race, for reasons just but hidden, his mercy made him choose some of the corrupt mass to be freely saved by the merit of Jesus Christ, and his justice made him resolve to punish the others by the damnation that they deserved.  That is why, with the Schoolmen, only the saved were called Praedestinati and the damned were called Praesciti.  It must be admitted that some Infralapsarians and others speak sometimes of predestination to damnation, following the example of Fulgentius and of St. Augustine himself:  but that signifies the same as destination to them, and it avails nothing to wrangle about words.  That pretext, notwithstanding, was in time past used for maltreating that Godescalc who caused a stir about the middle of the ninth century, and who took the name of Fulgentius to indicate that he followed that author.

83.  As for the destination of the elect to eternal life, the Protestants, as well as those of the Roman Church, dispute much among themselves as to whether election is absolute or is founded on the prevision of final living faith.  Those who are called Evangelicals, that is, those of the Augsburg Confession, hold the latter opinion:  they believe that one need not go into the hidden causes of election while one may find a manifest cause of it shown in Holy Scripture, which is faith in Jesus Christ; and it appears to them that the prevision of the cause is also the cause of the prevision of the effect.  Those who are called Reformed are of a different opinion:  they admit that salvation comes from faith in Jesus Christ, but they observe that often the cause anterior to the effect in execution is posterior in intention, as when the cause is the means and the effect is the end.  Thus the question is, whether faith or salvation is anterior in the intention of God, that is, whether God’s design is rather to save man than to make him a believer.

84.  Hence we see that the question between the Supralapsarians and the Infralapsarians in part, and again between them and the Evangelicals, comes back to a right conception of the order that is in God’s decrees.  Perhaps one might put an end to this dispute at once by saying that, properly speaking, all the decrees of God that are here concerned are simultaneous, not only in respect of time, as everyone agrees, but also in signo rationis, or in the order of nature.  And indeed, the Formula of Concord, building upon some passages of St. Augustine, comprised in the same [168] Decree of Election salvation and the means that conduce to it.  To demonstrate this synchronism of destinations or of decrees with which we are concerned, we must revert to the expedient that I have employed more than once, which states that God, before decreeing anything, considered among other possible sequences of things that one which he afterwards approved.  In the idea of this is represented how the first parents sin and corrupt their posterity; how Jesus Christ redeems the human race; how some,