Isaiah: "Because human care without divine help is too weak to heal, it seeks God as helper." Likewise in the book entitled On Flight from the World: "Frequent," he says, "is our talk of fleeing this world; and would that the disposition were as cautious and careful as the talk is easy! But what is worse, the enticement of earthly desires often creeps in, and the outpouring of vanities takes hold of the mind, so that what you strive to avoid, this you think of and turn over in your mind. This is difficult for a man to guard against, and impossible to put off. Finally the prophet testifies that it is a matter of wish rather than of accomplishment, saying: 'Incline my heart to your testimonies, and not to avarice.' For our heart and our thoughts are not in our power; poured over us unexpectedly, they confuse the mind and spirit and draw them elsewhere than you had proposed; they call back to worldly things, insert things of this world, thrust in things of pleasure, weave in enticements; and at the very time when we are preparing to lift up the mind, empty thoughts being inserted, we are for the most part cast down to earthly things. And who is so blessed as always to ascend in his heart? But how can this be done without divine help? In no way at all. Finally, above, the same Scripture says: 'Blessed is the man whose help is from you, O Lord; ascents are in his heart.'" What can be said more plainly and sufficiently? But lest the Pelagians perhaps answer that by the very fact that divine help is asked for, man's merit goes before, saying that this itself is merit, because by praying one becomes worthy that divine grace should come to his help, let them attend to what this same holy man says in the Exposition of Isaiah: "And to pray to God," he says, "is a spiritual grace. For no one says 'Lord Jesus' except in the Holy Spirit." Hence also, expounding the gospel according to Luke: "You see, certainly," he says, "that everywhere the power of the Lord cooperates with human efforts, so that no one can build without the Lord, no one guard without the Lord, no one begin anything without the Lord." Does so great a man as Ambrose, because he says these things and commends the grace of God with grateful piety, as befits a son of the promise, therefore destroy free choice? Or does he want that grace to be understood which the Pelagians, by different turns of speech, will have seen only as the law, namely that God is believed to help us not to do what we have come to know, but to come to know what we should do? If they think this man of God holds this, let them hear what he said about the law itself. In the book On Flight from the World he says: "The law could stop the mouths of all; it could not convert the mind." Likewise in another place in the same book: "The law," he says, "condemns the deed; it does not take away the malice." Let them see that a faithful and Catholic man agrees with the apostle, who says: "But we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world become guilty before God; because no flesh will be justified by the law in his sight." For from this apostolic meaning Ambrose took and wrote those things.

Now, since the Pelagians say that there are or have been righteous men in this life who lived without any sin, so much so that the future life, which is to be hoped for as a reward, cannot be more advanced and more perfect, let Ambrose answer and refute them on this point too. For, expounding the prophet Isaiah, on account of what is written there, "I have begotten sons and exalted them, but they have despised me", he undertook to discuss the generations which are from God, and in that discussion he recalled the testimony of John, where he says, "He who is born of God does not sin." And treating this most difficult question, he says: "Since there is no one in this world who is free from sin, since John himself says, 'If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar', if those born of God do not sin, and we understand this of those who are in this world, we must reckon them to be the countless who have obtained the grace of God through the regeneration of the washing. But yet, since the prophet says: 'All things wait for you to give them food in due season; when you give it to them they will gather it; when you open your hand all things will be filled with goodness; but when you turn away your face they will be troubled. You will take away their spirit and they will fail and return to their dust. You will send forth your Spirit and they will be created, and you will renew the face of the earth', these can be seen as said not of any time whatever but of the future, when there will be a new earth and a new heaven. They will be troubled, then, so as to take a beginning, and when you open your hand all things will be filled with goodness, which is not easily the case in this age. For what does Scripture say of this age? 'There is none who does good, there is not even one.' If, then, there are different generations, and this entry into this life is a receiver of offenses, so much so that even he who begot is despised, while the other generation does not receive sins, let us see whether our regeneration is not after the course of this life, of which it was said, 'In the regeneration, when the Son of Man sits on the throne of his glory.' For just as the regeneration of the washing is spoken of, through which, the filth of sins wiped away, we are renewed, so there seems to be spoken of a regeneration through which, purified from every stain of bodily compactness, we are regenerated with clean sense of soul into eternal life; because the quality of that regeneration is in some way purer than that of this washing, so that no suspicion of sins may fall not only on its acts but not even on our very thoughts." Likewise in another place in the same work: "We see," he says, "that it is impossible that anyone should be perfectly spotless while placed in the body, since even Paul calls himself imperfect. For he says thus: 'Not that I have already received or am already perfect.' And yet a little after he says: 'As many of us, then, as are perfect'; unless perhaps because there is one perfection in this world and another after, that perfection of which he says to the Corinthians, 'When what is perfect has come', and elsewhere, 'until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ.' So, just as the apostle says that many placed in this world are perfect together with him, who, if you look to true perfection, could not be perfect, since he himself said, 'Now we see through a mirror in an enigma, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know as I also have been known', so also they are spotless in this world and will be spotless in the kingdom of God; though certainly, if you examine more minutely, no one can be spotless, because no one is without sin." Likewise in the same: "You see," he says, "that while we live this life, we ought to cleanse ourselves and seek God and begin from the cleansing of our soul and as it were lay the foundations of virtue, so that after this life we may deserve to obtain the perfection of purification." And likewise in the same: "Weighed down, however," he says, "and groaning, who would not say: 'Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?' So with the same teacher we resolve all the varieties of interpretation. For if everyone is wretched who recognizes that he is entangled in the troubles of the body, then certainly every body is wretched; for I would not call him happy who, confused by certain darknesses of his mind, does not know his own condition. This too comes to the understanding not absurdly: for if a man who knows himself is wretched, surely all are wretched, since each either recognizes his weakness through wisdom or does not know it through folly." Likewise in the book On the Good of Death: "Let death, then, work in us," he says, "so that life too may work; a good life after death, that is, a good life after victory, a good life when the contest is finished, so that now the law of the flesh no longer knows how to fight against the law of the mind, so that now we have no struggle with the body of death." Again in the same: "Therefore," he says, "since the righteous have this reward, that they see the face of God and that light which enlightens every man, let us from now on put on such zeal that our soul may draw near to God, our prayer draw near, our desire cleave to him, that we be not separated from him. And placed here, let us be joined to God by meditating, reading, seeking; let us know him as we can. For here we know in part, because here all things are imperfect, there perfect; here little children, there grown strong. 'Now we see,' he says, 'through a mirror in an enigma, but then face to face.' Then, with unveiled face, it will be granted to behold the glory of God, whom now souls wrapped in the compacted flesh of this body and overshadowed by certain stains and filth of this flesh cannot see clearly. 'For who,' he says, 'will see my face and live?' And rightly; for if our eyes cannot bear the rays of the sun, and if anyone gazes long facing the sun he is said commonly to be blinded; if a creature cannot look upon a creature without harm and injury to itself, how can one, covered with the cast-off skin of this body, see without danger to himself the flashing face of the eternal Creator? For who is justified in the sight of God, when not even an infant of one day can be clean from sin, and no one can boast of the integrity and chastity of his heart?"

It would be too long if I wished to recall all that holy Ambrose said and wrote against this heresy of the Pelagians, which arose so long after: not answering them, indeed, but proclaiming the Catholic faith and building people up in it. But neither could I, nor ought I to, recall all those things which Cyprian, most glorious in the Lord, set down in his letters, by which it may be shown how this faith which we hold is the true and truly Christian and Catholic faith, handed down of old through the holy Scriptures, and so retained and kept by our fathers up to this time, when these men tried to tear it up, and to be retained and kept henceforth by God's favor. For that it was so handed down to Cyprian and by Cyprian, these and similar testimonies brought forward from his writings testify; and that it was so kept up to our times, the things Ambrose wrote about these matters before these men began to bubble up show, as does the fact that Catholic ears everywhere shuddered at their profane novelties; and that it is so to be kept hereafter, the condemnation of some of them and the correction of others has declared wholesomely enough. For whatever they dare to mutter against the sound faith of Cyprian and Ambrose, I do not think they will break out into such great fury as to dare to call these memorable and remembered men of God Manichees.

What is it, then, that with raging blindness of mind they now boast that throughout the whole West a dogma no less foolish than impious has been taken up, when, by the Lord's mercy and his merciful governing of his church, the Catholic faith has kept such watch that, like the dogma of the Manichees, so also the dogma of these men, no less foolish than impious, was not taken up? See, holy and learned men, Catholics as the fame of the whole church attests, praise with due and fitting commendations the creature of God, and marriage instituted by him, and the law given by him through holy Moses, and free choice implanted in the nature of man, and the holy patriarchs and prophets; all five of which the Manichees condemn, partly by denying, partly also by detesting them. From this it appears that these Catholic teachers are far removed from the views of the Manichees. And yet they assert original sin; they assert that the grace of God goes before every merit, over free choice, so as to give truly free divine help; they assert that the saints lived righteously in this flesh in such a way that the help of prayer, by which daily sins are forgiven, was necessary for them; and that perfect righteousness, which cannot have sin, will be in another life the reward of those who have lived righteously here.

What is it, then, that they say: "A signature was extorted from simple bishops sitting in their own places without the gathering of a synod"? Was a written statement extorted from the most blessed men Cyprian and Ambrose, most excellent in the Catholic faith, before these men and against these men, who overturn their impious dogmas with such clarity that we can scarcely find anything clearer to say against them? Or was the gathering of a synod needed so that an open ruin might be condemned? As though no heresy had ever been condemned except by the gathering of a synod; when rather very few are found for whose condemnation such a necessity arose, and there are many, incomparably more, which deserved to be censured and condemned where they arose, and from there could become known through the other lands as things to be avoided. But the pride of these men, which exalts itself so much against God that it wishes to glory not in him but rather in free choice, is understood to be grasping at this glory too, that a synod of East and West be gathered on their account. For since, the Lord resisting them, they cannot pervert the Catholic world, they try at least to disturb it; whereas rather, by pastoral vigilance and diligence, after the competent and sufficient judgment already passed on them, these wolves must be crushed wherever they appear, whether so that they may be healed and changed, or so that they may be avoided for the safety and soundness of others; with the help of the Shepherd of shepherds, who seeks the lost sheep even among little children, who makes sheep holy and righteous freely, and who, though they have been sanctified and justified, yet in this frailty and weakness, because of the daily sins without which one does not live here even when one lives well, both providently teaches them to ask for daily forgiveness and mercifully hears them when they ask.