Baring-Gould’s sources: Roman Martyrology. Authorities The letters of S. Augustine, and his own writings.] S. John Cassian, in order to instruct and discipline the army of monks he had assembled in his monastery of S. Victor, at Marseilles, wrote his “ Institutions ” and “Conferences,” the latter on account of the practical teaching of the chief Egyptian abbots. One of these, named Chaeremon, appears to have taught a doctrine much like Semi-Pelagianism, that man’s resolve to do good must precede grace; and the perusal of S. Augustine’s work “ On Correction and Grace,” led Cassian, S. Hilary of Arles, and other leading churchmen at Marseilles, and throughout the South of Gaul, to take serious exception to 354 Lives oj the Saints. tjuncas.

Augustine’s predestinarian rigour, and to make a stand for the freedom of the human will, which Augustine seemed inclined to ignore, or reduce to nothing, before the constraining force of grace.

Prosper a layman of Riez, in Aquitain, or rather Provence, took up his pen against Cassian, and the supporters of free will. He entered into correspondence with S. Augustine, as did another Hilary, not the bishop of Arles, and their letters drew forth from S. Augustine his letters on the Predestination of the Saints, which contain the germs of that dangerous teaching afterwards embodied by Luther in his H De servo arbitrio,” and by Calvin in his “Institutes.”1 S. Augustine in his first letter showed that man was placed in a state of salvation by a pure unmerited gift of grace, and in a second letter “On Perseverance,” he contended that man’s condition, after having been so placed, is not of man’s making or marring, but is simply and solely the work of God. The Semi-Pelagians [followers of Pelagius, who taught people could be good without God’s grace] had with reason objected that to teach this doctrine would be disastrous to Christian morality. Augustine admits that caution must be used in declaring it, nevertheless he insists on it as true, not seeing that this admission condemned his doctrine as 1 S. Augustine illustrates his teaching of predestination by the case Of a mother who has twins. Each of these Is a “ lump of perdition/’ She overlies one and it perishes unbaptlsed, to enter an eternity of misery; the other is baptized and is saved. This teaching Is identical with that of Mahomet, which is thus summed up by Mr. Palgrave i — “It is God’s singular satisfaction to iet created beings continually feel that they are nothing else than his slaves, his tools, and contemptible tools also, that thus they may the better acknowledge his superiority and now his power to he above their power, his cunning above their cunning, his will above their will, his pride above their pride; or rather, that there is no power, cunning, will, or pride, save his own/* Arabia i., p. 366. God took clay, at the creation, and broke it in half, one half he made into men and cast into heaven, saying, “ And what care I ?*' The other he made into men and cast into bell, and said, “And what care I?'* This doctrine is also identical with the predestinarian ism of Calvin.

not divine; for what is Gospel- truth is fit for all to hear and all to put in practice.

Prosper and Hilary, not content with having elicited these treatises from S. Augustine, went to Rome, in 431, and complained of those in Southern Gaul [roughly modern France and Belgium] who refused to receive his doctrine on grace. The Semi-Pelagians had laid themselves open to attack on one vulnerable point, they had denied that grace was necessary first to stir the human will into activity; in this they were decidedly wrong. Pope S. Celestine, influenced by Prosper and Hilary, wrote a letter addressed to Venerius, bishop of Marseilles, Leontius, bishop of Frejus, and to the other bishops of Gaul, requiring them to forbid the teaching of what was erroneous in their churches. “ As for Augustine,” he said, “ a man of holy memory,” — he had died the previous year, 430, — " he was always in our communion, and has never been charged with the slightest suspicion of false teaching; his science was such, that my predecessors regarded him as a chief teacher. He was loved and honoured by all the world, therefore I exhort you to resist those who venture to attack his memory, and to impose silence upon them.” To this letter S. Celestine added nine articles on grace, to the following effect: — 1. By the Fall man has lost the natural power to rise, and his free-will is powerless to raise him to the condition man was in previous to the Fall without the assistance of grace. 2. No man is perfect Goodness must be communicated by Him who is All-good. 3. Not even the baptized can overcome daily temptation without the assistance of grace. 4. None can use free-will aright, except by the help of grace through Jesus Christ. 5. All the desires, works, and merits of the saints are to be regarded as appertaining to the glory of God, for none are able to please Him save by the assistance of His grace. 6. God works in the hearts of men, stimulating the free will, the holy desire, and the good intent 7. Grace not only remits sin, but strengthens to resist sin. 8. Prayers for the heathen that they may be given faith, for schismatics, that they may be given faith, are not vain forms, but signify that we require God to work on the heathen and the schismatic to bring them to the knowledge of the truth. 9. The ceremony of exorcism before baptism proves that the Church believes in the unbaptized being under bondage to Satan. Therefore it is to be believed that the grace of God “ prevents,” that is, goes before the merits of man. It does not destroy the liberty of free will, but emancipates it, illumines and directs it. It is God who wills that we should use his gifts aright; but his gifts must be co-operated with by us.1 The temperate and cautious language of the Pope was equally opposed to the extravagance of Augustinarian predestinarianism, and Semi-Pelagian denial of prevenience of grace.

S. Vincent of Lerins had drawn up sixteen propositions from the writings of S. Augustine, logical results of his teaching, as he asserted, which amounted to this — that God willed not the salvation of all men, that He has deliberately made the majority of men that He might damn them eternally, that to those who are predestined to damnation, salvation is impossible, and therefore that God is the author of their sins. These logical results of the teaching of Augustine were indeed arrived at by Calvin in after ages. S. Prosper undertook to refute these charges, together with fifteen articles drawn up by the Gaulish bishops and doctors against Augustinian [religious following the Rule of St. Augustine] predestinarianism. They were much the same in substance as those of S. Vincent, viz., predestination imposes on men a 1 One passage in these articles has passed into a proverb, “nt legem credendl cm status! supplicant! i.‘* fatal necessity to sin. Free-will does not exist, men are governed by fatal necessity. God wills not the salvation of all men, for if He wills it, and rules absolutely, why does He not save all. His will, not man's co-operation, rules man’s fate, and therefore if man is lost, it is not through his fault, but by the deliberate will of God. If men are fatally predestined to life or death, what was the use of Jesus Christ dying for us ?

S. Prosper wrote a work to answer, or deaden, the force of these rigid and logical conclusions. But the principal work of S. Prosper was a defence of S. Augustine against the work of S. John Cassian, already mentioned. He wrote it in the year 432. Cassian had advanced that (1) man can sometimes attain to a state of grace without the co-operation of God; that (2) Adam by his sin had not lost all faculty of good, all knowledge of what is good; (3) that all the merits of the saints are not solely due to God’s preventing grace, or if so, we are to attribute to nature nothing but what is evil, and this is Manicheism; (4) that every human soul has naturally in it the seeds of virtues, which it is the province of grace to make to grew and blossom; (5) that some are saved by God, others are only aided by him.

One of these propositions, the first, is of more than questionable orthodoxy; the second has been approved in effect by the Church in the catechism and decrees of the council of Trent1 The fourth is also true, if Cassian admitted, as there can be no doubt he did, that the germ of life in these seeds was of Divine gift The fifth proposition is true if we understand its drift aright, that God gives his grace to all, and that some refusing to use it or profit by it, are lost by deliberately neglecting to cooperate with grace, whereas others utilising grace, are thereby saved.

S. Prosper pretended that by these statements Cassian favoured the Pelagians, and contradicted himself He closed his work with an appeal to S. Sixtus, the pope, to drive out all concealed Pelagians, as his predecessors had expelled those who were manifest. The pope wisely refrained from acting on this bigoted advice, and S. John Cassian remained to the last in the Church, uncensured, and has been numbered with the saints both by the Eastern and Western Churches (July 23rd), as the champion of the freedom of man’s will. S. Prosper composed a poem entitled, 44 De Ingratis,” in the bitterness of his hostility to those who refuse to see in divine grace a power destructive to human liberty. He also wrote a Chronicle of the history of the world from the Creation to the year 455, which is probably that of his death. He had been secretary to S. Leo the Great, and some authors suppose that he wrote the letters attributed to S. Leo, against the errors of Eutyches. He was also the writer of a book 44 On Grace and Free Will,” and of a collection of maxims taken from S. Augustine. Some suppose that he wrote a work 44 On the Vocation of the Gentiles,” usually found among the writings of Pope S. Leo.