grace, and Providence all radiate from the central principle of the majesty of God and the littleness of man.  All his ideas of the servitude of the will are confirmed by his personal experience of the awful fetters which sin imposes, and the impossibility of breaking away from them without direct aid from the God who ruleth the world in love.  And he had an infinitely greater and deeper conviction of the reality of this divine love, which had rescued him, than Pelagius had, who felt that his salvation was the result of his own merits.  The views of Augustine were infinitely more cheerful than those of his adversary respecting salvation, since they gave more hope to the miserable population of the Empire who could not claim the virtues of Pelagius, and were impotent of themselves to break away from the bondage which degraded them.  There is nothing in the writings of Augustine,—­not in this controversy, or any other controversy,—­to show that God delights in the miseries or the penalty which are indissolubly connected with sin; on the contrary, he blesses and adores the divine hand which releases men from the constraints which sin imposes.  This divine interposition is wholly based on a divine and infinite love.  It is the helping hand of Omnipotence to the weak will of man,—­the weak will even of Paul, when he exclaimed, “The evil that I would not, that I do.”  It is the unloosing, by His loving assistance, of the wings by which the emancipated soul would rise to the lofty regions of peace and contemplation.

I know very well that the doctrines which Augustine systematized from Paul involve questions which we cannot answer; for why should not an infinite and omnipotent God give to all men the saving grace that he gave to Augustine?  Why should not this loving and compassionate Father break all the fetters of sin everywhere, and restore the primeval Paradise in this wicked world where Satan seems to reign?  Is He not more powerful than devils?  Alas! the prevalence of evil is more mysterious than the origin of evil.  But this is something,—­and it is well for the critic and opponent of the Augustinian theology to bear this in mind,—­that Augustine was an earnest seeker after truth, even when enslaved by the fornications of Carthage; and his own free-will in persistently seeking truth, through all the mazes of Manichean and Grecian speculation, is as manifest as the divine grace which came to his assistance.  God Almighty does not break fetters until there is some desire in men to have them broken.  If men will hug sins, they must not complain of their bondage.  Augustine recognized free-will, which so many think he ignored, when his soul aspired to a higher life.  When a drunkard in his agonies cries out to God, then help is near.  A drowning man who calls for a rope when a rope is near stands a good chance of being rescued.