Two Dissertations

1It is indeed to be lamented, and deeply deplored, that by the misfortune or disease of our age it almost always happens that those mysteries of our religion which were published for the peace and comfort of souls are turned nearly into matter for litigation and fighting alone. Who would ever have thought that the death of Christ, appointed for establishing peace and for destroying enmities, as the Apostle speaks (Ephesians 2:14-17; Colossians 1:20-21), could become so fertile in breeding disputes? But this seems to come about by the innate curiosity of men, who are commonly more eager to pry into the secret counsels of God than to embrace the benefits publicly offered. Hence it happens that, by overmuch disputing for whom Christ died and for whom he did not die, little thought is given by each and all to applying the death of Christ to the salvation of our souls by true and living faith.

In treating this matter my purpose is to enter that path which composes quarrels rather than sows a quarrel upon a quarrel. Since, then, it is confessed among those who extend the death of Christ to each and every person that it is nevertheless applied, as to fruitful reception, to certain particular persons; and since, on the other side, those who restrict the same death to the elect alone still confess that it would profit all who are called — indeed all human beings, if they believed — each side seems to acknowledge a twofold consideration of the death of Christ. For by both it is considered as a universal cause of salvation applicable to each and every person if they believed, and as a special cause of salvation efficaciously applied to certain particular persons who have believed. If I treat the death of Christ under this twofold consideration, it will perhaps appear that in some of the points so fiercely contested there are different manners of speaking rather than discrepant judgments. I will therefore recall the matter to certain brief and clear theses: first those things which are to be set out concerning the death of Christ as a universal cause of salvation applicable to all; then I will add other theses concerning the death of Christ as a special cause of salvation efficaciously applied to some, or at least to be applied infallibly in its own time.

2Let us now come to our purpose. And first we will treat of the death of Christ as it is commonly proposed in the Holy Scriptures and ought to be considered by us — namely as a certain universal remedy instituted by God and applicable to the whole human race unto salvation. Then we will come to that other part of our dispute, concerning the death of Christ insofar as, by a special decree of God, it is a particular remedy to be applied efficaciously and infallibly to the salvation of certain persons. In the former consideration of the death of Christ various theses will meet us to be discussed, of which this is the first and principal, as being the basis of the rest, which we form in these words:

The death of Christ is proposed in Holy Scripture as a universal remedy applicable unto salvation to each and every human being by the ordination of God and by the nature of the thing.

This thesis is first to be explained, then confirmed by testimonies and arguments, and finally vindicated from contrary objections. As to the explanation: when we name the death of Christ, we comprehend the whole obedience of Christ, active and passive, whose completion and as it were final act was in the death itself — for which reason theologians commonly attribute by synecdoche to the death what belongs to the whole obedience. Whatever therefore Christ did, whatever he suffered, from the cradle to the cross, this whole satisfactory and meritorious work of the Redeemer we understand is to be joined and coupled with the death itself in this our thesis. So the Apostle (Romans 5:19) set the obedience of Christ taken universally as the cause of human salvation: by the obedience of one many are made righteous. And when it is said that Christ made himself obedient unto the death of the cross (Philippians 2:7-8), the Apostle does not exclude from the ground of meriting all the preceding obedience of Christ, but rather includes it, and teaches that this meritorious obedience of Christ already began when he took the form of a servant, and was consummated when he offered himself on the cross. Under the word death, therefore, we comprehend that infinite treasury of merits which the Mediator of God and men, the man Jesus Christ, whether by doing or by suffering, procured and heaped up for our use.

Secondly, when we say that this death, or this merit, is proposed in the Holy Scriptures as a universal cause of salvation, we mean this: according to the will of God made known in the word, this remedy is proposed without distinction to any individual of human nature unto salvation, yet cannot profit anyone unto salvation unless a special application intervene. For a universal cause of salvation, or a universal remedy, involves these two things: one, that it be of such a kind that it can cure and save each and every person; the other, that it be of such a kind that for producing this determined effect in any singular human being it requires a determined application.

We take the first testimony from (John 3:16): God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. By this testimony we effectively conclude that the death of Christ is applicable to any human being by the ordination of God, and will be applied if that person believes in Christ. Give me that individual of the human race to whom an evangelical minister cannot truly say: God so loved you that he gave his only-begotten Son, that if you believe in him you should not perish but have eternal life. This can be announced from the certainty of faith to any singular human being; therefore the death of Christ is applicable to any human being according to this will and ordination of God.

3I know that some learned and godly theologians take “the world” here for the world, or university, of the elect, and they lean on this argument: that the Son of God is said to be given so that everyone who believes in him should not perish; yet only the elect are those who so believe in Christ that they do not perish but obtain eternal life. I answer that nothing more can be inferred from this than that the death of Christ is in the event saving to the elect alone, and is in fact applied through intervening faith. It cannot be gathered that it was not a remedy applicable to others, and to be applied, if they had believed, by God’s ordination.

Let us illustrate the matter by a similitude. Suppose that in some city each and every person is laboring under an epidemic and deadly disease, and that the king sends to them a most skilled physician furnished with a most efficacious medicine, and publicly proclaims that all shall be cured who are willing to use this medicine. Without doubt we could truly say of this king: So he loved this city that he sent his most skilled physician to it, that all who were willing to use his labor and medicine should not perish but recover their former health. If anyone should reply that this physician was sent only to those who use his labor, and that by the king’s ordinance his medicine was applicable only to those who were willing to drink it, that man both diminishes the king’s beneficence and says what is openly false. For the physician was sent to all, with no condition presupposed on the side of the one sent or of the sick; he was also furnished with a saving medicine applicable promiscuously to all. Willingness to admit the physician and to drink the medicine does not belong to the destination of the physician or of the medicine, but to the undoubted perception of health.

The ancient Fathers seem to have delighted greatly in this similitude. Prosper looks to it when, answering Vincent’s objection that on Augustine’s view our Lord Jesus Christ did not suffer for the salvation and redemption of all human beings, he replies that against the wound of original sin, by which the nature of all human beings was mortified, the remedy is the death of the Son of God. And a little later: This cup of immortality has indeed in itself what would profit all; but if it is not drunk, it does not heal. Our faith is therefore required not so that God may be said to have given or destined his Son to us as a remedy, but so that the Son given and destined may be received by us unto the obtaining of eternal life.

The second testimony is drawn from two places joined and compared with each other. The former is (John 3:17-18): God did not send his Son to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned; but whoever does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God. To these words let us add also (John 12:47-48): If anyone hears my words and does not believe, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. Whoever rejects me has one who judges him; the word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day. From these we have that the Son of God was sent by the Father to bring a universal remedy applicable to the whole world. Nor can these words be restricted to the world of the elect. First, because this world, to save which Christ was sent, is divided into believers and unbelievers; but the world of the elect consists of believers alone, or at least of those who will believe in their time. Second, because some of those to save whom Christ is here affirmed to have been sent are to be condemned; yet none of the elect will be damned. Third, because those who are here pronounced to be damned are said to undergo damnation because they did not believe in the only-begotten Son of God, or because they rejected him. By these forms of speech it is sufficiently clearly intimated that he was offered to them by God and sent to save them. But how, or in what sense, are we rightly to understand that Christ was sent to save those who perish by their own fault — that is, by their own unbelief? In no other sense than that expressed in our thesis: namely, that the death of Christ was constituted by God as a universal cause of salvation, and is applicable to any human being under the condition of faith — a condition which those persons by their voluntary malice have despised. Calvin understood these words no otherwise; on (John 3) he noted that the name “world” is repeated again and again, lest anyone think himself altogether shut out, provided he holds the way of faith. And on (John 12:47) he observed that, so that all might have more courage toward repentance, salvation is here offered promiscuously to all. It is therefore clear from these places that the death of Christ is proposed and considered as a remedy applicable to all unto salvation by God’s ordination, even if it is rejected by unbelievers.

We will bring forward a third testimony from (Acts 13:38) and following: Be it known to you, men and brethren, that through this man remission of sins is announced to you; and from all things from which you could not be absolved by the law of Moses, by him everyone who believes is absolved. See, you despisers, and wonder, etc. Then in verse 46: Since you thrust away the word of God and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles. From these words it is plain that by God’s own ordination Christ and the death of Christ are proposed and offered promiscuously to human beings as a remedy applicable to each and every person unto the obtaining of remission and eternal life. Second, it is also clear that by the will and ordination of God this remedy was applicable not only to those to whom it is in fact so applied through faith, but even to the despisers themselves, who thrust away Christ and eternal life by their unbelief. Finally, verse 48 also makes plain that faith itself — by whose intervention what is by God’s decree applicable to all is in fact applied to some — is not found in unbelievers by their own fault, but arises in believers by the special benefit of a merciful God. And here at last the secret of election puts itself forth — from whose untimely and too lofty speculation we ought not to overwhelm that philanthropy of God by which he ordained and gave a remedy applicable to each and every sinner unto salvation, a remedy that will indeed profit those alone, and all, who have believed.

4The fourth testimony is found in (2 Corinthians 5:19-20): God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not imputing their sins to them; and he placed in us the word of reconciliation. Therefore we discharge an embassy in Christ’s name, as though God were beseeching you through us: We pray in Christ’s name, be reconciled to God. First it is to be observed that the Apostle here sets down as a common benefit to the whole world this reconciliation which he says was procured by God himself through the mediation of Christ. But to have reconciled the world promiscuously denotes nothing other than to have ordained and granted to the world that universal remedy, or propitiatory sacrifice of Christ’s death, which is applicable to all. Second, we must observe in what sense God is said to have reconciled the world to himself by the very fact of the merit of Christ’s offering — namely, that this sacrifice of Christ being posited, he does not impute sins to them: that is, he does not require of any human being that he himself make satisfaction for his sins (which is impossible), nor does he any longer will to punish anyone for his sins who will use this propitiatory sacrifice. Finally it is also to be noted that this reconciliation, this non-imputation of sins of which the Apostle speaks, is considered as already accomplished on the part of God and of Christ as soon as Christ is understood to have laid down his life for the sins of the world; but on the part of sinful human beings there remains the ministry of the Gospel, by which it is testified to human beings, and there remains that the Gospel must be believed before human beings are brought, as it were, into actual possession of this grace. And for this reason the Apostle added, after saying that God had reconciled the world to himself in Christ, that ministers must nonetheless discharge their embassy and exhort any and all to be themselves reconciled to God. From all of which it is clear what we posited in our thesis: that the death of Christ was ordained by God and preached by the Apostles as a remedy applicable to all unto reconciliation and salvation by the will of God, even though, for human beings to be reconciled in actual fact, preceding repentance and faith are needed.

So Aquinas understood this place: “Be reconciled to God” — this seems, he says, contrary to what he said, “God reconciled us to himself”: for if he himself reconciled, what need is there that we be reconciled? We are already reconciled. To this it must be said that God reconciled us to himself as efficient cause, namely on his own part; but that it may be meritorious for us, reconciliation must also be made on our part. But Musculus explained this whole place most clearly, and his words it will not be tedious to set down: God, he says, reconciled to himself the whole human race, which from the beginning to the end of the world was, and is, and will be, when he gave the Son unto death for all. Then after a few words interposed: Yet God reconciled them to himself in Christ, not imputing their sins to them, so far as concerns the very work of reconciliation prepared and sufficient for reconciling the whole human race. But because reconciliation cannot take place between unwilling parties, God himself instituted the ministry of reconciliation, by which all are called and invited eagerly to embrace this grace. If the whole world embraced it, the whole world would certainly be reconciled to God and saved, with every imputation of sins rejected, and not one of mortals would perish. Those therefore who so wholly lean upon and cling to the secret of predestination that meanwhile they overwhelm and plainly overturn this reconciliation of the world, at the same time overturn the matter of our evangelical preaching, which consists chiefly in this: that we make any human being certain that God is so reconciled to him through the death of Christ that, if he believes in Christ, God will not impute sins to him but will adjudge eternal life to him. This work, established on the part of God and of Christ, is called the reconciliation and redemption of the world, even though unbelievers and the impenitent refuse to be reconciled and redeemed. So Prosper speaks, answering the Chapters of the Gauls, objection 9: The Redeemer of the world gave his blood for the world, and the world refused to be redeemed. So our Church of England speaks, Article 31: The offering of Christ once made is a perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and there is no other satisfaction besides that. So finally Paul speaks when he says that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself: that is, God, by giving his Son unto death, himself supplied to his enemies a refuge of reconciliation, to which whoever at length takes refuge has God, by its benefit, so pacified and reconciled that he will at once receive him into grace.

The fifth testimony is drawn from the Epistle to the Hebrews, (Hebrews 2:3) and (Hebrews 4:1-2) and following: How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? which began first to be declared by the Lord himself, and was confirmed to us by those who heard him, etc. Let us therefore fear lest, the promise of entering into his rest being left, any of you should seem to have come short. For the gospel was preached to you as well as to them; but the word heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard. From this whole discourse of the Apostle it is plain, first, that in the Gospel salvation is offered promiscuously to all those to whom it is preached; for on this very account it is called euangelion. Next it is clear that this salvation laid up in Christ and offered to human beings in the Gospel is neglected and thrust away by many — namely by all unbelievers who do not give faith to the evangelical promises. Finally this also is established: that this neglect and unbelief is the true cause that keeps the ungodly from the Lord’s rest — that is, that deprives them of the eternal life offered to them in Christ. But none of these things could truly and seriously be said unless it be presupposed that salvation through the death of Christ is, by God’s ordination, applicable to all human beings. For who can rightly be said to have neglected salvation — that is, a cause of salvation constituted and prepared by God — which was never prepared, constituted, or applicable to him? Or how does this neglect and unbelief exclude from participation in the salvation offered in Christ those who, for want of a divine ordination, were in every way most shut out from it? We must therefore concede some ordination of God according to which Christ, as a cause of salvation, was applicable even to those who by their own fault fell short of salvation.

The last testimony is drawn from those places gathered together in which the will of Christ in dying is declared to have been extended to procuring the salvation of all. Of this sort are (2 Corinthians 5:15): One died for all; (1 Timothy 2:6): He gave himself a ransom for all; (Hebrews 2:9): By the grace of God he tasted death for all; and (1 John 2:2): And he is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. I pass over the rest. These and similar places, although they do not avail to infer that conclusion of certain Remonstrants — namely, that by this death of Christ reconciliation and remission of sins have been acquired or obtained for each and every human being, or that each and every human being has by the very death of Christ been restored into a state of grace and salvation — yet they prove sufficiently effectively what we intend: that this death of Christ was constituted and ordained by God himself and by Christ as a universal cause of salvation, or a universal remedy applicable to all human beings unto obtaining reconciliation and remission. I do not therefore see by what right or necessity some theologians restrict places of this kind, in which Christ is expressly affirmed to have suffered for all, to the elect alone or to the mere university of the elect, when in the sense aforesaid they most truly extend to any others whatever. For nothing hinders that what by divine predestination is to be applied infallibly to the elect alone should, by some divine ordination, be applicable to all. The Collocutors of the Hague seem to me to have conceded this very thing under other forms of speech. For that Remonstrant dogma, that Christ died not for the elect alone but also for other human beings, they concede if it is understood of the mere sufficiency of Christ’s merits; but if it is understood of an efficacious, or actually wrought, reconciliation, they deny it. This is enough for me: for they will never rightly maintain that mere sufficiency of Christ’s death with respect to all, unless they also confess that by God’s ordination it is applicable to all unto salvation according to some way constituted by God. For he is absurdly and falsely asserted to have died sufficiently for all who is affirmed to have died for the elect alone; since that word “sufficiently” is not a diminishing term, nor does it destroy the truth of the thing affirmed. But more will be said of this matter when we reach our second thesis. Thus far we have contended by the testimonies of Scripture. Next we will weave certain reasons grounded, as it seems to us, solidly enough in the Scriptures.

5That death whose fruit brings some spiritual benefits even to those who are not saved is not applicable to the elect alone; but the death of Christ does bring some fruits even to those who will not be saved. For a clearer understanding of the Major I now suggest what I warned from the beginning: under the name of the death of Christ we embrace that whole heap of Christ’s meritorious obedience, to which his very death set the last closing clause, as it were. For this infinite merit of the Mediator Christ is what God the Father looks upon when he grants to lost and miserable mortals any spiritual benefit whatever in order to eternal salvation. If therefore it shall be established that even the non-elect receive certain benefits of this kind from the merit of Christ, then it will be clear that the death of Christ, at least as to some effects, is not only applicable promiscuously to all human beings, but is in fact applied to certain persons who will not be saved.

Let us therefore come to the proof of the Minor, which alone can come into doubt. First, this very thing — that God deigns to call many even of the non-elect to repentance and faith, and under the condition of faith to eternal life — I ask, is it not to be counted a great benefit? It is certainly so counted by God himself, who calls the preaching of the Gospel the word of life (John 6:68; Acts 5:20); the saving grace of God (Titus 2:11); who says that Christ had to suffer and rise again, that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations (Luke 24:46-47); who finally calls this very announcement of the Gospel a treasure (2 Corinthians 4:7), pronounces the very feet of those who preach the gospel beautiful (Romans 10:15), and threatens its removal with the place of the highest punishment (Matthew 21:43), and decrees that those who have despised and thrust away so great a good are to be punished most severely (Luke 10:12-13; 2 Thessalonians 1:8). All these things show that the Gospel is a supernatural benefit granted even to those who abuse it.

Second, if anyone should stubbornly deny that the announcement of the Gospel itself is a benefit granted by God with respect to the non-elect, yet no one will deny that that illumination of the mind, tasting of the heavenly gift, and some communication of supernatural gifts, of which mention is made in (Hebrews 6), are great and excellent benefits, and that they are conferred in order not to this bodily but to that spiritual life. Yet all these are often given to those who are not of the number of the elect; and they are given through and on account of Christ. For of his fullness we have all received (John 1:16), and to each one grace was given according to the measure of the gift of Christ (Ephesians 4:7). Indeed of supernatural gifts of whatever kind we may rightly say with the Apostle that one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each as he wills (1 Corinthians 12:11). I will also add this: whatever supernatural grace is given through Christ to any human being is given from the merit of Christ; for Christ confers nothing of this kind on human beings which he did not first merit for them by his obedience. So Bernard, Sermon 13 on the Song: Whatever wisdom, whatever virtue you trust yourself to have, ascribe to the Virtue of God, the Wisdom of God — to Christ. The origin of fountains and rivers is the sea; of virtues and sciences, the Lord Jesus Christ. Ambrose more generally: Every gift of the grace of God is in Christ (commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians).

Finally, this at least, on the judgment of all the ancients, proves that the death of Christ is by God’s ordination applicable even to the non-elect: that they expressly taught that in Baptism it is applied to the remission of original sin for any baptized infant. This is an excellent and supernatural effect of the death of Christ, concerning whose application to the non-predestinate there was scarcely any doubt in the ancient Church — not even among those who held absolute predestination most tightly. A very ample witness to this matter is Prosper himself (Response 2 to the Chapters of the Gauls, and Sentence 2 on the same Chapter). To him one may add the African Fathers in their Synodical Letter, and the Council of Valence, Canon 5. By this first argument, therefore, we obtain that the meritorious power of Christ’s death is not to be restricted to the elect alone, but is applicable to others by God’s ordination, and as to certain effects is sometimes in fact applied.

6Whoever, by undergoing death according to God’s ordination, sustained the penalty owed not only to the sins of certain singular persons but to the whole human race — his passion, by virtue of the same ordination, is applicable not only to certain and definite persons but to any individual of the human race. But Christ by dying sustained the penalty owed to the sins of the whole world. Therefore he willed his death to be, as it were, a universal cause of salvation applicable to all. Whoever denies the Major is bound to show why God willed his Son to bear the sins of the human race, if he did not will to institute in his death a cause at least applicable to the human race, even though an efficacious application does not follow in many. We can invent no other causes of this matter than that it pleased the divine goodness and wisdom to require from our Redeemer, and as it were to take into his own hands, a universal lytron applicable to all: (1) that in the application itself the liberty of the divine will, doing of its own what it wills, and a special eudokia toward the elect, might more appear; (2) that toward the non-elect, at least those called in the Church, he might show a specimen of great mercy; (3) that unbelievers might be convicted in their consciences that on Christ’s part a way of freeing them was not wanting, but that they failed themselves, according to Christ’s word (John 5:40): You will not come to me, that you may have life.

Let us now descend to the Minor, in which it is affirmed that Christ sustained the penalty owed to the sins of the human race. So the Scriptures speak (Isaiah 53:6): All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has made the iniquity of us all to meet upon him. So the Fathers speak: The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ is the price of the whole world, from which price those are strangers who either, delighted with captivity, refused to be redeemed, or after redemption returned to the same servitude (Prosper, on the Chapters of the Gauls, sentence on 9). So our Church of England, Article 2: Christ truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, that he might reconcile the Father to us, and might be a sacrifice not only for original guilt but also for all actual sins of human beings. Finally, those who most tightly restrict this death of Christ cannot deny this. The reverend and most learned Pareus, in his judgment on this second Remonstrant article which he sent to the Synod of Dort, has these words: The cause and matter of Christ’s passion was the sense or endurance of the wrath of God stirred up by the sin not of some human beings but of the whole human race, whence is effected the universality of the sin and of the wrath of God against it endured by Christ; but the universality of a reconciliation obtained or restored for all, by no means (Acts of the Synod of Dort, p. 217). The force of the argument is: Whoever willed and ordained that Christ the Mediator should sustain the wrath of God owed to the sins not of certain persons but of the whole human race, that one willed this passion of Christ to be a remedy applicable to the human race — that is, to each and every human being, and not only to certain singular persons — the supreme power and entire liberty of dispensing and applying this infinite merit according to the secret good pleasure of his will being nonetheless left to himself.

Whoever by divine ordination can be called to believe in the Mediator, and who by believing can obtain eternal life — to those the death of Christ is applicable unto salvation by a prior ordination of God. But any wayfarer can be called to believe in the Mediator, and by believing can obtain eternal life according to the evangelical covenant. Therefore the death of Christ is applicable to any wayfarer. The connection of the Major is plain from this: that a serious call to believe presupposes an object prepared in which one may believe; and this very ability to be saved by believing intimates that the saving object — that is, the death or merit of Christ — has been ordained as a remedy applicable to the one to whom such a benefit is promised under the condition of faith. For if someone were called to faith in Christ to whom Christ was not applicable by God’s ordination, faith would be demanded in a false object — indeed in none at all — as regards such a called person. The matter would stand just as if an evangelical preacher should call some demon clothed in human appearance and dwelling among human beings to faith in Christ, and should promise him eternal life if he believed. Such a call would be erroneous on the caller’s part and empty on the called person’s part, because he is called to believe in Christ to whom Christ is not applicable by God’s ordination, and salvation is promised to him under a condition to whom, even if he were supposed to believe, salvation is nonetheless denied for want of a sacrifice and covenant pertaining to him. The matter does not stand so with any wayfarer: therefore it must be confessed that the death of Christ under the conditions of the evangelical covenant is applicable to anyone.

The Major being confirmed, I come to the Minor, which ought to be beyond controversy among all the orthodox. For although God’s providence does not bring it about that the Gospel becomes known to each and every person, and thus that all are called to Christ, yet God himself constituted that the Gospel should be something truly announceable to all, and should be preached to every creature. If one preacher could go through the whole world and meet each and every mortal, it would be lawful for him to offer Christ to any human being, and under the condition of faith to announce and promise salvation to be obtained through Christ. For so the Apostle himself speaks (Romans 3:21-22): But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been manifested, attested by the law and the prophets — the righteousness of God, I say, through faith in Jesus Christ unto all and upon all who believe; for there is no distinction. The most learned Belgian Professors, in the judgment they exhibited to the Synod of Dort, confess this very thing (Acts of the Synod of Dort, p. 88): We confess, they say, that the merit and value of Christ’s death suffice not only to expiate all sins of human beings, even the greatest, but also to save all the posterity of Adam, even if they were far more numerous, provided they embraced it with true faith. But it would not suffice to save all, even if all believed, unless this be posited: that by divine ordination this death of Christ is a constituted remedy applicable to all. Deny that Christ died for some human beings, and I will at once infer that such persons, even if they believed, could not be saved through the death of Christ. What is commonly answered to this argument by some — that God did not command ministers to announce that Christ died for individual human beings whether they believe or not, but for believing and penitent sinners alone, and therefore that from the universality of the call it cannot be demonstrated that the death of Christ is by divine ordination a universal remedy applicable to anyone — seems to me said with too little consideration. For the faith of human beings is not presupposed as a condition that makes Christ to have died for them, but as a condition that makes the death of Christ — already applicable to all by the divine eudokia — in fact applied to individuals and fruitful. The death of Christ was a sacrifice established in the divine acceptation from the beginning of the world and ordained for human beings; nor could it help anyone, if he believed, unless it had been offered for him before he believed. When therefore we announce to someone that the death of Christ can profit him if he believes, we presume that it was destined for him as applicable before he believes.

7If all mortals, as soon as the doctrine of the Gospel concerning Christ the Redeemer sustaining death for the sins of human beings becomes known to them, are bound to render gratitude and obedience to Christ himself, then it is certain that this work of the Redeemer offering himself as a sacrifice to God is to be considered as a benefit applicable promiscuously to all. For there is no cause why we should say that those are bound to gratitude, or to any acts of obedience whatever, by reason of the death of Christ, who are in every way most shut out from that benefit. Yet the Apostle testifies that any human beings whatever can be stirred to obedience by this very argument. For to any human beings whatever it can truly be said, after this mystery of Christ’s death has been made known to them, what is found in (1 Corinthians 6:20): You were bought with a price; glorify God in your body and in your spirit. Likewise also (2 Corinthians 5:15): He died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and rose again.

Unless the death of Christ is understood as a remedy applicable to all, that foundation on which evangelical ministers build exhortations of this kind will always be uncertain and often false. Always uncertain, because it cannot be clear to human beings who the elect are. Often false, whenever it is applied to the non-elect, who on this title of redemption are not bound to live to Christ unless it be presupposed that that sacrifice offered by Christ for the redemption of the world is applicable to them. Indeed Christ himself could not by right of his death claim for himself a certain supreme lordship over each and every person, unless his death, according to God’s ordination, were a merit applicable to all unto salvation. Since therefore Christ died and lived again for this, that he might be Lord both of the living and of the dead (Romans 14:9), we ought, at least as to the right and power of saving application, to extend his death to all — although the Spirit of Christ (who breathes where he wills) gives to human beings the faculty and will to apply, and even the very fruit of the death applied, by a decree of special mercy.

8That work which truly and by merit, as soon as it is understood to have been transacted between God the Father and the Son, gives Christ the name Redeemer of the world and Savior of the world, must be acknowledged as a universal cause of salvation, or a universal remedy applicable to the whole human race. But such was the work of Christ’s obedience unto the death of the cross. Therefore, etc. The Major is confirmed from this: that on the side of the price itself paid, Christ would be only a particular Redeemer and Savior if the price paid were not, by God’s ordination, applicable to any individuals of the human race whatever. We therefore who grant to Christ the name and title of Redeemer and Savior of the world must at the same time grant this: that this redemption, from which he is so named, is the payment of the price owed for the liberation of the human race — a payment which so far avails with God that he can require no other satisfaction for reconciling any human being to himself; and which so far profits us all that any sinner can be freed, provided he believes in this Redeemer and (as must always be done with remedies) applies this saving medicine to himself by faith. In this sense we truly say that Christ died for all human beings, and that this death of Christ, or the redemption acquired by his death, is a merit applicable to each and every human being — which can in no way be affirmed of the fallen angels. Christ Jesus is therefore Redeemer and Savior of all human beings causally, as the Schools speak: that is, by instituting and supplying a cause sufficient and ordained and accepted by God for expiating the sins of whoever will use this remedy. This suffices to found the title of universal Savior and Redeemer, even though the will to believe is not given to all.

We now come to the Minor, which is so clear that it does not need laborious proof. The Scriptures, looking to this death of Christ applicable to all, call him the Savior of the world (John 4:42): This is truly the Christ, the Savior of the world. They call the death of Christ itself a lytron given for the redemption of all (1 Timothy 2:6), a propitiation for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2). The Catholic Church also in her public prayers has always named Christ the Redeemer of the world. But lest anyone twist appellations of this kind into the sense that Christ would be called Redeemer of the world because he efficaciously redeems the elect scattered through the whole world, I add at the end that both the Fathers and modern writers have asserted Christ to be Redeemer of the world in the sense we have set down — namely, that his death is a lytron applicable by God’s ordination to each and every human being. Here belong those words of Prosper, answering Vincent’s objection, Response 1: On account of the one nature of all and the one cause of all truly assumed by our Lord, all are rightly said to be redeemed, and yet not all have been delivered from captivity, etc. And a little later: The cup of immortality compounded of our infirmity and the divine power has indeed in itself what would profit all; but if it is not drunk, it does not heal. The same is the aim of those words of Musculus already cited by us (Common Places, p. 151): We know that not all become partakers of this redemption; yet the perdition of those who are not saved by no means hinders its being called a universal redemption. For that reprobate human beings do not receive it is neither a defect of the grace of God, nor is it just that on account of the sons of perdition it should lose the glory and title of a universal redemption, since it is prepared for all and all are called to it. From all of which it is clear that Christ is rightly called Redeemer and Savior of the world, because he brought to the whole human race a remedy applicable unto procuring the salvation of individuals.

9If it was the counsel and will of God that Christ by dying should deliver into his hands a lytron most absolute, most perfect, and most sufficient, not only for freeing those who by God’s benefit believe and so are saved as to the event, but also for those who by their own fault remain unbelieving and so are damned as to the event, then it must be confessed that this death of Christ is a remedy applicable to all by the nature of the thing and by God’s ordination. And such was God’s counsel, such his will — which is proved from the divine promises that indicate his will to us. For God promised salvation under the condition of faith and repentance even to those who will never perform these conditions. So to Cain himself, if he repent, remission is promised (Genesis 4:7). Which salvation, or remission of sins, promised under condition to such a person, clearly argues that a cause of salvation was prepared for that same person and is applicable under the said condition. The same is proved from this: that God so ordered his counsel in the work of redemption that no mortal can truly complain that he perished for want of an expiatory sacrifice. Yet he to whom the death of Christ is not a remedy applicable unto salvation by God’s will can no less truly affirm that a sacrifice was wanting to him than can the evil angels, for whom the death of Christ is ordained under no condition. And this is that counsel which the Pharisees are said to have despised (Luke 7:30).

If according to the order and nature of the things themselves, and of our consideration, the death and merit of Christ must be posited as something first ordained and destined by God for the good of the human race before faith is understood to be destined for anyone, then it is necessary to think of it as a cause of salvation applicable to all before it is stated as applied, or to be applied infallibly, to this one and that. The reason of the consequence is this: that the death or merit of Christ is understood as applied or to be applied to no one until faith is conceived as granted or to be granted to him; and on the contrary, the death of Christ is considered applicable to anyone before faith is conceived as denied or to be denied to him forever. I now add the Minor: namely, that the death of Christ, or his infinite merit, must be posited as something first established and destined for human beings before faith is destined for these or those singular persons. This is plain, first, because the death or merit of Christ is the object of faith: to what end would he destine to give faith to Peter or to Paul unless he had first ordained a remedy of salvation applicable to anyone through the medium of faith? Further, faith, like all other saving gifts, is conferred on human beings on account of Christ and from the merit of Christ; therefore in the order of the divine decrees the death of Christ precedes the faith of every Christian. Here belong those words of the Palatine theologians in the judgment they exhibited at Dort (Acts of the Synod of Dort, p. 88): The faith of the elect does not precede but follows the death of Christ, because that death is the cause of the faith by which the elect are given on account of Christ, and its object, which faith itself looks upon and embraces. Finally, for all human beings lost in the first Adam, a obtainable salvation is decreed in the death of the second Adam before it is decreed to whom it is to be given efficaciously and infallibly, and to whom it is not to be given. It must therefore be confessed that the Mediator Jesus Christ, with his death and the infinite treasury of his merits, is by God’s ordination applicable to the whole human race unto salvation, although there intervene the freest, most just, and most hidden good pleasure of God, according to which he decrees that faith (by whose medium application is made) is to be given infallibly to certain persons and by no means to others. But why, in dispensing the treasury of Christ’s merits — sufficient and applicable to each and every person — he deals so unequally with equals, we ought not to ask, because we cannot know, but with the Apostle to rest in the secret will of God, who has mercy on whom he wills, and whom he wills he hardens (Romans 9:18); to whom no one has first given, that he should be bound to repay him as a debt (Romans 11:35).

10The last reason is drawn from a comparison of the twofold covenant, and according to it of the twofold ordination of human beings unto salvation. As therefore in the covenant of nature, which is understood as made with Adam in the very creation, salvation was obtainable for Adam and all his posterity under the condition of obedience to be rendered to the law of nature and to the express command of God, so in the covenant of grace, which was sanctioned in the blood of the Mediator, salvation is understood as obtainable for all human beings also under the condition published in the Gospel — namely, faith in this Mediator who satisfied for the sins of the human race. Further, as in the first covenant God, who ordained salvation as obtainable for Adam and his posterity, nevertheless did not predestine that either Adam himself or any of his posterity should in fact be saved through that covenant, so God, who in the second covenant ordained salvation as obtainable for all under the condition of faith, nevertheless did not predestine to give this faith to each and every person who would infallibly obtain salvation.

Yet lest the blood of the Son of God should flow away, and by the fault of human choice the same should happen in the second covenant that had happened in the first — namely, that no one should enjoy its benefit — God stirred within himself a higher and more secret counsel, and decreed out of mere and special mercy to give to some that they both can and will fulfill the aforesaid condition of faith, indeed that they in fact fulfill it infallibly. Now just as he would be injurious to God who should deny that salvation was ordained by God as obtainable for Adam and his posterity under the covenant of nature, even though according to that covenant no one was made partaker of salvation, so he is more injurious to Christ who denies that his death was ordained by God as a remedy of salvation applicable to all under the condition of the new covenant, even though many do not obtain salvation from it. God himself gave to the world this remedy applicable to each and every person: let the world grant God the liberty of applying it or not applying it, as shall seem good to his wisdom, mercy, and justice. Those who think of the death of Christ in this way do not take out of the midst that common philanthropy of God which Scripture testifies; and yet they at the same time maintain that as many as are saved by the merit of Christ’s death have been saved by special and unmerited grace, and that as many as are not saved have perished by their own unbelief or at least by their own fault. It is superfluous to heap up more reasons for corroborating our opinion. What is customarily objected on the contrary side let us now hear.

11Before we dissolve those things which can be urged on the contrary side, this is to be premised: we are by no means pleading the cause of those who maintain that Christ by his death obtained for all and each human being the remission of sins, reconciliation with God, and a state of salvation. So Borreus seems to think in Arminius, who, resting on this foundation, asserts that all infants of all nations dying without actual sins are saved, because God took the whole human race into the grace of reconciliation. He therefore opines that by the very sacrifice of Christ's death the whole human race is placed in a state of salvation, from which if they do not fall away they will without doubt obtain salvation. Many ascribe the same error to Huber and Puccius. But our defense is this: not indeed that by this death of Christ salvation has in fact been obtained for all and each, or that all and each have by its benefit been received into grace and set in such a state that if they persevered they would possess eternal life; but that this death of Christ is, by the decree of the Divine will, a remedy applicable to the whole human race, or to any individual of the human race, unto salvation — although in procuring and effecting the application itself God specially has mercy on some and not on others. You have received this opinion established by several arguments: now let us vindicate it from the objections which can be brought on the contrary side.

12Obj. 1. First, then, it can be objected that at the time when Christ underwent death many had already been adjudged to Gehenna and were being tormented in hell; and from hell there is no redemption. How then can we maintain that Christ's death was ever in any way applicable to these damned human beings? Moved by this argument some have held that that innumerable multitude of the impious who lived from the beginning of the world until Christ's coming, and who for their impiety were cast into hell, before Christ's sacrifice offered on the cross had no more right to the benefit of redemption than the Devils themselves. So the Lyons Fathers speak in a certain writing which stands in Tom. 9 of the Bibliotheca Patrum: Just as the Lord Jesus Christ is in no way to be said to have suffered for the impious and damned angels, so far be it that he be believed to have suffered all things for those impious and damned human beings.

Sol. But I reply: when we affirm that Christ's death, by God's ordination and by the nature of the thing, is a remedy applicable to any human being, we are not looking only at the external passion of Christ endured at a fixed moment of time, but at the eternal virtue of Christ's death, salutary to human beings in every age. For Christ, as to God's acceptance, was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world; and the efficacy of this propitiatory sacrifice could extend itself as much to those who lived before Christ suffered as to us who live after his passion. If therefore they mean only this — that by Christ's temporal death those could not be relieved who before his death had by an irrevocable decree been adjudged to infernal punishments — we confess the same; because they have already ceased to be wayfarers, that is, capable of repentance and faith. But if they wish to contend further that the eternal virtue of Christ's death was not applicable to such while they lived, because Christ's passion looked no more to them than to the impious and damned angels, that we utterly deny. For of Cain, of Esau, indeed of any human being who died before Christ suffered, it can truly be said that by the virtue of the sacrifice to be offered through the Messiah he could have been absolved from his sins and saved, if he had believed in the same — which cannot likewise be said of the damned angels; because the universal covenant of salvation under the condition of faith embraces the whole human race and does not embrace the fallen angels. It is therefore worthy of observation that God willed Christ's death, whether applied or under whatever condition applicable, for none of the fallen angels — toward these, therefore, God held himself equally and alike; but not equally toward human beings. For as to these, although he established and declared that the death of his Son under the condition of faith is applicable to any, yet he did not decree by the benefit of special mercy to render it equally applied to any. We do not therefore deny what is manifest — the difference between Demons and Human beings, namely that by God's ordination Christ's death is something ordained and applicable to human beings, but neither ordained nor applicable to demons — although after this life, for human beings constituted in hell, no further possibility of application remains. For this consequence is vicious: Christ's death was not applicable to the damned after their damnation; therefore it was never and in no way applicable to them.

13Obj. 2. Those who set Christ's death, by God's ordination, as applicable to all and each, by the same stroke maintain that God provided for many human beings a remedy which he foresaw would never profit them. For God knew that none of the reprobate would be healed by this medicine of Christ's blood and freed from eternal death; to what end, then, would he ordain so precious a remedy as applicable even to those to whom it was most certain it would never be applied?

Sol. I do not deny that from our opinion it rightly follows that this remedy, even with God himself so ordaining and establishing it, is applicable to innumerable human beings to whom in fact it will never be applied. I deny, therefore, that anything false or inconvenient can, this being granted, be deduced from it. Indeed it is manifest that many benefits were provided by God for angels and human beings — I add also, and sometimes conferred, and duly ordained to a certain end — which God meanwhile knew would never profit them, nor avail to produce such an end. Those excellent gifts which were conferred on the apostate angels in their first creation were duly ordained by God to produce firm and constant obedience in them and to procure their beatitude; yet God knew they would be rebels and would never employ these gifts for the attainment of that good to which they were destined. The same can be said of Adam while still intact, whom God furnished with knowledge and holiness and fortified with his warnings abundantly sufficient to keep him in his duty; knowing meanwhile that all these things, which were applicable to promoting his obedience and happiness, would never be applied. It is therefore not alien to Divine wisdom to establish and ordain means applicable to some end, although he understands that, some obstacle intervening which he himself has not decreed to remove, the application itself will be hindered. Here that of Aquinas can be brought, in the disputed questions on Predestination, where he sets a difference between providence commonly taken and predestination, which is a special part of providence: Providence, he says, regards only the order unto the end; predestination regards the issue or event of the order. Things ordained to an end by that more common providence do not always attain the end; but those ordained by singular predestination always attain it. As therefore God, by that wider providence, is understood to have provided many bodily remedies applicable to driving away any bodily diseases whatever from any persons whatever, which nevertheless he has not decreed to be infallibly applied to these or those singular persons; so also we affirm that God, from that philanthropy and more common providence, provided and ordained the blood of his Son as a remedy applicable to expiating the sins of any human beings whatever, although by singular predestination he has not decreed to render it applied to all and each. But to what end is it ordained as applicable to all, which is not intended to be infallibly applied to all? I answer: that from this the Divine liberty, mercy, and justice may shine more clearly, while that remedy which by God's ordination is applicable to any unto salvation is nevertheless applied only to certain human beings, God specially having mercy on them, and is not applied to others, God permitting it, and their own malice deserving it.

14Obj. 3. If Christ's death, God so ordaining, is a remedy applicable to all unto salvation, then God would procure that this death of Christ be announced to all, lest anyone be able to plead that he perished by mere ignorance of so efficacious a remedy. But experience teaches that this remedy has not been revealed, not only to many singular human beings, but even to many nations, through several ages: it has therefore not been constituted by God as a remedy applicable to all and each, which has lain hidden from so many human beings, God himself so disposing the matter.

Sol. As to the minor, we gladly concede it — which both the sacred Scriptures testify and the Fathers acknowledge to be most true. (Acts 14:16) shows Paul that God in past generations suffered all nations to walk in their own ways, without any knowledge of Christ. And for this cause (Colossians 1:26–27): he calls Christ's Gospel a mystery which was hidden from ages and generations, but now has been manifested to the saints, to whom God willed to make known the riches, etc. Hence that of Prosper, On Free Choice: It is not remote from common inspection through how many ages how innumerable thousands of human beings, dismissed to their errors and impieties, have perished without any knowledge of the true God. And On the Calling of the Gentiles, book 2, chapter 7: In the farthest parts of the world there are some nations to whom the grace of the Savior has not yet shone. The Minor therefore being conceded, we say the consequence of the Major is invalid. For God is not bound to procure the application of that remedy to all and each which he willed to be applicable to all and each — which is clear both in bodily and in spiritual remedies. Although therefore Christ's death, by God's ordination and by the nature of the thing, is such a remedy as can both be announced and be applied to all and each individual of the human race unto remission of sins, yet God is bound by no promise to procure that it be announced and in fact applied to all and each. God willed the death of his Son to be a treasure as it were deposited in his hands, from which he can dispense to the whole human race whatever looks to obtaining either pardon, or grace, or glory; but he also willed that the actual communication of this treasure remain in his freest power, and from it to give or not to give to human beings according to the good pleasure of his will. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with my own? (Matthew 20:15). We say therefore that Christ's death is by God's ordination applicable to all, yet that God is not obliged to procure for anyone its actual application or even its announcement.

15Obj. 4. If Christ's death is to be considered as a remedy or lytron applicable to any human being by God's ordination, then Christ's resurrection, intercession, and mediation will likewise look to all in the same way. But Christ was not raised for all, does not intercede for all, is not the Mediator of all: therefore neither is his death to be extended to all. That these must never be torn apart is proved from (Romans 8:34), where all are joined together: It is Christ who died, yes rather who rose again, who is also at the right hand of the Father, making intercession for us. And (Romans 4:25): the Apostle teaches that for whose offenses Christ died, for their justification he was also raised: but he was not raised for all; therefore neither did he die for all.

Sol. If the reason of our defense is rightly weighed, it will easily appear that all this brings no detriment to our cause. For we do not maintain that Christ's death is, by God's ordination, so applied to all and each human being that on account of this propitiatory sacrifice the whole are immediately set back into a state of grace and salvation; nor do we defend that, from God's special intention and the decree of predestination, this death of Christ is to be applied infallibly to all and each; but that this death, God so ordaining and revealing it in his word, is that lytron by which the sins of any human beings whatsoever can be expiated, the conditions required in the Gospel being fulfilled. And hence it is that the Gospel preacher, whomever he meets under whatever sky, can confidently announce to him salvation obtainable in the death of the Son of God, if he believes. This can be promised to none of the fallen angels. Whence it is clear that this conditional promise of salvation in Christ's death, which can be announced to any human being, is founded in some ordination of the Divine will which regards human beings universally and individually, and does not regard angels. Let the adversaries say what this ordination is, if it is not that which we affirm — of Christ's death as applicable to the human race under the Gospel conditions. These things being so established, we come nearer to the solution of the said objection; and we affirm that Christ's resurrection, intercession, and mediation pertain to all and each by the same right as the death itself, or the oblation accomplished on the cross. For as we can truly announce to any human being that his sins are, by God's ordination, expiable by Christ's death, and will be expiated if only he believes in Christ; so also we can truly announce that the same Christ has been raised that he may justify that believer, exalted to the right hand of God that by his mediation and merits he may preserve that believer in grace with God, and at length lead him to glory. We do not therefore tear apart what God has joined, but teach that Christ's death, resurrection, and intercession are joined by an indissoluble bond — yet in different ways. If we look to the universal human race, that is, to all and each human being, then we say that not only the death but also the resurrection and intercession of Christ look to them as to the possibility of enjoying these benefits, the condition of faith being presupposed: if we look to the elect, we affirm that all these look to them as to the infallibility of enjoying them, from this condition of faith destined for them and to be given them in time. Although therefore in a certain special respect Christ's death and resurrection, with the vast treasure of his merits, are restricted to the elect alone (of which we shall treat later), yet it is not to be denied that the death and merits of Christ, who soundly assumed the nature of all and one cause of all, are of such a kind as can be announced, offered, and applied by faith to all and each who share human nature. Christ himself indicated this clearly enough in (John 3:17–18) in these words: God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. He that believes on him is not condemned: he that believes not is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. Those therefore who never believe or will believe nonetheless had life obtainable in the death and merits of Christ by God's ordination, if they had believed.

16Obj. 5. If Christ's death is a benefit applicable to all and each by God's ordination, then it must be said that Christ satisfied for the sins of the whole human race. But this cannot be defended without meantime undermining Divine justice: for the reason of justice does not suffer the same sin to be punished twice. Grant then that Christ's death is the lytron by which satisfaction was made to God for the sins of the human race — how can these human beings still be summoned by God's justice for the same sins and tormented with eternal punishments?

Sol. As to the Major, we judge its consequence can safely be conceded. For that Christ satisfied for the sins of the human race, or of all human beings, the orthodox Fathers boldly assert. So Eusebius, Demonstration of the Gospel, book 1, in the preface: It was fitting that the Lamb of God offer himself a victim for the remaining kindred lambs and for the whole human race. So Nazianzen: Christ is the sacrifice of the whole world, an expiation never to die, Oration 2 on Easter. So finally (to omit the rest) Cyril, Catechesis 13. The same manner of speaking our Anglican Church everywhere uses in the Articles of Religion, Articles 15 and 31, and elsewhere. Indeed even those who most strive to restrict this death of Christ speak thus. We cited earlier the testimony of the reverend Pareus, Heidelberg theologian, who freely confesses in the Judgment exhibited to the Synod of Dort that the cause and matter of Christ's passion was the sense or endurance of the wrath of God, stirred up by the sin not of some human beings but of the universal human race. A little later: the universality of sin and of the wrath of God against it, endured by Christ, is affirmed. Nor should this seem dissonant, since this universal redemption, satisfaction, or expiation accomplished by Christ's death imports nothing else than that a universal cause of salvation has been established and granted to the human race by Divine ordination, by whose benefit all and each can enjoy, through the faith required by the Gospel. We therefore call Christ the Redeemer of the world, and teach that he satisfied for the sins not of some human beings but of the whole world — not because, this price being paid for the sins of this race, all and each are immediately to be freed from captivity and death, but because by the virtue of this price paid all and each can and ought to be freed from death, and in fact are to be freed, according to the tenor of the Gospel pact, that is, if they repent and believe in this Redeemer. As to what is further urged — that it is against justice to accept satisfaction or a lytron for the sins of the universal human race, and yet not free all from the punishments of their sins, but adjudge many to eternal torments notwithstanding this satisfaction — to this I answer: This would indeed be most iniquitous if we had paid this price to God from our own, or if our Surety Jesus Christ had so offered his blood to God as a satisfactory price for the redemption of the human race that, no other condition intervening, all human beings would by the very fact of the oblation be immediately absolved, or if God himself had covenanted with the dying Christ that he willed to pour faith into all and each and to give all else that looks to the infallible application of this sacrifice offered for the human race. But since God himself arranged that this price from his own be paid to himself, it was in his power to attach conditions — which being fulfilled, this death would be fruitful to any human being; not being fulfilled, it would help no human being at all. No injury therefore is done to those human beings who are punished by God after the lytron for the sins of the human race has been accepted, because they themselves exhibited nothing to God in satisfaction for their sins, nor fulfilled that condition without which God was unwilling that this satisfactory price should turn to the good of any singular person. Further, neither should this be judged injurious to Christ the Mediator: for he so willed to die for all, and to number the price of redemption to the Father for all, that meanwhile he willed not all and each in any way whatever, but all and each as soon as they believed in him, to be absolved from the guilt of their sins. Finally Christ, offering himself in sacrifice to God the Father for expiating the world's sins, yet submitted to the Father's good pleasure the free distribution and application of his merits, and no pact was entered between Father and Son by which God is bound to effect that this death of Christ, which by God's ordination is applicable to all under the condition of faith, become applied to all through the gift of faith. We must not therefore deny that Christ's oblation once made is a perfect satisfaction for the sins not of some human beings only but of all — yet so that he who is said simply to have died for all conditionally promises from his death remission of sins and salvation, and will perform it, only to believers. Let us illustrate all this by a likeness: Think of countless human beings cast into prison by some King for an enormous debt, or condemned to death for the crime of high treason; and the King himself procuring that his son wipe out this whole debt to the last farthing, or put himself as guilty for those traitors and endure the punishments owed by all — yet with this law promulgated by both: that none is to be absolved or freed except those alone who will acknowledge this King's Son as their lawful Lord and serve him. These things being so established, I ask: if those are not freed who persist disobedient and rebellious against the King's son, is the crime of injustice incurred because after this lytron paid their debts are nonetheless exacted from many, or after the punishments endured by the son vengeance is nevertheless taken on these rebels? By no means: because the payment of a just price and the enduring of due punishments was indeed ordained to obtain remission for anyone under the condition of obedience, and not otherwise. I will not add more: it will be easy to accommodate all this to our present purpose.

17Obj. 6. No middle can be found or devised between the sufficiency of the price and its real application. Those therefore who deny that a real application of Christ's death has been made to all ought not to proceed further than to posit the sufficiency of this price for all: above which whoever wishes to posit anything is necessarily compelled to concede a real application of the same to all. But now those who constitute this death of Christ as applicable to all unto salvation by God's ordination seem to give some middle between sufficient value and actual efficacy. But of what sort, pray, will that be? or where will it be found? It cannot be some efficiency looking indifferently to all and each human being and caused in them by Christ's death; because such an effect cannot be assigned. Nor can we, by virtue of Christ's death, place in God himself either some impetration of remission of sins extended to all, or an intention of application. It remains therefore that beyond the sufficiency of the price we posit nothing that looks to all as overflowing from Christ's death.

Sol. That this objection may be met, it must first be seen what sufficiency they understand who so reason, and meanwhile retain this distinction of the Scholastics — that Christ died sufficiently for all, efficaciously for the elect. They therefore understand Christ to have died sufficiently for all thus: Christ's death is sufficient to redeem all, but he was unwilling to die for all; Christ's death is in itself and in its intrinsic value a sufficient lytron for all, but it was not paid for all. But it never entered the Scholastics' mind to defend this sufficiency only hypothetically and absolutely to deny that Christ died for all. Nor can it easily be explained how without open contradiction it could be affirmed that Christ died or was offered sufficiently for all, and meanwhile be denied that he willed to die or be offered for many at all. As to those therefore who admit only such a hypothetical oblation and sufficiency in Christ's death, if it be referred to all, I answer that a middle can and ought to be assigned between that bare sufficiency of the price and its real application. For God's ordination revealed in the Gospel, according to which this death of Christ is proposed as to be received by any who repent and believe, proves that some middle has been constituted between that sufficiency and actual application. For in this ordination of God, according to which Christ's death is established and proposed as a cause of salvation applicable by faith to any wayfarer, there is contained less than in real application, yet there is contained something fuller than in the mere and bare sufficiency of the thing considered in itself, this conditional ordination looking to any sharer in human nature being excluded. This therefore is that very middle which the adversaries denied could be assigned; but they still urge and ask what that is in which this quasi-middle is produced, which surpasses bare sufficiency and yet does not reach real application. I answer: Though there is not some act looking indifferently to all and each, caused from Christ's death, yet there is a title to eternal life, looking indifferently to all and each under the condition of faith, founded in Christ's death; though there is not in God an impetration of remission, or an intention of application, extended to all and each according to the infallible order of predestination, yet there is in God a certain obligation to remission, and a will to remit sins and to confer life, extended to all and each according to the tenor of the Gospel promise. But I now forbear more, because when we come to the next thesis we shall treat of this very matter more copiously by design.

18Obj. 7. The Father's will, the Son's oblation, and the Holy Spirit's saving operation are equally wide, and regard the same persons. But the Father's will is to save the elect alone; and the Spirit, by infusing faith and giving perseverance, in fact saves the elect alone: therefore Christ's death or oblation is not to be extended except to the elect alone, and for that reason ought not to be considered as a remedy applicable to all and each unto salvation by God's ordination.

Sol. If the Major proposition is understood of the will of the predestinating God, which is always joined with infallibility of event, and of that special operation of the sanctifying Spirit which serves the execution of this decree, I say it is not absolutely true: for Christ's death or oblation somehow regards certain persons whom predestination does not embrace. Predestination is God's secret decree, by which he determined with himself from eternity to whom from the infinite merit of Christ's death he wills to give efficacious grace and eternal life infallibly; but Christ's oblation on the cross is a common benefit granted to the human race, by whose virtue anyone, provided he embraces it with true faith, can claim eternal life for himself according to God's will revealed in the Gospel. So Christ himself speaks in (John 3:14–15): As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. Although therefore God's predestination and the efficacious calling that depends on it embrace no non-elect person, yet as Christ's oblation in the Gospel, so also Christ's oblation on the cross, is wider, and is as applicable to any human being as it is announcible, and will become salvific to anyone provided he believes — God's secret will meanwhile being left to him, according to which he has determined mercifully to cause some to believe, to permit others to their innate hardness, and in them not to cause that they believe. Finally I add also this: that there was in Christ himself a will according to which he willed his death to look to all and each, and also one according to which he willed the same to pertain to the elect alone. He willed it to look to all Adam's posterity to be saved, and in fact to save all, provided they embraced it with true faith; he willed it so to pertain to the elect alone that from its merit all things that look to obtaining salvation should be infallibly given them. And in this sense we confess that Christ's oblation is equally wide with God's predestination — of which more in its place.

19Obj. 8. If Christ's death is set as applicable to all and each by God's ordination, then every distinction of elect and non-elect is removed, and the doctrine of predestination is utterly overturned: for if Christ is said to have died for all in any sense, what prevents our pronouncing all and each human beings elect by God in the same sense?

Sol. These things proceed from ignorance of the true reason of election or predestination. For it is not any ordination to salvation through media of whatever sort that puts a human being in the number of the elect or predestined, but an ordination through such media as God both knows and has decreed will infallibly produce the effect of salvation in the elect person. Hence that definition of predestination in Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance, chapter 14: It is the foreknowledge and preparation of God's benefits, by which whoever are liberated are most certainly liberated. Hence also that Apostolic chain in (Romans 8:29–30), in which predestination is coupled by an inseparable bond with final glorification: Whom he predestined, them he also glorified. Although therefore we confess that Christ's death under some respect has been ordained by God as a common remedy of the human race, and will profit all under this Gospel condition if they have believed; yet it does not follow from this that all and each are promiscuously elect, because God has not decreed to give to all and each that grace that they may believe, and by believing draw life infallibly from this death of Christ. Indeed this also can be added: even if we grant not only that Christ died for all, but also that on account of this death of Christ sufficient grace has been prepared and given by God to all and each (which nevertheless we do not hold), still no one would rightly infer from these concessions that all human beings are promiscuously elect, or that there is no distinction between the elect and the passed-by. The reason is ready at hand: because no however sufficient ordination of media to procure a human being's salvation argues that he is predestined, unless there has also accrued this — that there be indeed an infallible order of special providence establishing and directing the ordained media to the most certain and unfrustrable attainment of the end. This can be illustrated by the example of Angels and of Human beings considered in the state of intact nature. All and each angels were created instructed with sufficient grace, and thence sufficiently ordained to obtaining beatitude: yet it is not thereby proved either that there was no election among the angels, or that all were indiscriminately elect. So Adam himself in his creation, and in him all his posterity, are understood to have been given sufficient grace and duly instructed for obtaining eternal life: yet it will not follow from this that all human beings were elect, or that no predestination is given. For it is not any ordination whatever to the attainment of eternal life that immediately posits a human being elect or denies a non-elect, but (as has been said) an infallible ordination. To return therefore to what is in hand: from Christ's death ordained for all and each human being as a propitiatory sacrifice, and applicable by faith to obtaining remission and salvation, it does not follow that election and preterition are removed, because, this common ordination being posited and revealed in the Gospel, there is besides a certain secret ordination according to which the aforesaid death of Christ is decreed to be applied infallibly to some, of whom God wills specially to have mercy, and not so to be applied to others, of whom he does not will to have mercy in that way. And this abundantly suffices to defend the doctrine of predestination and reprobation, though we extend Christ's death to all in the aforesaid sense.

20Obj. 9. Some dispute, by an argument drawn from parity, as they think, in this way: It is as far from the truth that Christ by God's ordination died for some who are not saved, as that some are saved for whom by God's ordination he did not die; But this is absurd to say: Therefore that also.

Sol. I deny that the reason is equal on both sides. For (what is most received in the School of Theologians) Good does not arise except from complete causes, evil from any defect whatever. Human salvation, therefore, which is the greatest good, is not produced except by the full concurrence of all causes: but the loss of salvation, which is an evil, once one or another cause ordained to a human being's salvation is in place, can nevertheless occur from the defect of any. Although therefore it is impossible that some human beings be saved for whom Christ did not die, because Christ's death is one of those ordained causes which work human salvation; yet it is not impossible that some for whom he did die fall away from salvation, because it was not established by God that this death of Christ alone by the very fact of offering should render God propitious to all and save all, but that it should be a propitiation through faith in his blood, for the declaring of his righteousness through the remission of sins (Romans 3:25), and so upon all and over all who believe: for there is no distinction, as is had in verse 22. If further someone presses, Why is Christ's death defended as given to all human beings as a remedy, but faith given or prepared for all is not defended? I answer, Because the Scriptures clearly teach that Christ by dying obtained for all and each human being this grace, that under the condition of faith they can now hope for and obtain remission of sins and salvation; but this conditional grace could not be offered to all, nor would it look in any way to all, unless this death of Christ belonged to all human beings by God's own ordination: Now on the other side we do not defend faith as destined or given to all, because the same sacred Scripture which proposes Christ's death as a benefit granted to all, and applicable to anyone through faith, does not make this faith a benefit promised or given to all, but derived from the peculiar decree of election. Add to these that the Mediator himself, who offered himself to God as a sacrifice for expiating the world's sins, obtained from God that all and each who would believe in him should be absolved from sins, and thus far willed to pay this lytron for all: but he did not apply to all the merit of his death, nor obtain from God that all should infallibly follow faith and salvation. And here the secret of election opens, which ought not to overturn or weaken the universality of the offering and the truth of the Gospel promise.

21Obj. 10. If Christ's death is to be conceived by us as a remedy applicable to all human beings, then the sacred Scriptures would not restrict the very giving of the Son to believers alone: But they claim for the faithful alone not only the fruit or real application, but the very giving of the Son. (John 3:16): So God loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. What is given to human beings under a condition, that condition being removed, is understood as given to no one. Since therefore this condition of believing is fulfilled by the elect alone, it follows that we should say Christ was offered for them alone: And accordingly this offering, or Christ's death, is not by God's ordination a remedy or lytron applicable to all and each human being.

Sol. We can consider a twofold Giving or offering of Christ. The prior is that by which he is understood as Given or offered to God the Father on the altar of the cross for taking away the world's sins: of which the Apostle, (1 Timothy 2:6): There is one God; one Mediator of God and human beings, the human being Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom-price of redemption for all, namely to God his Father, as is more clearly expressed in (Ephesians 5:2): He delivered himself for us an offering and sacrifice to God, etc. This offering is the foundation of a certain later offering, by which he is offered to human beings in the Gospel, that being grasped by faith he may bestow eternal life on them from the merit of this sacrifice; Of this offering the same Apostle speaks, We are justified freely through the redemption made in Jesus Christ: Whom God set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, etc. If we look to the prior offering, I deny that Christ offered himself as a victim or gave himself as a lytron to God the Father for expiating the world's sins under the condition of human faith, as if under this formula, I offer myself to you as a victim for the sins of the human race, provided he has believed in Me. But he offered himself to God the Father simply, not conditionally. And this is proved from the fact that the Father himself, according to whose will the Son offered himself in sacrifice, did not establish with himself to give a Redeemer to the world under this hypothesis, If the world should believe; but God gave his Son to the world, and the Son gave himself to the Father as a lytron for taking away the world's sins, freely and absolutely. A condition indeed is annexed in Gospel preaching, not to the giving itself, but to the eternal life that will follow from the fruitful application of the thing given. As for the later offering, therefore, by which Christ offered to God for human beings is now offered to human beings themselves in the Gospel, I deny also that a hypothetical and conditional offering or giving of Christ is to be thought even from this Gospel preaching. For the Savior did not say in the place alleged above, So God loved the world that he gave the Son for it if it should believe: but after he had pronounced him given absolutely to all from God's love of humankind, he showed that he would not nevertheless profit all unto eternal life absolutely and simply, but conditionally, namely all, if they have believed, or all who have believed. We too, if ever we should preach the Gospel to unbelievers, say Indians or Americans, would not set about instructing them thus, Christ the Son of God died for some of you who are going to believe in him, for others not at all; but, Christ died for taking away the sins of the whole world, and gave himself a lytron to God the Father, yet so that neither Christ who offered himself a redemption-price for all, nor God the Father to whom he was offered, wills any of you to be freed from your sins before you believe in God, and in him whom he sent, Jesus Christ. As for what is urged last, That what is understood as given or promised under the condition of faith, that condition not being performed, is supposed given or promised to no one; and therefore Christ is truly affirmed given to the elect alone, who perform the condition; to this I answer, Nowhere in the Scriptures do we read that Christ, or Christ's death or sacrifice, was given or promised to the human race under a condition, although salvation or eternal life is everywhere promised to be given under the condition of faith. Although this too can be added, That even a thing promised under a condition somehow looked to those who never fulfill the condition, namely as to the right of claiming the promised benefit if they had fulfilled it. Which Christ himself seems to hint at in (John 3:18), Where he teaches that unbelievers are condemned, because they did not believe in the name of the only-begotten Son of God. They therefore had the death of the Son of God applicable to themselves even who did not believe, although they did not have it applied, because they did not believe. And for this reason the elect alone find life in Christ's death, because by God pitying them they alone believe.

22Obj. 11. Christ's death is not applicable to those for whom he did not die or was not offered: But there are countless human beings for whom he did not die or was not offered, namely all those who were not enrolled in the register of the elect before the foundations of the world were laid. From this they try to confirm the Minor, because the Apostle expressly asserts that God wills to grant all things to those for whom the Son died, (Romans 8:32): He who did not spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how will he not also with him freely give us all things? But he does not freely give all things to all: Therefore Christ did not die for all: Therefore his death is not applicable to all.

Sol. I gladly grant that Christ's death can in no true sense be said applicable to those for whom God in no way willed him to die. For Christ's death is not a remedy applicable to expiating anyone's sins except by God's ordination and acceptance. And for this reason, although the lytron paid by Christ to God the Father is in itself of sufficient and superabundant value for redeeming the sins not only of human beings but of fallen angels, yet because of the defect of ordination and acceptance as to the angels, we truly deny that Christ ought to be said to have died for them in any way. The same would have to be held of those human beings too, if there were any who by the same defect of Divine ordination and acceptance were alien and excluded from every possibility of the said redemption. But as has been said, the Major being granted, let us come to the Minor. I answer therefore, That there is no one sharing the same human nature which the Redeemer deigned to assume, for whom Christ has not delivered himself as a redemption-price applicable by God's ordination and acceptance for obtaining remission of sins through faith in his blood. Nor does the Apostle contradict us, whose whole discourse in Romans 8 does not look to consoling any human beings whatever placed in any state, but the elect; nor the elect simply, but the elect already called, justified, sanctified, that is, as the same speaks in (Colossians 1:13), already delivered from the power of darkness, and transferred into the kingdom of the Son of his love. Nor does he affirm simply and universally that God freely gives all things to all human beings for whom Christ died, but to all those of whom the present discourse is instituted, that is, to all the predestined believing in Christ, for whom not only did Christ die, but to whom moreover Christ has already been given in a special mode, that is, united, and communicated with the infinite treasure of his merits. This consolatory argument of the Apostle drawn from Christ's death is therefore efficacious, but if it is accommodated to those and so far, to whom and so far as it was accommodated by the Apostle: namely in this way, You who from your effectual calling, justification and sanctification can already acknowledge and feel that you are predestined, and that God in specially and effectually redeeming you willed his Son not only offered to himself, but also communicated to you, how can you not trust that he will for the rest freely give you all other things necessary for consummating salvation? But if anyone should wish to apply the aforesaid reason to any human beings whatever, setting aside consideration of predestination, calling, justification, in this way, Christ died for you, or Christ gave himself a lytron or victim to God for expiating your sins, therefore God will also freely give you all things, I say he draws this argument beyond its limits contrary to the Apostle's mind; who narrowed it to certain persons, namely the predestined, and those already placed in a certain state, namely of justification and adoption.

23Obj. 12. Christ was ordained redeemer not from philanthropy, but from that special good-pleasure by which God specially embraced his elect unto eternal life: Christ's death therefore is not a lytron applicable by God's ordination to redeeming all human beings, but destined for the elect alone.

Sol. I deny the antecedent: and I affirm that God in sending the redeemer willed to render both loves attested to the world, namely that common love of the human race which we call philanthropy, and that special and secret love which we call good-pleasure. The argument of common love is, that he willed to look so far to the human race, that is, to all and each human being, that they should have a redeemer, through whose satisfaction grasped by faith they could obtain remission of sins. This love he did not exhibit to the fallen Angels (whom nevertheless he preserves as his creatures), inasmuch as for them Christ was in no way ordained as redeemer, nor is remission of sins through the redeemer's satisfaction under any condition either announceable or applicable. From this we clearly gather that in the very constitution or ordination of the redeemer God had a certain respect of common love toward human beings, which he did not have toward Demons. Which will be plain if we weigh rightly what this very redemption is. It is therefore the payment of a just price or debt for us captives, not that by the price being counted out we are freed by the very fact, but that we are freed as soon as we should believe in the redeemer. This is that ordination of Christ's death or of the satisfactory price, which flowed from God's love common to all human beings; and accordingly under this respect, extended by us to all and each human being, it is rightly preached. And we judge that most celebrated place, (John 3:16), So God loved the world, etc., looks hither. Now as for that secret and more special love by which God embraces the elect, far be it that we deny Christ's death and merit to be a special gift in a special mode to be applied efficaciously and infallibly to these elect for redeeming and saving them from that special love. To the common love therefore with which God follows the human race, we attribute that he willed to constitute a general redeemer, through whose death and satisfaction anyone, provided he believes in him, can be absolved from his sins (Acts 13:38). But to the special good-pleasure by which he embraces the elect alone we think it should be attributed that from the death and merit of this constituted and ordained Redeemer he decreed to give to certain singular persons efficaciously and infallibly faith, remission of sins, and eternal life. And we think the Savior looked to this special intention in (John 10:15), where he says he lays down his life for his sheep, that is, for the elect he so offers himself as a victim that from his death they may not only be able to be saved if they believe, but may actually believe and be saved. We ought not therefore so urge God's special good-pleasure toward the elect that we deny that lytron of Christ ordained for reconciling and freeing all and each to God, and, provided they embrace it with true faith, to be applied; leaving meanwhile to God his hidden judgments and entire liberty in dispensing or not dispensing that special grace, by whose intervention faith is infallibly produced in human hearts, and effectual application is procured, and eternal life is infallibly obtained from the Gospel covenant.

24Obj. 13. If Christ's death by Divine ordination is applicable to all human beings unto salvation, then the salvation of all would be effected through this death of Christ. For God always effects and attains that end which he intends. If therefore he had ordained Christ's death for procuring the salvation of the human race, he would certainly have saved the whole human race by means of this death of Christ. Those therefore who establish that by God's own ordination Christ's death is a constituted remedy applicable to all human beings unto salvation seem to strike against Divine wisdom: For it belongs in part to a wise person to intend something he does not attain. They seem also to strike against Divine omnipotence: For it belongs to an impotent person to ordain a benefit or remedy applicable to all and each, which yet because of human malice and unbelief cannot be applied to many.

Sol. For removing these scruples it must be carefully observed that we defend only this, That there is a certain ordination or good-pleasure of the Divine will, according to which Christ's death is a satisfactory lytron so applicable for obtaining remission to all and each human being, that if they subjected themselves to the aforesaid good-pleasure and ordination, it would be applied to all and each in fact. But we do not assert or sustain this, That there is some ordination, good-pleasure or decree of the Divine will, according to which he absolutely intends or establishes to render this death of Christ efficaciously and infallibly applied to all and each. That prior ordination considered in itself suffices for this, that Christ's death may truly be said applicable to all and each human being: just as the defect of such an ordination is the reason we cannot say Christ died for the apostate angels, or that Christ's death is applicable to them in any way. These things being first tasted, I affirm that the consequence of the Major is invalid. For although Christ's death by the ordination and will of God himself is a remedy of such a kind as can be applied to any individual of human nature unto salvation, and moreover the mode of application is clearly set in sacred Scripture, namely through the performed condition of faith, yet it cannot from this be inferred that either faith itself or salvation itself is to be conferred infallibly on all and each: because it is far different to ordain Christ's death as a remedy applicable to all human beings unto salvation, and to prescribe faith as the mode or condition by whose intervention it is applied, and to establish and absolutely decree to work faith and salvation efficaciously in these or those. This later therefore cannot rightly be deduced from that prior. For as if God should create some herb endowed with such virtue that it can bring health to anyone laboring under any disease whatever, and moreover should promise that whoever used it would without doubt recover former health, someone would rightly conclude from this that this herb is by God's ordination applicable to all and each sick person as a remedy for any disease: but he would not rightly infer that all and each are to be cured infallibly by the benefit of this remedy; because to some it will not be given to find this herb, to some perhaps there will not be that mind to use it when found: So from the fact that God sent a redeemer into the world, and furnished him with such virtue and grace that he can confer remission of sins and eternal life on any human being laboring under the guilt of damnation, and moreover promised in the Gospel that whoever should believe in this redeemer would be absolved from all his sins, someone would rightly conclude that this Redeemer and his death are, God so ordaining, applicable to all sinners; but not rightly, that all sinners will be saved through his death, because to many this saving death of the redeemer is not revealed, to many it is not given to believe in him when revealed. But what is brought against this, That God always attains the end he intends, can easily be removed. For we do not defend that God by absolute will (which predetermines not only the ordination of means to the end, but the infallible event of the end) intended through Christ's death to procure in fact the salvation of all and each, but that he established, willed, ordained that the death of his Son both should be and should be held such a lytron as could be offered and applied to all and each human being. And this God has plainly attained. For all acknowledge, or ought to acknowledge, that Christ so suffered, and died, and was offered for the sins of all human beings that all to a person, none excepted, could through his death by believing obtain remission of sins and salvation. Nor does it conflict with Divine wisdom to constitute, and sometimes to confer on human beings, means ordained and applicable to some end, and meanwhile to permit many human beings to fall short of attaining that end. For by this path God attains a higher end, namely the illustration of his glory, through the demonstration of justice toward those who abuse the means ordained for procuring human salvation, and through the demonstration of his mercy toward those who by the benefit of special grace use the aforesaid means for their salvation; through the demonstration finally of his supreme Dominion, and most free liberty toward those to whom he has not even deigned to reveal the means supplied by himself unto human salvation, and by his own ordination applicable to any human beings whatever. Concerning God's omnipotence also we answer, That with our opinion in place it is in no way shaken. For we do not say that through the malice of any human beings whatever God cannot apply Christ's death to all unto salvation, which he established and ordained applicable to all; but that God, who has mercy on whom he wills, and leaves hardened whom he wills, wills not to heal this malice in all by the remedy of special grace, wills not to render Christ's death, which he made applicable to all, applied to all. And here of the one who is freed through Christ's death applied to him by the help of special grace God would rightly say, So I will; Of the one who is damned, this applicable remedy notwithstanding, application not having been made, he would also say, Take what is yours, and go. To this one I will to give what is not owed; to you I will not. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with what is mine? Here if anyone murmurs, he would deservedly hear, O human being, who are you who answer back to God?

25Obj. 14. If we posit that Christ died for all, it will follow: 1. That Christ pursued all human beings with supreme and greatest love (John 15:13): Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. And (1 John 3:16): By this we have known the love of God, that he laid down his life for us. Which does not seem so, because he does not lead all to life by this death of his. 2. What is a corollary of this, that Christ equally loved Peter and Judas, the elect and the non-elect: For he would have exhibited to all the token of supreme love; but in the supreme there are no degrees. 3. Finally, if Christ so died for all that by this death of his he procured for the non-elect only the possibility of salvation under the condition of faith, or a remedy merely applicable, which he knows will not be applied, but for the elect the very application and salvation — he would seem to have loved the non-elect more than the elect, because it is of greater love to suffer death for someone in order that he may obtain some minute good than a great one; just as that man would show a more ardent love toward someone who exposed himself to death lest the other be ever so slightly hurt, than if he did it lest he be punished with death.

Sol. The aim of both places is the same, namely to kindle Christians to mutual and most tender love by the example of our Savior Jesus Christ, who so loved us that he endured to die for us. But the sense of the words here is that to undergo death, or to pour out one’s life for another, is the greatest external effect and the most evident proof of love — which, when Christ has exhibited toward us by laying down his life for us, we too ought, where need is, to lay down our lives for the brethren, as is had in the aforesaid place (1 John 3:16). It is therefore not enough that we be ready to spend gold and silver for the brethren, to undergo hard labors or dangers, because there is still a greater love — that is, a greater, surer, and clearer proof of our love — namely that we lay down our soul, that is, our life, for them. And because nothing is dearer to each than himself, therefore by this attestation of love, by which someone spends himself for a friend, there is no greater. I now come closer to the solution, and I say: Although we confess that no one has greater love — that is, can from his own side put forth a greater external effect of his love — than by laying down life, because each has nothing more precious than his life; yet we deny that it is rightly deduced from this that the love of one dying for some is absolutely, simply, and in every way, as regards all those, the supreme and greatest that anyone can conceive in his heart. For first, where one lays down life for many, nothing hinders that as to the internal act of loving he may love one more vehemently than another: as if we should think that Jacob underwent death for freeing all his sons from captivity, we would nevertheless rightly assert that he did not love all supremely, but Joseph and Benjamin above the others, and more than the others. Supreme love as to intention, therefore, cannot be inferred with respect to all to whom this greatest judgment of love is exhibited. Second, someone can pour out life promiscuously for many, and yet as to the magnitude of the good willed love some more intensely than others, and accordingly not embrace all with supreme or equal love. For the magnitude of love is not to be estimated only from the side of the precious thing which is spent on the beloved by the lover, but from the side of the benefits which are intended to be conferred on the beloved from that spent thing. For example: If a King’s son should undergo death for all guilty of treason, this law being set, that all and each be absolved who are willing to cast themselves as suppliants before the King’s throne and to pledge faithful obedience for the future; and if for certain ones he should further intend to obtain from the Father that, for the merit of his death, he deign to persuade them of this submission and obedience, and so persuaded not only to absolve them but even to raise them to the highest honors — who does not see that death was endured for all, and yet that all were not loved supremely and maximally? For since to love is to wish and confer goods on someone, once a common benefit granted to many is posited, those are more loved to whom greater goods from the aforesaid benefit are intended and conferred. Finally, although human beings cannot exhibit to human beings a greater external testimony of love than if someone die for another, yet God the Father, Christ the Mediator God-man, and the Holy Spirit can exhibit a greater secret act and effect of their love toward some of those for whom Christ died than toward others; namely if they establish not only to give to certain ones remission of sins and eternal life from the merit of Christ’s death, provided they believe in this their Redeemer, but also from eternity elect certain ones to life to be participated efficaciously in Christ the Redeemer, and prepare for them and infallibly give all those things which effect this infallible participation and application. From these you see that that inference does not hold: Christ died for all; Therefore he loved all with supreme and equal love: because, this common benefit of his death being granted to all, he can nevertheless love some more intently than others, and decree, prepare, and give to some more and greater goods from the merit of his death than to others. Which is clear even in the elect themselves, for all of whom all confess that Christ suffered, and yet no one will have affirmed that Christ embraces with equal love anyone (so to speak) from the common run of the elect and the Patriarchs, Apostles, or his most blessed mother, or enriches them with equal gifts of grace and glory overflowing from the merit of his death. But that other subtlety by which it is inferred, If Christ had undergone death for all, he would have shown greater love toward the non-elect than toward the elect, because it argues greater love to sustain death for someone to obtain for him some minute good than a great one, seems to me little agreeable to right reason. If diverse deaths were to be undergone for diverse persons, this objection would have some appearance of truth: but where a single death is sustained for diverse persons, there it is plain that he is more loved for whom the one who dies intends more and greater goods from this single death. For if to love is to will goods to another, then to will greater goods is to love more. But in this way the love of Christ dying stood toward the elect and the non-elect: for from one and the same death he willed more and greater goods to come to the former than to the latter.

26Obj. 15. Means wisely destined do not exceed their adequate end: But the adequate end of Christ’s death is the salvation of the elect: Therefore Christ’s death has no ordination to any other non-elect whatever: Therefore it is falsely established as applicable to all human beings by God’s ordination.

Sol. I acknowledge that the infallible salvation of the elect is, under the glory of God, a certain special and outstanding end for attaining which Christ’s death was destined: Yet I deny that it was the unique or sole end. For God sent his Son into the world, and willed him to die, not only that he might efficaciously save the elect, but also that remission of sins and eternal life might be generally offered to any human beings whatever in the Gospel, and even conferred, if they believed. But this general or conditional covenant is not understood as established unless Christ’s death by God’s ordination is presupposed applicable to all human beings, and to be applied in fact to anyone as soon as he has believed. Scripture has clearly indicated this end in many places: (John 3:14–15): As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. And (John 6:40): This is the will of my Father who sent me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life. (Acts 10:43): To him all the Prophets bear witness, that through his name everyone who believes in him receives remission of sins. I pass over the rest. From these it is plain enough that, although not all but the elect alone believe, God specially softening their hearts, yet Christ’s death was so offered by the Son to God the Father, so also offered indiscriminately by God the Father to human beings, so announced promiscuously to all by Evangelical ministers, that anyone may gather from this that there is a certain firm and stable ordination of God according to which Christ’s death pertains to all human beings. The non-elect by their unbelief make this ordination useless to themselves: but they do not make such an ordination to be counted as nothing, or to be acknowledged as by no means established by Christ’s death as regards these unbelievers. For if we admit this, any unbeliever could plead, Even if I had believed the Gospel, I would not have been freed from sins by Christ’s death, because Christ’s death had no ordination according to which I could have been partaker of it. Which is diametrically contrary to the words of Christ himself (John 3:17–18): God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned; but whoever does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God. And this is what holy Prosper says: The death of Christ has indeed in itself what would profit all; but if it is not drunk, it does not heal. That it has in itself what can profit all, it has from the general Divine ordination: but that it is not drunk by many through faith, happens from common human unbelief: that it is drunk by some, comes from special Divine pity.

27Obj. 16. It is absurd to posit that Christ’s death by Divine ordination is a lytron applicable to those to whom it is not applied; because in Christ’s death itself there was the firmest application of the death for all those for whom he is truly affirmed to have died and suffered: Therefore Christ’s death is not a remedy ordained by God except for certain singular elect persons known to God alone, to whom at length as to the event it is saving.

Sol. We deny that anything absurd inheres in the aforesaid opinion, which we have demonstrated to be true and agreeable to Divine wisdom. But what is objected — That as regards all for whom Christ died, an infallible application of the death is also included in that same death of Christ — does not seem to us to be conceded. For Christ’s offering considered in itself nakedly obtains and gets from God this universally, that all and each who have been willing to believe in Christ are saved. The Gospel preaches and promises this efficacy of Christ’s death to the whole world: but that infallible purpose of applying this death to these or those persons evangelical heralds cannot promise by name to any mortal. We say that Christ’s death is ordained for all those to whom remission of sins through faith in his blood can be announced: which grace looks to any participant of human nature. But we confess that Christ’s death is to be applied infallibly to the elect alone; because the certainty of application depends, as from a primary cause, on the secret and eternal act of God predestinating, not on the sole fact of Christ offering himself for human beings. Christ therefore in offering himself had a general intention conforming to the Father’s ordination, namely that he might indiscriminately free any human beings whatever, provided they believed in him, from the guilt of sins, and in this sense he is said to have offered himself for all. He also had, as conscious of Divine predestination, a special intention conforming to the Father’s secret and eternal good-pleasure, namely that for the sheep to be given to him according to the decree of election he might from the merit of his death obtain and give faith, salvation, all things: and with this special intention he is said to have laid down his life for his peculiar people, that is, for certain singular persons. What comes to certain ones from Christ’s death through a special act of Divine predestination ought not to overturn what was acquired for all through the very act of offering. Let infallible application rather be ascribed to predestination; but that Christ’s death is applicable to all and each through faith, let it be assigned to the offering itself from the tenor of the Divine covenant.

28Obj. 17. The last objection is drawn from those places in which Christ’s death is expressly referred to certain particular persons: from which they infer that it does not look to others. The places on which they rely are these: (Matthew 1:21): You shall call his name Jesus: for he himself will save his people from their sins. (John 10:15): I lay down my life for my sheep. (John 11:51–52): Jesus dies, that he might gather into one the children of God who were scattered, and the like.

Sol. From the aforesaid testimonies and others like them it is well concluded that Christ’s death, by the will of God sending the Son and of the Son offering himself, pertains in a certain special manner to that peculiar people known to God alone, that is, to the elect. But that special manner is of this kind: not that he is said to have died for these alone, but that he died for these alone with a certain, eternal, gratuitous purpose of saving them infallibly, through the grace of special mercy flowing from a certain special providence which we call Predestination. But from testimonies of that kind which refer Christ’s death to certain persons, not considered simply, but complicated with the decree of secret predestination, it is wrongly inferred that this death in a certain general manner by no means pertains to all human beings. But this general manner is of such a kind that we acknowledge Christ to have died for the whole human race with the Evangelical covenant, and that most firm one, concerning the expiating of sins and the conferring of eternal life on all and each human beings provided they embrace this Redeemer of the world with true faith. And hence it is that although in the sacred Scriptures some places occur in which Christ is said to have died for the elect or for his peculiar people, yet none occur in which he is denied to have died for any human beings, and very many in which he is affirmed to have died for all. For the Spirit of God willed to intimate to the faithful themselves the special privilege of the elect in Christ’s death, yet he did not will to overwhelm in silence the common right of the human race in that same death of Christ. It is ours therefore to leave to God the decree of his hidden predestination, according to which he has established how far and to whom he wills to apply this death of Christ efficaciously through the gift of special grace; and meanwhile with grateful minds to acknowledge the sum of the revealed Gospel, which proclaims One dead for all, that whoever believes in him should have eternal life. In this sense Ambrose: Although Christ suffered for all, yet he suffered specially for us, because he suffered for the Church (On Luke, book 6, chapter 7). And thus far we have given you our first thesis explained, confirmed, and vindicated from contrary objections. We have lingered longer in treating it, because (as was said) it contains the Caput of the matter, and opens the way to unraveling the rest, in discussing which we shall be much briefer. Let us therefore come to the second thesis.

29Cap. 4. Thesis 2 is proposed, explained, and established. In our first thesis we tried to show that Christ’s death or merit, constituted by God, set forth in the sacred Scriptures, and to be considered by us, is a universal remedy applicable to all human beings unto salvation by God’s ordination. And for this reason we do not hesitate to assert that Christ died for all human beings, inasmuch as he underwent a death by whose merit and power all and each mortal who obeys the Gospel can be freed from death and obtain eternal salvation. But because some so concede that Christ died for all that with the same breath they assert he died for the elect alone, and so explain the received distinction of the Theologians — He died for all sufficiently, for the predestinate efficaciously — that they plainly extinguish the former limb, we will add a second thesis that will furnish occasion for disputing the matter on purpose, which until now we have only lightly touched in passing. This second thesis, then, will be cast in this form (pardon it if somewhat long): The death of Christ is acknowledged as the universal cause of human salvation, and Christ himself as having died sufficiently for all human beings, not by reason of a bare sufficiency or intrinsic value, according to which the death of God is a price more than sufficient for redeeming a thousand worlds, but by reason of the Evangelical covenant stabilized by the merit of this death with the whole human race, and of the Divine ordination depending thereon, according to which, under the possible condition of faith, remission of sins and eternal life are decreed to be exhibited, for the merits of the dead Christ, to any human being who will believe.

In treating this thesis we will do two things: First, we will untie certain terms that need explanation. Second, we will partition this thesis of ours into certain members and confirm them one by one with several arguments. First, then, it falls to be explained what we mean by bare sufficiency, and what by that which is commonly admitted by Theologians, that Christ died sufficiently for all. If we speak of the price of redemption, that lytron is to be acknowledged sufficient which answers equally to the captive’s debt, or which satisfies the demand of him in whose power it is to free this captive. Equality, whether of thing to thing, or to the demands of him who has dominion over the captive, constitutes what we call bare sufficiency. This will be illustrated by examples. Suppose my brother is held in prison for a debt of a thousand pounds. If I have as many pounds laid up in my chest, I can truly affirm, This silver is sufficient to dissolve my brother’s debt and free him from the debt. Yet so long as it is not yet offered for him, a bare sufficiency of the thing is understood, and it is estimated from value alone, while the act of offering that very lytron is still lacking, without which the aforesaid sufficiency effects nothing. By like reason, if many are condemned to death for the crime of treason, and the King himself against whom the crime was committed covenants that he is willing to be reconciled to all for whom his Son deigns to undergo death: already the Son’s death is by pact constituted a sufficient lytron for redeeming all for whom it shall be offered; but if there are any for whom that lytron is not yet offered, as to them it has only a bare and mere sufficiency, which is thought from the thing’s value considered in itself, not that which is understood from the offerer’s act. I add: even if we admit that the aforesaid lytron is not only sufficient by equality of thing to thing and by the demand of him who requires nothing further for redeeming captives, but is also greater and better by infinite degrees and exceeds all their debts, yet if the mind and act of offering for certain captives do not accompany it, although such a lytron be ever so copious and superabundant when viewed in itself and from its internal value, still what was said of sufficiency must be said of superabundance: it is a mere superabundance of the thing, and has as yet effected nothing for freeing the aforesaid persons.

To this mere sufficiency, which looks to nothing else than an equal or superabundant dignity of the appointed price for the thing to be redeemed, I oppose another, which for clarity’s sake I will call ordained sufficiency. That is understood when the thing that has the character of a lutron or redeeming price not only equals or by dignity surpasses the thing to be redeemed, but is moreover ordained to redeem it by some will and act of the offerer. Thus a thousand talents stored in a Prince’s treasury may be called a sufficient lytron for redeeming ten citizens captured by an enemy; but if the mind and act of offering and giving these talents for these captives, or for some of them, do not accompany it, as to those for whom it is not given a mere, not ordained, sufficiency of the thing is supposed. But add the act and mind of offering them for freeing certain persons, and then at last ordained sufficiency is asserted as to those alone. Further, this ordained sufficiency of the lytron for redeeming a captive can be twofold: Absolute, when between the one who gives and the one who receives this redeeming price for freeing captives it is so agreed that as soon as the price is paid, by the very fact of payment the captives are at once freed. Conditioned, when the price is accepted not that the captive be at once paid for and restored to liberty, but that he be freed under a condition, if he first does this or that. When we say that Christ died sufficiently for all, we understand not a mere sufficiency of the thing with a defect of oblation as to the greater part of human beings, but that ordained sufficiency which had joined to it the mind and act of the offerer, and that for all, yet by that conditioned, not absolute, ordination which we have expressed. In a word, when we affirm that Christ died sufficiently for all, we mean this: that there was in the victim itself a sufficiency or equivalence, indeed a superabundance, of price or dignity if compared to the whole human race; and that in the offerer and the accepter there was a certain ordination according to which the aforesaid victim was offered and accepted for the redemption of all human beings. Let this suffice for explaining the first term.

30Second, that also must be explained which was set down in the thesis, namely that by the merit of the aforesaid death of Christ a certain new covenant has been sanctioned between God and the human race. By this covenant we understand that which is urged by the Apostle in (Galatians 3:11): Believe, and you shall live, and is set over against the legal, Do this and you shall live. This very pact, which promises salvation to any sinner under the condition of faith, has its foundation and firmament nowhere else than in the Mediator’s blood: without which poured out, not even by believing could any mortal aspire to eternal life. But when Christ’s death has been accepted by God as a lytron, it is now lawful without distinction for any human being to ascend into heaven by believing, as the Apostle shows in (Romans 3:21–26) and Christ himself in (Mark 16:15), Go, etc. In this Evangelical covenant, then, stabilized by Christ’s death, which the Apostles published to the whole world and Evangelical ministers still preach, no respect of persons is had. Esau will be saved, if he believes in the Messiah, as much as Jacob; Jacob will be damned, if he does not believe, as much as Esau. Yet it must be confessed that there is also another ordination of God, secret and absolute, looking to certain definite persons, and founded also in Christ’s death, which receives the name of the New Covenant. But this is understood rather as a pact between God the Father and Christ than between God and us. It is that which is recalled by the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 53:10): If he shall have set his soul for sin, he shall see a long-lived seed; and is explained by the Apostle (Hebrews 8:10): This is the covenant that I will make, etc. I will put my laws in their mind and write them on their heart, etc. — as if to say that by his death Christ not only stabilized that conditioned covenant which can be promulgated to all and each under this formula, If you believe, whoever you are, you will be saved through Christ’s death, but also that secret and absolute one concerning faith to be given to certain human beings, and those same to be saved infallibly through and on account of Christ. It is to be noted, however, that this latter covenant is known to Christ alone, and cannot through Christ’s ministers be made plain to anyone as to the singular persons it embraces. For the Apostles themselves could, and we can, preach to any human being that conditioned and revealed covenant, If you believe, you will be saved; but neither they could, nor can we, promise anyone infallibly, You are of those whom God gave to Christ the Mediator, and whom through and on account of Christ he will gift with persevering faith and lead infallibly to eternal life. For that would be as if we professed we had been of God’s counsel before the foundations of the world were laid, and could point out elect and non-elect with the finger. Without this latter covenant, which is more properly understood as stabilized between God and the Mediator than between God and human beings, that former conditioned one would by human wickedness and unbelief be void in all human beings, and that precious blood of infinite merit would flow away into emptiness. Yet because, as has been said, God alone knows those to whom this covenant looks, it is ours to urge and press that former conditioned covenant revealed to us: and that is what we defend as stabilized by Christ’s death with the whole human race. Finally this too is to be observed. Although that conditioned covenant is not actually published to each human being, yet it is of such a kind that it can be published and announced to any mortal: although individuals do not claim their right in this covenant for themselves, yet there is no one to whom it is not lawful, by the merit of Christ’s death, to promise this to himself and claim it from the pact, If I believe, I will be saved. It is stabilized as to all and each, but by a certain special providence of God governing the matter it is revealed and announced to these, not to those.

It remains third to explain what was set down in the thesis concerning the Divine ordination depending on the aforesaid covenant, according to which remission of sins and eternal life are decreed to be exhibited to any human being under the possible condition of faith. And here that one point needs explanation, that we affirm the condition of faith to be possible for each one. We do not want this so understood as if each one had in himself a natural intrinsic principle proportioned to eliciting an act of true and living faith. For that was the error of Faustus of Riez and the Semi-Pelagians, who ascribe faith to free choice and dream that the gift of believing is as it were naturally inborn and fixed in it. To this look those words of Faustus, On Free Choice, book 2, chapter 6: You see that the good of believing is not a novel privilege but an old one, and that from the very beginnings of the coalescing world the human mind was gifted by the highest Author with faith as with intellect and reason. And lest anyone think this gift of faith lost in fallen man, a little later he adds chapter 7: Let any pursuer of virtue cultivate in himself by special study this general gift of faith. See more in that sense. Although therefore he calls faith a gift, he still hints that it is a natural and general gift, and that anyone can elicit this act of believing by the powers of free choice. But this we wholly abhor, and we do not look to it when we say the condition of faith is possible. Further, neither do we found this possibility of believing in some supernatural gift already received by all. For we do not dare to maintain that gratuitous and sufficient helps for bringing forth the act of believing are given to all and each; since sacred Scripture itself clearly teaches that faith is a special gift of God. It remains, then, that with the most learned Báñez we found the possibility of performing this condition neither in some natural and innate gift, nor in a supernatural gift received by all, but in a supernatural gift possibly to be received by any wayfarer, according to the ordinary law, as the School speaks. These things thus set out and established, I will now divide the aforesaid thesis into three members, which I will confirm separately with reasons brought forward.

311. The mere sufficiency of Christ’s death, which is estimated from the intrinsic value alone of this lutron, without that ordained sufficiency which arises from the mind and act of offering, does not avail so far that Christ may truly be said to have died sufficiently for all. I thought this thesis should be added because of those who hold tightly that Christ died for the elect alone, and yet (I confess I am too slow to understand how) admit that Christ died sufficiently for all; and sometimes exalt this thing, a sufficiency spreading itself to all human beings, in very strong words. For they confess that Christ died for all human beings, for all orders, states, and kinds of human beings, indeed even for individual human beings as to the sufficiency of merits. The Contra-Remonstrants in the Judgment exhibited to the Synod of Dort write thus: When Christ is said to have died for all, this can be understood of the sufficiency of the merit, or the magnitude of the price. For the death of the Son of God is the one perfect and sufficient lytron for expiating and blotting out all the sins of the whole world: an immense merit of righteousness, a catholic medicine of death, a perennial fountain of life, etc. A little later: This sufficiency of the lytron, as to the reprobate, has a twin end, one of itself, the other by accident. The end of itself, that God may make it plain he does not delight in the destruction of human beings, inasmuch as he gave his only-begotten Son, that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). The end by accident, that by this sufficiency of the lytron they may be rendered inexcusable. For these perish not by Christ’s fault but by their own, when by their unbelief they repudiate the benefits offered by Christ in the Gospel. So far they. This sufficiency of Christ’s death for reconciling all, I deny can be rightly conceived from a bare sufficiency of the thing offered, unless an ordained sufficiency from the offerer’s act accompanies it. Which can be proved thus.

When we say that Christ died sufficiently for all, we say nothing else than that he was offered sufficiently for all, or that he gave himself as a lytron or price of redemption sufficiently for all. But to die for all, or to be offered for all, or to give oneself for all, designates the act of one dying or offering himself, terminated under some ordination to freeing all. Therefore the mere sufficiency of the lytron, without the mind and act of the offerer terminated to persons, cannot make true this assertion, Christ died sufficiently for all. For common sense refuses that one should be granted to have died sufficiently for all who is denied to have died or been offered for some. And while the intrinsic sufficiency of the lytron for redeeming a thousand worlds stands and is conceded, it can at the same time stand that this same lytron has not yet been offered in any way for many human beings, much less sufficiently offered. For just as for freeing five debtors who each owe two hundred pounds, ten thousand pounds are more than enough; yet if this whole sum is offered and paid to the creditor by name for two only, the other three excluded, the sufficiency and superabundance in itself of this lytron will not make it that it was sufficiently given and paid for those three: so in this common cause of the human race, although Christ’s precious blood is a lytron more than sufficient for canceling the debts of all and each, yet it would not thence be affirmed to have been sufficiently offered for those who are discretely excluded in the very act of offering. They seem therefore not so much to interpret as to mock this most received and most true pronouncement of the Theologians, Christ died sufficiently for all, who transfer this term sufficiently from the mind and act of the one dying to a bare sufficiency or intrinsic value of the death considered in itself; as if the sense were, Christ’s death in itself has sufficient merit and value for blotting out the sins of all human beings, but Christ was not offered or dead for all — when the clear sense of this saying is that Christ died for all, and died sufficiently for all, although what he sufficiently offered for all is not efficaciously applied to all because of the intervening obstacle of unbelief.

In this distinction of the Scholastics, which our men commonly admit — namely that Christ died for all sufficiently, for the predestinate efficaciously — those words sufficiently and efficaciously denote what in the very mode of oblation was common to all human beings, elect and non-elect alike, and what was peculiar to the elect alone. Common to both was that Christ was sufficiently dead or offered for them as a victim to God the Father. But how will this former term, sufficiently, be referred promiscuously to elect and non-elect, if it designates a bare sufficiency of the thing, excluding the ordination of the same thing to persons that arises from the offerer’s mind and act? Or what need is there of that latter term, efficaciously, to constitute a distinction in the mode of oblation or in the offerer’s intention as to elect and non-elect, if there was absolutely no intention of Christ offering himself except for the predestinate alone? A bimembral distinction is frivolous and plainly inept where both members are not presupposed in the thing distinguished. It is to be observed, then, that the holy Fathers, urging the universal sufficiency of Christ’s death, do not stick in a bare sufficiency of the thing, but in the act, mind, and very mode of offering. So repeatedly Athanasius in the treatise On the Incarnation of the Word. I will set down one golden place: Christ the Son of God, having borrowed a body like ours, because we all were liable to death, sacrificed to his Father that same body given over to death for all. Likewise: After the monuments of his Divinity had been displayed, it remained that he should offer a sacrifice for all, delivering his temple to death for all, that he might make all free from the old transgression, etc. You see that the note of universality is joined not with the intrinsic sufficiency of the thing offered, but with the mind and act of the offerer, which looked to all. So Augustine: Christ’s blood was so poured out for the remission of all sins that it could blot out even the very sin by which it was poured. He does not say that in the blood poured out there is a sufficient intrinsic value for expiating all human beings’ sins, which is confessed among all who know how to estimate God’s blood rightly; but he urges the mode and act of offering, and in that constitutes this universality: It was so poured for the remission of all sins. It is one thing to say that Christ’s blood has from itself and in itself a sufficient value for blotting out all human beings’ sins; another to affirm that it was poured by the very fact for the remission of all sins, which Augustine said. But why do I recall the holy Fathers? Holy Scripture so speaks of Christ’s death that it does not refer its universal force to the bare dignity of the victim offered, but to the act and mind of the offerer (1 Timothy 2:6): He gave himself a price of redemption for all. The Apostle does not say, This lytron in itself and in its intrinsic value is sufficient for redeeming all, but was in truth given for a few, not for all; but, He gave himself for all. The mind and act, then, of Christ giving himself embraced all. So also of the Father sending the Son; So God loved the world, etc. (John 3:16). That bare sufficiency of the thing, then, does not avail so far that Christ may be affirmed to have died sufficiently for all, without a sufficiency ordained toward all from the offerer’s mind and act.

323. Christ is acknowledged to have died sufficiently for all human beings in that sense in which he is denied to have died for the fallen angels. This is clear and confessed among all the orthodox, who often recall this discrimination between evil angels and any evil human beings, at least while they are wayfarers. To this look those words of Ambrose on that text of Psalm 118, The earth is full of the Lord’s mercy, Sermon 8: That mystical Sun of righteousness has risen for all, come for all, suffered for all, risen for all. But if anyone does not believe in Christ, he defrauds himself of the general benefit. A little later: Perhaps you may say, Why was it not said, THE HEAVEN IS FULL OF THE LORD’S MERCY? Because there are also spiritual wickednesses in the heavenly places, but those do not pertain to the common right of God’s indulgence and the remission of sins. From which it is plain that Christ so suffered for the whole human race that all human beings thence have a common right of obtaining indulgence by faith, which the demons do not have, because he in no way died for them. Certain of our own, who fight hard for restricting Christ’s death, yet freely grant this: that there is not the same ratio for any human beings that there is for the diaboli, as to the sufficiency of Christ’s death. For to any human beings, but not to the diaboli, he paid a lytron apt enough, if only they were willing to embrace it. This discrimination in the payment of this lytron is worth observing: It was so paid to God that it cannot redeem the diaboli, even if they are supposed to believe — namely because it was not paid for them; but it was so exhibited and given to God that it can redeem any human beings, if they are willing to believe; whence this, unless because it was offered and paid for all of them? For it would not avail to free any human beings, even if they believed, unless it is supposed to have been given and offered to God for them, in the common cause of the human race, even when they did not believe. This discrimination between the sufficiency of Christ’s death as to human beings and as to demons being established — that Christ’s death is understood as sufficient for all human beings in that sense in which it is rightly denied for the angels — let us pass from this Major proposition to the minor. I say, then, that if we acknowledge no other sufficiency in Christ’s death for redeeming any human beings than that which we have called mere sufficiency, which depends on the intrinsic value of the lutron, the offerer’s ordination to persons being removed, no discrimination is set up between such persons and the demons themselves as to that right of obtaining indulgence and remission by the benefit of this lutron, which was recalled above from Ambrose and granted universally to human beings, excluded from angels. It is plain; because the value of Christ’s passion is estimated from the dignity of the suffering Person. It had therefore in itself and in its intrinsic price not only sufficiency but infinite superabundance, even if against it are weighed the sins not only of all human beings but of angels. There must therefore be granted, with respect to human beings, not only that mere sufficiency which depends on the inherent dignity of the thing offered, but that ordained one which arises from Christ’s mind and act referring this his passion to all human beings, not referring it to angels. This being posited, Christ is truly said to have died sufficiently for all human beings, by that sufficiency which has no place in relation to the apostate angels, and of which it is truly said, Christ died for the fallen angels neither efficaciously nor sufficiently.

Objection. But perhaps someone may meet this argument and assert that a mere sufficiency of the thing offered, considered in itself, as to human beings makes it that Christ is rightly said to have suffered sufficiently for all human beings; yet does not make it as to the Diaboli, because that is not sufficient which is not apt and suitable. But a great part of the aptitude in Christ for taking away human sins was that he assumed the likeness of sinful flesh. Since therefore he did not assume the nature of angels, he had neither a suitable state nor a sufficient passion for taking away the sins of evil angels. Solution. But this subtlety limps on both sides. For that mere sufficiency, even with aptitude and congruence however great added, if some ordination and action of offering related to persons has not accompanied it, does not yet make it that Christ is said to have suffered at all for such persons, much less that he is affirmed to have suffered sufficiently. In vain, then, is the assumption of human nature urged, so that from it those who contend he died for the elect alone may deduce that Christ died for all human beings, whether sufficiently or insufficiently. On the other side also the aforesaid exception wavers, because although between Christ and the Angels there did not intervene that likeness of nature which is between Christ and human beings, yet this cannot hinder the lytron paid by Christ — that is, the blood of God — from having been in itself and in its value most sufficient for taking away even the sins of angels. For what crime of any creature can be so great that the poured blood of God would not suffice to expiate it? — which has infinite value from the dignity of the Divine Person, and therefore, the dissimilarity of human nature notwithstanding, if God had deigned to indulge the angels this right in Christ’s passion, it would be applicable even to redeeming angels. God indeed willed to pity the human race, not to pity the angels; he willed the Redeemer to assume not an angelic nature but the seed of Abraham: From this we can conclude that Christ’s death is not a lytron ordained for the redemption of angels, but we neither can nor ought to conclude that it is not a lytron of sufficient dignity, value, and efficacy in itself, if that ordination had been. An argument can be made the other way: that Christ, nature’s dissimilarity notwithstanding, is a sufficient and suitable Head for pouring grace even into the angels themselves; whence the most learned Theologians assert that he merited gifts of grace and glory for the good angels themselves. But that Christ’s merits do not profit the evil angels is to be referred not to insufficiency of the thing but to the will of God alone: and consequently, if we posit many human beings to whom Christ’s passion and merit are in no way ordained, their ratio and condition as to the sufficiency of Christ’s death will be no other than that of the Diaboli.

334. We prove that a bare sufficiency of the thing offered in itself cannot make true that pronouncement of the Theologians, Christ died sufficiently for all human beings, and that from the confession of those who deny that Christ’s death was spent on the whole human race and restrict it to the elect alone. So Piscator in the Apologetic Response, section 87: It cannot be said that Christ died sufficiently for all: for it would follow that he died for all, whose contrary has been demonstrated. And in the same place, that distinction by which Christ is said to have died for all sufficiently, for the elect alone efficaciously, is empty, because it implies a contradiction, etc. It truly implies a contradiction among those who admit a bare sufficiency of the death as to all, and utterly deny its universal ordination for procuring the salvation of all human beings. They are therefore bound either to explode this distinction hitherto approved by the orthodox, or with us to acknowledge an ordained sufficiency of Christ’s death for freeing all. The most learned Pareus seems to go this way when he affirms that Christ, as to the sufficiency of his merit, died and willed to die for all and each. Where he does not constitute this sufficiency in that alone, that Christ’s death in its intrinsic value suffices for redeeming all; but also in the will of Christ dying and sufficiently ordaining his death to freeing all. And here it is to be noted in passing that those err who narrow Christ’s death to the elect alone, so as to establish that he willed to die for them alone, and yet plead that there is no question or contention about the sufficiency of Christ’s death for all and each; that the whole controversy is about the act of this efficacy. For even with that sufficiency of the death in itself for redeeming a thousand worlds posited; and this also posited, that the efficacy of this death is destined absolutely and infallibly not to all but to certain persons to be freed in fact — still it remains controversial whether Christ’s death has only an intrinsic sufficiency for redeeming all, conceived under the hypothesis, If he had willed to offer and pay that lytron for all, or also a conjunct Divine ordination according to which this lytron, sufficient in itself, was in fact offered for all, and thence is applicable and to be applied to all unto salvation, if they have been willing to obey and subject themselves to the aforesaid ordination. Such an ordination we defend, looking even to those who are not saved, because they did not believe in the name of the only-begotten Son of God; and hence we say that Christ died sufficiently for all. But here some of those who hold tightly that Christ suffered and died for the elect alone nevertheless wish to seem to defend not a bare sufficiency of Christ’s death in itself, but that ordained one from God’s intention which we assert. And for this reason, when they are pressed with arguments, they do not refuse to mention the Divine will and intention. Their mind and sense must be examined more closely, lest we seem to wrestle with ghosts, or to fight (as they say) about goat’s wool.

So a certain learned man wrote on this matter: When we confess that Christ died for all, that phrase, FOR ALL, is admitted by our men on account of the sufficiency and the intention of God, by which he willed that it be sufficient for all. Yet it is to be known that this locution is improper; not however to be rejected, because it sometimes has a foundation in the thing itself, and among Theologians is received by long use. Others say in the same sense that it was the counsel and decree of God the Father that by his passion and death Christ should pay such a lytron as, considered in itself, would suffice for reconciling all human beings. These seem, besides a mere sufficiency of the thing, to add a sufficiency related and pertaining from God’s intention and counsel to reconciling all human beings. They seem to, but in truth they do not. For first, that they say they acknowledge Christ to have died sufficiently for all on account of God’s intention by which he willed that his death be sufficient for all, is of no moment. For the death of the Son of God does not need some supervening intention in order to be sufficient for all, since in itself it is of infinite value: yet it does need, in order to be given and accepted for freeing them, under whatever condition. Sufficiency is a certain intrinsic power and aptitude of the thing: nor is an extrinsic act of one intending this sufficiency required to constitute it; but ordination to freeing any persons is a voluntary act, and flows from the intention and counsel of the one ordaining. It is therefore frivolous to couple God’s intention with the internal sufficiency of the thing; which intention was either to be denied altogether as to Christ having died sufficiently for all, or was to be joined with an ordination of the death pertaining to all. Second, that they say this phrase, Christ died sufficiently for all, has a foundation in the thing, cannot be defended on their own view. If I should say, Christ’s death is a sufficient lytron for all, the true foundation of this saying is in the thing itself, namely in the dignity of the dying Person: but if I say, Christ is sufficiently dead or offered on the altar of the cross for all (which are equipollent), there is now no foundation on which the truth of this saying stands, unless I first posit that Christ suffered and was offered for all, and then also add the sufficiency of this passion for all from the dignity of the lytron. He who denies the one forum vainly attempts to defend the saying in the other. Let us conclude, then, that neither can Christ truly be said to have suffered or died sufficiently for all, nor can Christ’s death truly be acknowledged as a universal remedy applicable to all human beings according to God’s ordination, unless besides a mere sufficiency of the thing flowing from its innate dignity we admit, from the will of God accepting this victim and of Christ offering the same, a stable and fixed decree of God according to which this death of Christ can bring eternal life to all and each. And thus far we have treated the first member of our thesis: in which we have shown that that bare sufficiency which is understood in Christ’s death itself considered by itself does not suffice for this, that Christ be said to have died for all, or that his death be held the universal cause of salvation with respect to the whole human race. Let us show further what that is which is required beyond this for the matter. This second thesis will serve to illustrate that point.

34Christ’s death, by reason of the Evangelical covenant stabilized with all human beings through it, is affirmed as truly endured for all human beings, and Christ in the same respect is asserted to have died sufficiently for all. We designate that pact of which we made mention before: If you have believed, you will be saved; or, Whoever has believed will be saved (Romans 10:9). That this pact concerning granting remission of sins, and concerning human beings to be saved by faith, has been sanctioned by the blood and death of the Son of God, first appears from the sacred Scriptures. In the institution of the Lord’s Supper Christ himself says (Luke 22:20): This cup is that new testament in my blood, which is poured out for you. As if he had said, The wine is a symbol of the Lord’s blood, by which blood that new covenant concerning remission of sins and our justification by faith is sanctioned and stabilized. And the Apostle (Hebrews 9:22): Without shedding of blood there is no remission. That covenant therefore entered with human beings, by which God bound himself to remit the sins of believers, has its firmness in Christ’s death. The same Apostle (Romans 3:25) teaches that God set forth Christ to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, for declaring his righteousness through the remission of sins that were before. In Christ’s blood or death, then, this Evangelical covenant is founded, according to which by faith remission of sins, justification, and eternal salvation are conferred on human beings.

Not to be long in a matter clear enough: since this conditioned promise, If you have believed, you will be saved, flows from God’s gracious affection toward human beings, it cannot have its foundation elsewhere than in the death and merit of Christ the Mediator, in whom all God’s free promises are Yes and Amen (2 Corinthians 1:20). For the act of faith itself is not of such worth that by its own dignity or merit it could obtain from God remission of sins and salvation; but the death and blood of the Son of God are of such worth that by their merit and power they can justify and save any believer according to the tenor of the Evangelical covenant. Through Christ’s death, therefore, this covenant has been stabilized.

35But there remains in the second place that which has more scruple: whether this Evangelical covenant, If you have believed, you will be saved, which we have shown stabilized through Christ’s death, pertains by Divine ordination to the whole human race, or only to singular and certain persons. We defend it as firmed with the whole human race. Which can stand clear. First, from the mandate and promise of Christ himself sending his Apostles into the whole world after death endured and overcome (Mark 16:15–16): He said to them, Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who has believed and been baptized will be saved; but he who has not believed will be condemned. On which words of promise the most learned Calvin rightly annotated that this promise was joined on, which would allure the whole human race to faith. It is therefore understood as stabilized with the whole human race. For a promise has no force of alluring to any action except those to whom it is presupposed as made.

Second, the same is plain from the practice of the Apostles and of all Evangelical Ministers conforming to Christ’s mandate and promise. For these, with no respect had to nation or predestination, boldly promise remission of sins under the condition of faith to all and each whom it is given them to meet; by this very deed they acknowledge the covenant concerning remission of sins through faith in Christ’s blood to be universal. For a conditioned pact cannot seriously be proposed to them, and the annexed benefit promised to them under condition, to whom by the will of the one making the pact the pact itself does not extend. For example: if some king should enter this pact with certain persons, that he is willing to pardon them a crime of offended majesty if as suppliants they seek pardon from him; it would not thence be lawful for any of the King’s servants to go to the prison and announce promiscuously to all that pardon is to be obtained from the King if only they have cast themselves as suppliants at his knees — because this pact does not look to those alone whom the Royal good pleasure willed included? Likewise neither would it be lawful for God’s Ministers to promise promiscuously to all under the condition of faith remission and salvation, unless it were certain to them that by God’s will this conditioned pact was entered and stabilized with all. But this the Apostles did; this we do: therefore we acknowledge this pact firmed with all and each, that is, with the whole human race.

36But perhaps someone may say: Even if this pact stabilized by Christ’s blood pertains not promiscuously to all human beings but to the elect alone, yet remission and salvation can be proposed and offered to all under the hypothesis of faith, because it is certain that the elect alone will perseveringly believe; and therefore no one of the non-elect will ever be able to charge that this conditioned covenant was false on God’s part as to himself, or violated. But this reply is of no moment. For the truth of any conditional proposition is to be conceived before the positing of the condition: indeed, although the condition is never going to come into act, still the truth of a rightly instituted conditional proposition ought to stand. Here, then, the conditional proposition or promise, If you have believed, your sins will be remitted to you, is false as to Cain or Judas unless a true foundation of the connexion is given, if it should happen that they believe. Nor does it matter at all to the truth of a conditioned proposition whether they are going to believe or not; since in such a proposition the ratio of the connexion is looked to, not the truth or falsity of the parts taken separately. If Peter shall have denied Christ, he will obtain eternal life, is a false proposition because of the weakness of the connexion, and yet each part separately was true. If Peter shall not have believed, he will not obtain eternal life, is a true proposition, and yet each part taken apart was false: for Peter both believed and obtained eternal life. By like reason, then, this conditional pronouncement, If you have believed, you will obtain remission of sins and eternal life, would be false as to any non-elect person, even if he is supposed never going to believe, if the antecedent ratio and cause of the connexion is lacking: but it is lacking unless that conditioned pact is asserted stabilized with all and each human being. For it does not follow: God in Christ’s death sanctioned a covenant concerning saving all the elect by faith: Therefore if Cain shall have believed, he will be saved. That conditioned covenant is therefore stabilized with the whole human race.

3. We prove that this Evangelical pact stabilized in Christ’s death, concerning giving salvation under the condition of faith, is universal, by urging this same reason further, and that from the concessions of those who seem to oppose us. Those therefore who try most of all to restrict Christ’s death nevertheless concede that by the merit of Christ’s death there is some way and ratio constituted by which any unbeliever can escape merited condemnation, namely if he believes. They concede that Christ’s death would abundantly have sufficed for saving all human beings, if as many human beings as are in the whole world believed in him. They concede finally that the word of the Gospel concerning Christ crucified is announced indiscriminately to elect and non-elect, and all are commanded to believe in him, with this promise added, that all believing in him will obtain remission of sins. These things posited, I argue thus: If as many human beings as are in the whole world would obtain remission of sins and salvation if they believed, then there is firmed by Christ’s death a universal pact concerning saving any human being under the aforesaid condition of faith: But the first is true: Therefore also the second. The reason of the consequence is this: Because that conditional which they admit as much as to non-elect as to elect — namely, If you have believed, whoever at length you are, you will be saved — does not have necessary truth from the nature of the thing, as these do, If there is fire, it is hot, or, If it is a human being, it is an animal: it remains therefore that it have its truth founded in some voluntary ordination of God, by which he himself sanctioned that as to any human being, the antecedent being posited in being, the consequent also would be posited. For no third foundation can be assigned on which the truth of the aforesaid conditional rests. Therefore it must be confessed that that Evangelical pact is universal from God’s own ordination, and looks equally to all and each human being.

If anyone here objects that the Gospel itself was never announced to all human beings, and therefore neither does that Evangelical pact embrace the whole human race, or pertain to all and each, I reply: it does not follow, The Evangelical pact is not announced to this nation, or to this singular human being, Therefore as to them it was not sanctioned or stabilized: But this rightly follows, The Evangelical pact is not of itself Announceable to this nation, or to this human being, Therefore it pertains to them in no way. For other causes of the Gospel’s not being announced can underlie, while we still confess it announceable to all; which causes it is not of the present design to search out. We say therefore that in any age, to any nation, and to any human being, remission of sins in the Redeemer’s death under the condition of faith could truly have been announced. So in the time of the Old Testament this covenant was revealed to Job the foreigner. So in our age if an Evangelical Minister came to the Antipodes, he would not wait for a new stabilization of this conditioned covenant as to them, but at once, acknowledging it as stabilized, would announce it to them. And hence it is that the Apostle calls this word of the Gospel a mystery hidden from ages and generations, but now made manifest, and so on (Colossians 1:26). He therefore acknowledged it stabilized from eternity with the human race, although hidden or made manifest to these or those according to the Divine good pleasure. See (Romans 16:25–26) and (Ephesians 3:5) and 9.

37It remains that, by reason of this universal pact stabilized through Christ’s death with the whole human race, we show that in a true and sound sense we can affirm that Christ suffered, or died, for all human beings: which we will set out in few words.

But this I warn beforehand: for verifying this formula of speaking it is not absolutely necessary, neither from the sense of the Scriptures, nor from the sense of the Fathers, nor from the very force of the words, that we maintain that all those for whom Christ is affirmed to have been crucified and to have died are to be led through to eternal life by the infallible order of predestination by the benefit of Christ’s death; although concerning certain ones to be saved we gladly acknowledge that there was such an intention of Christ dying, and in its place we will confirm it with clear testimonies of the Scriptures and arguments.

First, then, from the usage of the Scriptures these two are not always equivalent: Christ died for these human beings, and, God predestined these human beings to be saved infallibly through Christ’s death: because the Scriptures often pronounce universally that Christ died for all; but they never affirm universally that God predestined all to be saved by the benefit of Christ’s death. To what end, I ask, would the Spirit of God in proclaiming Christ’s death so often use general terms extending it to all, and in celebrating Divine predestination always use restrictive terms limiting it to few, if Christ’s death and God’s predestination as to human beings had an equal and plainly the same ambit? Second, because in the sacred Scriptures Christ is said in the same sense to have reconciled human beings, to have given himself as the price of redemption for human beings, in which sense he is said to have died for human beings; yet he is said to have reconciled and redeemed the world inasmuch as the world has in his death a universal cause constituted and stabilized, which any mortal, apprehending it by faith, can be actually reconciled to God and freed from the guilt of sins: Therefore also he is rightly conceived dead for all, inasmuch as all in his death have eternal life exposed to them and obtainable by faith. Just as, then, when God is said to have reconciled the world in Christ, or Christ to have given himself as the price of redemption for all, God is not therefore said to have predestined all in Christ, so neither from this, that he is affirmed crucified and dead for all. Further, the sacred Scriptures clearly extend Christ’s death, as a benefit applicable by Divine ordination, even to those who by their unbelief applied it least to themselves. They therefore extend it outside the number of the elect, of whom there is no one to whom that lytron is not infallibly applied unto salvation. Here belong those places of the Scriptures in which unbelievers are pronounced to be condemned because they have not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God, sent into the world that the world might be saved through him (John 3:17–18); because they will not come to Christ that they may have life (John 5:40); because they thrust away the saving word of God and judge themselves unworthy of eternal life (Acts 13:46); finally, because through unbelief, the promise of entering into God’s rest being left, they were frustrated by their own fault (Hebrews 4). All these prove that, from the sense of the Scriptures, Christ’s death and merits were ordained also for the use of those who scorned and thrust them away: but that they were not ordained to such according to the infallible order of predestination is plain from the event: Therefore for verifying that Christ is said according to the Scriptures to have died for these or those human beings, it is not necessarily required that he be understood dead for them with an absolute purpose of saving the same.

38From the Scriptures let us descend to the Fathers. It is plain among them that this proposition, Christ died for these human beings, does not avail in the same way as this, Christ will by his death save these human beings infallibly. We will be content with a few testimonies, because the matter is most well known to those who are even moderately versed in the Fathers’ writings. Ambrose, on Psalm 118, affirms that Christ suffered for all, and yet at once adds that those who do not believe in Christ defraud themselves of this general benefit. Therefore for Ambrose, Christ suffering for someone, and deciding by his passion that someone is to be saved infallibly, do not sound the same. Prosper, to the Chapters of the Gauls, reply 6: Most rightly is the Savior said to have been crucified for the redemption of the whole world. Yet the same affirms, Sentence 9, that although Christ’s blood is the price of the whole world, yet those are strangers from this price who, delighted with their captivity, were unwilling to be redeemed. So that of these it is rightly said, The Redeemer of the world gave his blood for the world, and the world was unwilling to be redeemed — to the Chapters of the Gauls, reply 9. Therefore with Prosper these two are not counted as of equal force: Christ was crucified for these, and Christ will procure that these be saved infallibly. Theophylact on (Hebrews 2:9): God gave his Son to us unto death, not for the faithful only, but for the whole circle of the lands. For although not all are saved, yet he fulfilled what was of his office. From which words it is plain that for Theophylact it is not the same if someone has said, Christ was given by God that he might die for all, as if he had said, Christ by God’s absolute good pleasure will save all through his death. I pass over more testimonies.

Finally I add this. From the mere force of these words, Christ died for all, it cannot be inferred that Christ died for all in such a way that he absolutely decreed by this his death to work the salvation of all efficaciously and infallibly: because truly and properly he is said to die for someone who dies for procuring another’s good, even if that other by his own vice perceives no advantage thence. For the particle for denotes a respect to another in the will and intention of the one dying; but it does not perpetually and necessarily involve such a respect that no one is rightly said to die for another unless he has decreed by his death to free the other absolutely and infallibly from death. For what if under some condition he renders liberation from death possible for guilty human beings, which without his death was impossible? Is he not by this alone truly asserted dead for them? Ambrose asserts it, who writes that Christ came for the salvation of all, and undertook the redemption of all, inasmuch as he opened a remedy by which all could escape, although there are many who ascribe the causes of their death to themselves, because they were unwilling to be cured. We do not therefore deny that the particle for in the sacred Scriptures, when Christ’s death is treated, sometimes designates that special intention according to which liberation from death and transfer into life is infallibly destined for those for whom he is asserted dead: but that this is so perpetual or necessary that the truth of this assertion, Christ died for all, does not stand unless it is posited that he had that absolute intention of saving all — that at last we utterly deny. You see now that that secret and absolute good pleasure concerning saving human beings, according to the inscrutable order of predestination, is not necessary for this, that Christ be rightly and truly said to have suffered and died for all.

What then is necessary? I will say in few words. Since Christ’s death has a double respect, one to God, to whom this precious lytron was offered and paid, the other to human beings, for whom it was offered and paid: Christ is said to have suffered, been offered, or died for all, if by his death and passion it is established that he effected that God himself is understood otherwise disposed toward giving eternal life to all human beings than he would be without this death of Christ; and also if it is established that any human being has, by the virtue of Christ’s death, some right of claiming for himself remission of sins and eternal life, which with this death shut out he could in no way have or claim. Either of these clearly shows that the force of Christ’s death extends itself to the whole human race, and therefore that we speak neither falsely nor improperly when we say that Christ died for all human beings.

As to the former: It is certain that, with respect to Christ’s death, God’s will is now otherwise compared toward all and each human being than it would be without it. For by this very thing, that Christ in his human nature suffered death, without any other medium intervening, this at least has been effected with God, that he wills to be reconciled to any human being believing and penitent, to remit sins, to confer eternal life. Hence for Cain, if he has done well and repented, remission is prepared on God’s part (Genesis 4:7). Hence to any wicked person it is said in God’s own name, If he shall have turned from his sins, he shall altogether live, he shall not die (Ezekiel 18:21). Take away the respect of Christ’s death present to the Divine mind and embracing the human race, and nothing true, solid, or serious would underlie promises of this kind as to the non-elect. For the promise of conditioned remission ought to have its truth in Christ’s death no less than the remission itself which is granted when the condition is performed. Nor does anything avail to break this universal force which Christ’s death obtained with God, that no one of the non-elect fulfills that Evangelical condition of faith and penitence; for it is enough that by the force of Christ’s death, and of the Divine ordination stabilized through it, if the condition were fulfilled by any human being, the benefit of remission and eternal life would doubtless follow.

Now as to what looks to the latter: that also is certain and connected, that any human being can claim for himself this right by the benefit of Christ’s death, that if he has believed, at once all his sins are deleted, and he himself is adopted as heir of eternal life. For although, because of defect of the fulfilled condition, many cannot in fact claim these promised goods, yet there is no mortal who, if the condition had been fulfilled by him, would not have had them redound upon him from the force of Christ’s death. This conditioned decree of God stabilized by Christ’s death, and revealed in the Gospel — from which we understand that God by the virtue of Christ’s passion has obliged himself to give remission of sins and eternal life to every believer, and from which there has accrued a universal right not to these or those singular persons, but to any individual of the human race, of obtaining remission under the aforesaid condition — sufficiently suffices for this, that Christ be truly asserted to have suffered for all human beings. Nor is this conditioned decree firmed by Christ’s death and extended to all to be despised as a thing of nothing because the infallible fulfillment of the condition depends on another secret decree: since that secret decree, inasmuch as it embraces these or those singular persons, is utterly unknown to us, and therefore is scarcely to be preached to anyone by name; but this conditioned decree, which comprehends the whole human race, is to be announced to all and each, as the most solid foundation of our Evangelical doctrine, according to that of the Apostle (Romans 10:8–9, 11): This is that word of faith which we preach, namely, That if you shall have confessed with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and shall have believed in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For the Scripture says, Whoever believes in him will not be put to shame. This benefit by the virtue of Christ’s death is exposed and obtainable to all human beings under the condition of faith; and in that respect Christ is affirmed dead for all.

39We have taught that Christ died for all human beings, in this sense: that through Christ’s death an Evangelical covenant has been stabilized with the whole human race, according to which remission of sins and eternal life is exposed to all human beings under a possible condition of faith. Certain persons, fixing the eyes of their mind only on the secret of predestination and reprobation, cannot grasp how Christ, faith, remission of sins, eternal life, or any spiritual and saving good can pertain in any way, or under any possible condition, to those who were not included in the number of the predestinate before the foundations of the world were laid — even though Christ may be offered to them in Evangelical preaching, faith may be required of them, and remission and eternal life to be obtained through Christ may be promised to them under that very condition of faith. Briefly, then, we will show that this condition of faith, which is required for this, that Christ’s death endured for all be singularly applied to this or that person, neither is, nor ought to be conceived by us as, utterly impossible for any wayfarer. Here it must be recalled to memory what we warned from the beginning: that this possibility is founded in a supernatural help possibly to be received by anyone while we are here on the way; according to that celebrated saying of Prosper of Aquitaine: This is the difference between bad human beings and demons, that for human beings, even very bad ones, reconciliation still remains, if God has mercy; but for demons no conversion is reserved forever (Objection of Vincent, reply 6).

First, then, when we say that faith, or believing, is something possible for any wayfarer, we look not to an active and formal power, as if any wayfarer could by the liberty of his own choice elicit this act of believing; but to a passive power, as they call it, and a material one, because in any wayfarer this can be effected by God, that he be converted and believe the Gospel. For we are said to be able to do something in two ways, as Aquinas well observed: namely either by a power that is in us, as we say that a stone can be moved downward; or by a power considered on another’s part, as we say that a stone can be moved upward, not by an innate power, but by the power of the one throwing it. In this manner we affirm that any wayfarer can believe; or that the condition of faith is possible for any wayfarer, not by a proximate power residing in himself, but by a supernatural help which can be supplied by God at any moment to any wayfarer; according to that of John the Baptist (Luke 3:8): I say to you that God is able even from these stones to raise up children of Abraham. Therefore no heart is so hardened and stony that it cannot be softened by God and bent to faith and penitence. This is what Augustine signified in other words when he wrote that being able to have faith is of the nature of human beings, but having it is of the grace of the faithful (On the Predestination of the Saints, chapter 5). To this the same Augustine also alluded in the Soliloquies, book 1, chapter 1, where when he had said, Let us believe, if this is in our power, he at once adds, Our power is God himself.

40Second, when we refer this possibility of having faith to God’s active power, and to the human being’s receptive power, this is to be understood not of God’s absolute power only, but of God’s ordinary power. For among Theologians some things are called possible by God’s absolute power, some by ordinary power. It will not be foreign to our purpose to give this distinction explained in a few words. That, then, is called possible by God’s absolute power which from the nature of the thing does not involve a contradiction if it were done; that, on the contrary, is impossible which would involve a contradiction. And under this consideration, as Thomas rightly has it, whatever can have the ratio of a being is counted among these absolute possibles; but among impossibles, what cannot have the ratio of a being — such as whatever implies in itself to be and not to be at once. That such things are not subject to Divine omnipotence argues no defect in God. Because just as there is no defect of the power of sight when it is not directed to what is not visible, so neither is there a defect of absolute power because it is not terminated to what is impossible. It therefore suffices for establishing God’s omnipotence that he can do whatever is possible to be done: but of those things that are otherwise disposed it is more fittingly said that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do such things. To this some refer that of (Luke 1:37): No word will be impossible with God — that is, Whatever can be conceived by any intellect without implication of contradiction, that can be done by God. The norm, then, for judging what God can do by absolute power ought to be taken from the thing itself; because where there is no defect of possibility on the thing’s part, there is no defect of power on God’s part.

But this absolute power is not the one we properly and proximately look to in our thesis, but rather that which we call ordained or ordinary. That is taken in relation to some common law given and promulgated by God, according to which something is understood as possible to be done or not done, or also according to the common course of natural or moral things, as Báñez rightly has it. In this sense we affirm that, however unknown to us the secret decree of the Divine will may be concerning giving or not giving faith to singular persons, yet because there is no common law promulgated by God deciding the opposite, we ought to pronounce concerning any wayfarer that the condition of faith and penitence is possible for him according to God’s ordinary power: just as, on the contrary, we rightly say that according to ordained or ordinary power faith and penitence are already impossible for any damned person.

41That possibility of having faith, which looks to any wayfarer, is confirmed by a triple argument. First, one drawn from Divine mercy. For God, as Prosper speaks, takes from no one (still constituted on the way) the path of correction, nor strips anyone of the possibility of good. Moreover he has fixed a law concerning granting remission of sins and eternal life to any penitent and believing person: I do not will the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live (Ezekiel 33:11). Therefore not only according to God’s absolute power, but according to ordinary power, any unbeliever and impious person can be gifted with true penitence and saving faith. Of the unbelieving Jews the Apostle truly says (Romans 11:23): God is able to graft them in again. And of all contumacious sinners it is rightly affirmed in God’s person (Revelation 2:21): I gave them time that they might repent, and they were unwilling to repent. He who has so granted human beings the whole span of this life that in any moment of it conversion to God can be saving for them, according to that most celebrated saying of the Prophet (Ezekiel 18:21–22), If the wicked shall have done penitence from all his sins, etc., I will not remember all his iniquities — the same has also reserved to himself that according to his ordained power he can infuse the grace of faith and penitence into anyone not yet damned to the underworld. Hence it is that we ought to put no one outside a possible state of salvation whom God’s patience allows to live.

Second, the same can be shown by an argument drawn from the respect of Christ the Head toward any of the wayfarers. For although a natural head does not have power of influencing except into members conjoined and united, yet this mystical Head can act upon separated members and pour into them vivifying grace by which they are united to him. In which sense Aquinas not inconveniently lays down (Part 3, question 8, article 1) that Christ is the head of all human beings, but according to diverse degrees. He is called Head principally of those who are united to him by glory, or by grace actually communicated; less principally of those who according to God’s ordinary law can still be united to him, whether that power is to be reduced into act or not: but of those who are in no potency to receive Christ’s influx he can in no way be called Head. Such, however, ought to be judged all and only the damned; because according to God’s promulgated will there is no redemption from the underworld. The power of having faith, then, as to anyone still constituted in this life, is founded in the most sufficient virtue of Christ the Head for influencing, and in the aforesaid mercy of God, who according to the common law willed the whole span of this life to lie open for receiving.

Last, that the condition of penitence and faith, under which Christ’s death is applicable to any human being unto salvation, is possible while we live here, is plain from the diverse condition of human beings while they are wayfarers and after they have come to the term. By the consent of all Theologians the will of any wayfarer is for this state flexible toward the good; just as, on the contrary, the will of the damned for that state is immoveably hardened in evil. However clear it is. That after this life the state of bad human beings is immobile and plainly immutable, no one doubts. For as Damascene rightly has it, book 2, chapter 4: What the fall is to angels, the same is death to human beings. If a tree shall have fallen, whether toward the south or toward the north, in whatever place it shall have fallen, there it will be (Ecclesiastes 11:3). On the contrary, the will is flexible and the malice of human beings constituted in this mortal life is mutable, so far that by God’s ordinary power any unbeliever can be illuminated, any impenitent converted — in a word, any impious person justified and saved. Whence that of the Apostle (2 Timothy 2:25–26): Those who are affected with a contrary mind are to be instructed with gentleness: if at some time God may give them that repenting they may acknowledge the truth and receive soundness of mind. He therefore hints that these things can still be done, and ought to be hoped for by us. Not unlike is that of Peter (2 Peter 3:9): The Lord is patient toward us, not willing that any perish, but that all tend to repentance. There is no other place for correcting morals than in this life, says Augustine, Letter 54. But in this life while we are, no time is either too late or too early for recovering the soul’s health, as Clement of Alexandria truly has it in the Stromata. Who is going to receive faith and penitence from God before he exits life, who is not going to receive, is a secret hanging from his will; but that the very power unto faith and penitence remains to the extreme period of this life — although such a power would indeed be in vain unless in some it were reduced to act; but that it is not reduced in all is to be referred partly to God’s secret will, partly to the manifest wickedness of human beings. Under both respects, from a capacity or power unto faith and salvation least reduced into act as to many, there follows for God a greater manifestation of his mercy toward the elect, a clearer manifestation of justice toward the impious unbelieving and impenitent: and therefore such a power is not granted them in vain. Alvarez well, On Helps, disputation 105: For some power not to be in vain, it is not required that it sometime be reduced to every act it can produce; but it suffices that it be reduced to some, or several. For just as no one would truly say that the power of perceiving the mathematical disciplines is given to human beings by nature in vain, although many capable of these disciplines do not find masters who actually instruct them in the same; so no one will have affirmed that this power of believing and repenting is present in vain to all wayfarers by God’s fixed law, although God does not effect in all that they believe, that they repent.

42That also is objected which seems to cast a greater scruple: that God from eternity not only foreknew but predestined to whom he will infallibly give faith, remission, and eternal life, and to whom he will not: But God cannot in time act otherwise, or otherwise than he from eternity foreknew and decreed that he would do. On this argument Abelard once boldly asserted that God cannot do anything beyond those things which he has done or is going to do. If this holds, since it is certain that as to the greater part of human beings God neither foreknew faith to be produced in them nor decreed it, there is no ground for our saying that this condition of faith is in any way possible as to the non-elect still constituted in this life.

That God does or permits nothing without an antecedent eternal decree and eternal foreknowledge is most true. But if anyone thence concludes that God cannot do by ordinary power anything beyond those things which he foreknew and decreed to be done, that is most false. For as our Halensis rightly has it, Part 1, question 21, article 4, member 2: Divine power is limited neither by God’s will nor by his foreknowledge, although the egress of Divine power into act is always accompanied by his foreknowledge and will. Aquinas renders a reason of this matter fit enough, namely: Because the very doing is subject to the foreknowledge and ordination of the one doing; but not the very being-able, which is natural. For God therefore does something because he wills; yet he can not therefore because he wills, but because he is powerful by his nature (Part 1, question 25, article 5, to the first). The same Aquinas answers the aforesaid objection in form in the Disputed Questions On the Power of God, article 5, reply to 1, whose words I will set down: This locution, God CANNOT DO EXCEPT WHAT HE FOREKNOWS HE WILL DO, is twofold: because the exceptive particle EXCEPT is referred either to the power which is imported by the verb CAN, or to the act which is imported by the verb DO. If in the first way, then the locution is false: For God can do more things than he foreknows he will do. If in the second way, then the sense is that it cannot be that something is done by God and is not foreknown by God: so the locution is true; but this sense does nothing for the purpose. Thus far he. But because some so wholly lean on this contemplation of the eternal and secret will and foreknowledge that they admit almost nothing else into their minds, we will show briefly that neither the Scriptures, nor the Fathers, nor reason itself permit that according to these secret and eternal decrees of predestination it be established by us what is possible for God, or impossible, according to his ordinary power.

Let us begin from the Scriptures: which are accustomed not to restrict God’s power according to the secret decrees of his will, but to extend it according to God’s infinite strength, and according to the rule revealed in the word. (Matthew 3:9): God is able from these stones to raise up children of Abraham. (Matthew 19:26): All things are possible with God. And (Matthew 26:53): Can I not ask the Father, and he will exhibit to me more than twelve legions of angels? (Mark 14:36): All things are possible to you: transfer this cup from me. So also the Apostle speaks of the refractory Jews: God is able to graft them in again (Romans 11:23). And of any fallen human being: Who are you who judge another’s servant? To his own Lord he stands or falls. But he will stand: for God is able to make him stand (Romans 14:4). Finally of any wayfarer that is true: God is able to make all grace abound in him (2 Corinthians 9:8). I pass over more. From these it is plain enough that God’s power is least to be judged from his secret decrees: For he did not decree to raise children of Abraham from stones, nor to free Christ from the Jews’ hands, nor to raise and establish any fallen person, nor to pour the abundance of his grace into any and all: indeed he decreed and foreknew that he would least do all these things, which yet (if we are willing to hear the sacred Scriptures) are not therefore held for impossibles.

Augustine to this sense: Almighty God can do many things which he neither wills nor does. The same Father also presses the point in Judas himself, a reprobate beyond controversy: The Lord, he says, who raised Lazarus in the body — could he not raise Judas in the mind? He could indeed, but he was unwilling. What Augustine does not fear to affirm of Judas, let us intrepidly affirm of any wayfarer, the secret will or foreknowledge of God concerning the same notwithstanding: namely that God can raise anyone in the mind, that is, gift him with penitence and faith and saving grace; because of no particular human being has he revealed that he wills not this, and of each he has revealed that by ordinary power he can do this while he is still constituted on the way. On this will we ought to lean, and least to divine about the possibility or impossibility of things from a will utterly unknown to us.

43Finally reason itself teaches that ordinary Divine power is not restricted by the secret decrees of eternal predestination. First, because we little humans sense that our power is not constrained according to the decrees of our will. He who has most firmly decreed with himself not to give alms to this singular human being does not thence lose the power of giving: and on the contrary, he who has decreed to give to another does not thence take from himself the power of not giving. For just as he freely willed one of opposites, when he could have willed the other, so also he freely does the one, the power of doing the other not lost. If the matter so stands in a human being, whose power is mutable and losable, how much more in God, whose power is immutable, eternal, and always the same. Second, because if we posit God’s ordinary power bound to his eternal and occult decrees and as it were circumscribed, we could ask nothing from God with sure faith — I do not say that he wills, but that he can help us. For example: if I sense myself struck by Satan himself with some heavy temptation, I cannot with the certainty of faith flee back to God as able to free me, because it is uncertain to me what he decreed from eternity about this matter. By like reason we could not pray God to convert any unbelievers to faith, to bring any impious persons back to penitence, with full persuasion that he can do what we ask; because what was decreed to God in secret before the foundations of the world about these things is hidden from us. Third, finally, because if nothing else is judged possible to be done besides those things which God decreed to be done, it would follow that Divine power is not infinite. For that power is finite which is equaled to finite effects and is educed into its whole act. But infinite power, as Halensis rightly has it, Part 1, question 21, Can be educed into act, but not into the whole. God can therefore do many things which he does not will — for example, gift any singular person whatever with faith, justify, save. Indeed, he can will many things which he does not will, and yet his will (as Lombard rightly has it, Book 1, Distinction 43, Letter E) Can be neither new nor mutable in any way. Which, although he can will what he never willed, yet not otherwise, nor by a new will, but only by a sempiternal will can he will. For he can will what from eternity he can have willed: for he has the power of willing, both now and from eternity, what yet he neither now wills nor from eternity willed. Thus far he.

We thought these things should be set out a little more fully, that it may stand clearer that Christ’s death is applicable to any wayfarer, because the condition of Faith and penitence is possible for any wayfarer, the secret decree of predestination or preterition in no way destroying or coarcting this power either on God’s part or on human beings’ part. Therefore those act with little consideration who try to overturn the universality of Christ’s death, pertaining to any human beings under the tenor of the Evangelical pact, by the decrees of occult election and preterition. So much for our second thesis: let us go on to the third.

44Chapter 5. The third thesis is proposed, illustrated, and confirmed.

We have already finished our prior theses, in which it was explained in what sense the death of Christ is to be acknowledged as a universal cause of human salvation; and it was also shown that those do not rightly understand the most received saying of the theologians, Christ died for all sufficiently, for the elect efficaciously, who admit a bare sufficiency of the thing considered in itself, and meanwhile exclude an ordered sufficiency of the same, belonging from the will of God to all and each human beings according to the tenor of the Evangelical pact, under a possible condition of faith. Now indeed, because on the other side some have been found who stretch this universal force and ordination of the death of Christ considered, by this alone that Christ offered himself on the altar of the cross for all, beyond what is equal, a third thesis will have to be added by us, which may set the limits to which this universal force of the death of Christ extends itself, and beyond which it by no means diffuses itself — this force which embraces the human race and arises from the passion of Christ itself, considered without any other medium. It will be of this sort.

The death or passion of Christ, as a universal cause of human salvation, has by the very fact of the oblation rendered God the Father so far placated and reconciled to the human race that he may truly now be said ready to receive any human being into grace as soon as he has believed in Christ; yet the aforesaid death of Christ places no one, at least of adults, into the state of grace, of actual reconciliation, or of salvation, before he believes.

There are two members of this thesis, which we will treat separately and confirm with arguments, when a few things have first been premised about the word reconciliation for a clearer understanding of the whole matter. It must therefore be known that God, offended by the sin of man, not only stripped him of his paternal favor and adjudged him to eternal death, but further firmly decreed never to be reconciled to us under any condition by anything we would ever do or suffer. Just as the offense of God was contained in these two quasi-grades, so our reconciliation is carried through in two other grades answering these as it were from the opposite side. The prior grade of reconciliation is understood as procured as soon as — although not by us, yet in our name — that was done whereby the Divine will is inclined so that it already wills to return into grace with us under some certain condition to be performed, and to impart remission of sins and eternal life. This grade of reconciliation we affirm procured for all human beings by the very force and the very merit of the Lord’s passion, without any other medium. And hence it is (as we annotated above) that the death of Christ is set forth as the redemption or reconciliation of the whole world: God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19). Into which sense Prosper, Against the chapters of the Gauls, objection 9: The Redeemer of the world gave his blood for the world, etc. See Augustine, Epistles 159, 171, 173. This reconciliation of the world, therefore, is as it were the first grade toward the actual reconciliation of singular human beings; to none of whom would access to this Divine grace under the condition of faith have lain open, unless it were that God by the death of Christ had somehow stood reconciled to the human race. The posterior grade of reconciliation is situated in this, and is then judged acquired for this or that singular person, when, the condition of faith in Christ having been performed, he is received into the paternal grace of God, is justified, and is gifted with a hereditary right to eternal life. No one arrives at this posterior grade by the sole work of Christ himself offering himself on the cross to God the Father, but there must accede, before he obtains this actual reconciliation, an act or work of the human being himself believing in Christ the Redeemer and by faith applying the merit of his death to himself singularly. To this that of John 8:24 can be referred: Unless you believe that I am he, you will die in your sins. The death of Christ therefore does not snatch from death, nor actually reconcile to God, this or that singular person, except as believing.

45With this distinction or explanation of the word reconciliation set down, let us now return to the proposed thesis, whose prior member, to be confirmed by us in the prior place, stood thus: By the very fact of the death of Christ God is so far reconciled to any human being that he may truly be said ready to admit any into grace, even to eternal life, if only he has believed. We will dispatch this matter with fewer words, because the things we disputed about the universal pact, stabilized by the death of Christ under the condition of faith, all look toward this: yet we will add some things.

First, therefore, the very tenor of our Evangelical preaching demonstrates this. For what else do we preach to impious human beings and those still unbelieving, than that by the death of Christ it has been effected that the Divine will now stands toward the human race far otherwise than it would have stood with this death of Christ shut out? Namely, that that just God who without the blood of the Mediator would have breathed nothing other than wrath and death against us all and each, now placated by the blood of the Redeemer is ready to indulge pardon and life to all and each, provided they present themselves as suppliants and as believing in the Mediator. God would never order Ministers to preach this promiscuously to human beings unless he were in fact so disposed in mind. For the Gospel is a word of truth (Colossians 1:5), which announces nothing false or vain to sinners. But it pronounces and promises that God is so far placated and reconciled by the merit and efficacy of the blood of Christ poured out on the cross that he is ready to embrace any sinner whenever he has repented and believed: Therefore, the importunate speculation of election and reprobation set aside, the aforesaid efficacy of the death of Christ ought to be acknowledged toward all and each, and promiscuously proclaimed.

Second, that actual reconciliation of any singular person which is promised and exhibited to any believer because of the merit of crucified Christ presupposes that prior grade of reconciliation whereby God is understood so placated by the death of Christ that he already wills, under the condition of faith performed, to return into grace with any sinner. Whoever therefore confesses that any human being, however burdened with sins, as soon as he has believed is received into grace because of the death and merit of Christ, ought not to deny that by the death of Christ this has been effected toward all and each, that they have God ready, even obligated, to grant this benefit of reconciliation under the aforesaid condition to any. The antecedent is confirmed. Because we cannot even think the act of reconciliation or of perpetual remission going out as it were by law and terminated to any believing person at the very moment when he has apprehended the Mediator by true faith, unless we simultaneously think and acknowledge that the Divine will by the death of Christ is so prepared and predisposed that it leans toward exhibiting this favor to any human being, provided he has believed. This propensity or readiness of the Divine will to indulge pardon and grace to any human being as soon as he has performed the condition of faith I notice expressed by some with the word placability or reconciliability: which placability or reconciliability, obtained by the passion of Christ considered in itself, I do not understand why certain theologians reject so superciliously. For God would not be actually placated and reconciled to any human being as soon as he believed — that is, the condition of faith performed — unless he were placable and reconciliable to any human being before he believed — that is, under the condition of faith to be performed.

Here certain theologians object against us: Therefore on our view God will not be reconciled and placated to the sinful human being through and because of the death of Christ, but only reconciliable and placable: likewise the human being through the death of Christ is not reconciled to God, but reconciliable under a certain condition, namely of faith.

46Solution. I answer that the consequence is vicious; God is reconciliable through the death of Christ to any human being about to believe: Therefore he is not reconciled through Christ to any believer, but will still be only reconciliable. Rather we profess that God is reconciliable to any human being about to believe through and because of Christ; that he is also reconciled to any believing human being through and because of Christ; and finally that he has given this condition of faith, by whose intervening actual reconciliation is acquired through and because of the same Christ. In vain therefore and invalidly do they argue from the position of a universal benefit, namely of reconciliability under the condition of faith to be performed, to the removal or negation of particular benefits, for example of reconciliation and salvation; since both are fetched from the death and merit of Christ; although those general ones are carried through without any intervening act of ours, those particular ones not without some act of ours, although not because of any act of ours.

Objection 2. Second, this also is objected (which seems to be of greater moment): If by the death of Christ we posit God made so placable and reconciliable to any human being that he is ready to receive any into grace if he believes, yet actually reconciled to no one before he believes; then we seem to posit that the virtue of the death of Christ according to itself stands equally for all, that God himself also stands indifferently toward all, and as it were waits for the determination of a lower cause, so that the death of his Son may turn out for human beings either fruitful or fruitless: which is nothing other than, with the Semipelagians, to suspend the salvation or perdition of singular human beings from the proper free choice of each one, either apprehending or repelling Christ by faith.

I answer: Let it be granted that by the death of Christ God was made so far placated or placable to the human race that he will receive any into grace if he has believed, with no discrimination of persons (which is the very voice of the Gospel); yet it does not thence follow that this very discrimination of believers and non-believers, of the reconciled and the non-reconciled, finally of the saved and the lost, is to be recalled to the uncertain dice of human free choice. For he who promulgated this universal Evangelical decree, Whoever has believed will be saved, nonetheless reserved to himself the special privilege of giving faith to some by his singular mercy, of not giving it to others by his freest and most just will, and by their manifest unworthiness. By the virtue of the death of Christ God obligated himself to enter into reconciliation with any human being if he has believed; but he did not obligate himself to pour into every human being that efficacious grace by which it is infallibly effected that he believe. We therefore hold both: namely both that God is so far placated by the death of Christ that he is already ready to receive any into grace if they do penitence and believe in Christ; and that the same God who under the condition of faith is ready to indulge the grace of remission to all equally is nonetheless not so disposed that he stands equally toward all as to producing this condition of faith in them. A merchant is said ready to sell his wares if someone wills to buy them: but that, one being unwilling, another wills to buy, the merchant himself does not effect, but it depends on the free choice of each one. The matter does not so stand between God and us. For although by the virtue of the death of Christ he is already ready to give remission and to enter into reconciliation with any human being if he wills to believe in Christ, yet God has this peculiar thing, that he himself inspires in all believers this very will of believing. We do not therefore vote with the Semipelagians, but we say with the Fathers of Orange, Canon 6: If anyone says that mercy is conferred on us believing, willing, desiring, and knocking without the grace of God, and does not confess that it is done Divinely in us by the infusion and inspiration of the Holy Spirit that we believe and will, he resists the Apostle saying, By the grace of God I am what I am. So much concerning the first member of our thesis.

I come to the other member, which is formed in this manner. The death of Christ considered as a general cause of human salvation frees none of adults from the guilt and weight of their sins, constitutes none actually reconciled to God — in a word, places none in the state of grace and salvation — before faith applied to the Gospel.

47For the explanation of this proposition I will premise these few things.

The first is: that we, by the death of Christ generally considered as a cause of human salvation, denote nothing other than a consideration of the Lord’s passion in its immediate effect, which it produces of itself without any concurrence of human acts. This immediate effecting, which is produced without any media required from our side, we affirm to be reconciliability about to come into act as soon as we believe, not however actual reconciliation, or placement in the state of adoption and salvation before we believe.

The second thing which we thought should be premised looks to a certain discrimination to be observed here in the matter between adults and infants. For it has been said that none of adults is reconciled to God, or freed from the guilt of their sins, without an act of faith (which will shortly be proved). Whence it is clear that we admit that some of infants are by the virtue of the death of Christ absolved from sins and placed in the state of salvation, without any act of their will. For because they cannot by faith apply the blood of Christ for purging their souls, merciful God by the secret operation of his Spirit as it were sprinkles and vivifies their souls with the blood of Christ. This was well annotated by Aquinas, Disputed questions on Justification, article 3. Because children, he says, do not have whence they can convert themselves to the justifying cause, the justifying cause itself, namely the passion of Christ, is applied to them in baptism, and from this they are justified.

The last is: By the state of grace and salvation, which we deny belongs to any of adults before he has apprehended the mediator by an act of faith, we understand such a state as the Psalmist described, Psalm 32, when he pronounces blessed those whose iniquities have been remitted and whose sins have been covered; such as the Apostle painted, Colossians 1:12, 14, where he says they have been liberated from the power of darkness and translated into the kingdom of the beloved Son of God, already having redemption through his blood, namely remission of sins.

This thesis so explained must be proved, both against those who posit all human beings by the very merit of the passion of Christ received into the state of grace and salvation, and against those who think the elect at least reconciled from eternity, justified, and gifted with remission of their sins. Some attribute the former opinion to the Remonstrants: but, as it seems to me, however ambiguously and obscurely they speak, they are nonetheless alien from this error. They do indeed say, Hague Colloquy, page 9, that Christ by the death of the cross merited for all reconciliation and remission of sins. But they add, yet so that no one becomes a partaker of this remission in fact except believers. So elsewhere they say, page 131, that Christ by the death of the cross obtained for all reconciliation and remission of sins. But immediately they weave on this gloss, that the real participation of this obtained reconciliation and remission is proper to believers. Finally, pages 162 and 163, they expressly reject that dogma which is attributed to them by some, namely that all human beings by the death of Christ were restored from the fall and replaced in the state of grace; nor by remission obtained for all do they denote anything other than that a medium and mode has already been prepared and stabilized by the death of Christ whereby, faith applied, all and each can obtain remission of sins, page 186. So they soften and explain what seemed spoken more suspiciously in the Hague Colloquy: yet it must be confessed that some of them progressed somewhat further in this matter. Borreus, with Arminius, defends that God assumed the whole human race into the grace of reconciliation, Response to articles 13 and 14. Arnoldus against Tilenus seems also to sense the same, pages 232 and 261. Huberus and Puccius (whose writings I confess I have not yet seen) are everywhere charged with having taught that by the death of Christ all and each human beings were justified and restored into the bosom and grace of God. Now as concerns the latter opinion, I do not remember that I have read anyone of ours who expressly defends it. Yet our Thomson in his Diatriba, chapter 24, pages 92 and 99, commemorates some who try to prove the sins of the elect forgiven from eternity from the dignity and efficacy of the merits of Christ. Which granted, it would follow that the same were justified before faith in Christ, reconciled to God, and restored into the state of grace and salvation, which is most false. The proof of our thesis will be the refutation of both errors. We will therefore confirm it first in place by the testimonies of the Scriptures.

48First, that remission of sins does not flow immediately from the passion of Christ itself to all human beings without any intervening act of ours is proved by all those testimonies of the Scriptures which expressly prerequire an act of penitence. Such are Ezekiel 18:21: If the impious man has done penitence from all his sins, he will live with life and will not die. Luke 24:46, 47: It was necessary that Christ suffer and rise from the dead, and that penitence and remission of sins be preached in his name. 1 John 1:9: If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to remit our sins to us and to cleanse us from every iniquity. From which it is plain that although Christ died for all, yet not all immediately live through this death of Christ, but all live as soon as they have come to their senses; although remission of sins is offered in the name of Christ, yet not all promiscuously become partakers of this benefit, but only the penitent; by the same law, that penitence precede remission; Finally, although by the virtue of the death of Christ God is obligated to remit sins, yet so that neither the faithfulness nor the justice of God demands that this remission be indulged to anyone except under this condition, If he confess his sins.

Second, the same is shown from those places which, before we can be justified or reconciled to God, prerequire faith from us, as an instrument by which we apprehend the grace of justification, and as a condition of obtaining reconciliation, commanded to us in the Evangelical pact itself. Of this sort are Acts 16:31: Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved. John 6:40: This is the will of my Father who sent me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life. John 20:31: These things have been written that you may believe, and that believing you may have life in his name. Romans 3:22: The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ, unto all and upon all who believe; and verse 25: Whom God set forth to be a propitiation through faith, etc. Galatians 2:16: We know that a human being is not justified except through faith in Jesus Christ; and we believe in Christ Jesus that we may be justified from the faith of Christ. I pass over innumerable others. From these it abundantly appears that Remission of sins, and Justification, or our reconciliation with God, is not such a benefit as overflows from the passion of Christ itself, without all media, to any human being; but that those for whom Christ died, whether sufficiently or efficaciously, cannot have the saving fruit of the same death applied to themselves except through faith going before.

Third, this can also be gathered from those sayings of the Scriptures in which, the death of Christ presupposed, it is nonetheless expressly affirmed that any human beings lie under the guilt of death and Divine wrath so long as they have not apprehended the Mediator by true faith. To this those look: Mark 16:16: Preach the Gospel to every creature. He who has believed will be saved; but he who has not believed will be condemned. And John 3:36: He who is unbelieving toward the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God remains upon him. John 8:24: If you do not believe that I am, you will die in your sins. Finally, notwithstanding that Christ died for us, the Apostle said Ephesians 2:3 that we are all born children of wrath. Vain therefore are those who dream that by the death of Christ itself all human beings, without any intervening act from our side, have been restored into the bosom of Divine grace and the state of salvation.

Fourth, lest anyone say that the aforesaid testimonies pertain only to the non-elect, but that all the elect by the very merit of the death of Christ stand justified and reconciled to God before they believed, let these clear testimonies of the Scriptures be heard to the contrary, Ephesians 2:11, 12, 13: Remember that you were once without Christ, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been made near by the blood of Christ, etc. He addresses those whom chapter 1, verse 4, he presupposes elect before the foundations of the world were cast; yet he teaches that they remained strangers from the covenants of promise and alienated from God until by faith, as a spiritual hand, they had drawn to themselves the riches of Divine grace heaped up in Christ, as it is ready to gather from verses 7 and 8 of this second chapter. In the same sense sound those words of the same Apostle, Romans 5:1: Justified by faith we have peace toward God through our Lord Jesus Christ. The death of Christ therefore, considered in itself, until faith has acceded from our side, neither justifies this or that singular person nor places him in the bosom of grace. Finally, the Apostle Paul beyond all controversy was one of the elect, yet was not therefore either justified or restored into the state of grace and salvation while he remained a blasphemer against Christ and a persecutor of the Church, but then at last, after he acknowledged Christ and wholly leaned upon Christ, 1 Timothy 1:16: Jesus Christ had mercy on me, that in me he might show all clemency, that I might be an example to those who would believe in him unto eternal life. Remission of sins in the blood of Christ therefore does not anticipate faith and penitence, not even in the elect. Thus far we have fought with the express testimonies of the Scriptures; now we will attach some reasons founded in the same Scriptures.

49Ratio 1. Although we grant that the death of Christ, considered as a meritorious cause, is most sufficient to expiate the sins of all human beings and to restore them into the state of grace with God, yet it cannot actually constitute anyone justified and reconciled unless it is somehow joined, fitted, and united to the one who is supposed to be justified and reconciled by it.

For what the philosophers commonly say — that every action is through some contact — holds also in this supernatural action, which does not take place without some supernatural contact. By faith we touch Christ, and through faith we are joined to him and as it were fitted to him. For Christ dwells in us through faith (Ephesians 3:17).

Without faith, then, or before faith, we have no actual conjunction with Christ; and therefore from the merit of his death there is no remission of sins, no justification, no reconciliation with God the Father.

Most learned Calvin observed this on Romans 8:4: Christ communicates his own righteousness to none except those whom he joins to himself by the bond of his Spirit. Whatever therefore lies hidden in God’s eternal decree concerning those who are to be justified, reconciled to him, and likewise all the elect who are to be saved; whatever sufficiency or efficacy there is in the precious blood of Christ for redeeming human beings and reconciling them to God — still it does not customarily pass into the effect of actual reconciliation unless it is first joined to human beings through faith, because a meritorious cause no less than a natural one must be joined to that into which it flows and into which it pours its saving power.

50Ratio 2. Second, the argument is drawn from the proportion between Adam, the author of death and condemnation, and Christ, the author of life and justification.

Just as Adam binds no one with the guilt of death, and subjects no one to the divine wrath and condemnation, unless that one becomes as it were his member by natural generation: so Christ frees no one from death, restores no one into divine grace, justifies and reconciles no one to God, unless that one becomes his member by supernatural regeneration.

But this does not happen before faith is inspired into our hearts: John 1:12–13: As many as received him, to them he gave power to become the sons of God, namely to those who believe in his name: who were born not of blood, and so on, but of God.

No one therefore — whether among those passed by or among the elect — stands reconciled and justified before God by Christ’s death itself; but only then, when he is incorporated into Christ and through regeneration is set as it were as a member under this mystical Head, does he obtain the righteousness of Christ and peace with God.

51Ratio 3. If by the very merit of Christ’s death all sins had been forgiven to human beings before they believed in Christ, and so all had been restored into the state of grace and reconciliation by the mere fact itself, it would follow that no one is born a child of wrath — which is diametrically contrary to the Apostle’s words just alleged from Ephesians 2:3.

Further: since the merit of Christ, in God’s acceptation, has infinite and eternal efficacy, this inconvenience would also follow — that the sins of human beings are remitted before they are committed, and expiated before they are perpetrated — if without any intervening act of ours, from the merit of Christ alone, the remission of sins and the actual reconciliation of human beings were to arise. But this is plainly impossible.

For just as a medicine which, as to its implanted efficacy and virtue, can heal leprosy, yet does not actually heal this or that human being unless he has already become a leper and takes the medicine named: so the blood of Christ, which can heal any human being, yet does not actually heal, cleanse, or reconcile anyone to God unless that one is already contaminated by sin and is believing.

In no way, then, are they to be heard who either philosophize that all human beings promiscuously are reconciled and placed in the state of grace by the passion of Christ itself, or contend that all the elect, by the sole power of that same passion, have all their sins forgiven them from eternity — since there is no forgiveness of sins except of sins committed, and no forgiveness of committed sins is to be hoped for by any except believers.

Most excellently and truly the reverend of pious memory, the Bishop of Salisbury: An already-made remission of future sins ought not to be believed. For although to God they are as already done which he from all eternity disposed should be done, yet for us they are not to be received otherwise than according to that mode of dispensation by which, decreed from eternity, they are to be completed for us in time and brought into act. Thus far he. We therefore must not dream of a remission of sins, or of a reconciliation already obtained, except according to the mode of dispensation decreed by God: that is, unless we first truly repent and believe in the Mediator.

52Ratio 4. The whole force and efficacy of that merit which Christ by his death prepared for the good of the human race, as regards its outflow and derivation into other persons, depends on the will of the Father who ordains and accepts it.

For who would dare snatch the merit of Christ to himself in another manner, or under another law, than that by which God himself ordained it to be communicated to human beings and accepted in their name? Indeed if anyone tries to do this, he will have done it in vain: for the merit of Christ is so great a good to us as it was accepted by God — as Scotus taught not inconveniently in this our sense (Sentences book 3, distinction 19, unique question, p. 74).

But it was by no means accepted by God so as to produce actual remission of sins and reconciliation for any mortal before penitence, faith, and insertion into Christ. Therefore it does not actually justify, or reconcile to God, anyone except the penitent and the believing.

That it was not so accepted as to reconcile anyone before faith is clear from an argument drawn negatively from the Scriptures, in this way. No word occurs in the Sacred Scriptures from which it can be gathered that by the very force and efficacy of Christ’s death all human beings are promiscuously placed in the state of grace, or that any human being — whether elect or non-elect — before penitence and faith obtains, by the virtue of Christ’s blood poured out on the cross, remission of sins or actual reconciliation with God. Therefore it is rash to assert this.

Nor is there any reason for rejecting an argument of this kind drawn from the authority of the Scriptures negatively. For although in more middling matters, which do not concern the summit of our salvation, the reasoning is weak — This is not set down in the Scriptures; therefore it is false or illicit — yet in matters necessary to do or to know for salvation, such as the mode of obtaining remission and reconciliation with God, it follows most soundly: This is not taught in the Scriptures; therefore it is not to be believed by us. Since therefore the Scriptures nowhere teach that by the death of Christ remission of sins, or actual reconciliation, is conferred on any singular person before he has repented and believed in Christ, it is by no means to be admitted under pretext of amplifying the dignity of Christ’s death, or under any other pretext.

53After the firm foundations of the Scriptures and the weight of the arguments, we will also set down the Fathers’ suffrages — but very few.

Ambrose, On the Faith to Gratian, book 4, chapter 1: If you do not believe, he did not descend for you; he did not suffer for you. Those words have this sense: no fruit of redemption from Christ incarnate and having suffered reaches this or that singular person before he believes in Christ.

For Ambrose does not mean to deny that Christ descended and suffered for human beings, whether they believe or do not believe; he means to teach that the usefulness, or saving force, of this passion then vivifies and reconciles human beings when they believe.

In this manner of speaking, then, he follows the known rules of the jurisconsults, who are accustomed to say that not-being, and being but uselessly, are held for equals. Things found without effect may be called as if nothing. Christ is therefore denied to have been incarnate and to have died for unbelievers, because by their vice he is understood to have been incarnate and to have suffered for them uselessly and without effect.

This plainly argues from Ambrose’s mind that by this alone — that Christ died for believers — no one is placed in the state of reconciliation and salvation before faith is applied to the Gospel.

54Augustine will follow Ambrose. He writes thus in the reply to the article falsely imposed on him, reply 1: Those who pass through this age without the faith of Christ, and without the sacrament of regeneration, are aliens to redemption. A little later: The property of redemption is with those from whom the prince of this world has been cast out. At length he adds: The passion or death of Christ has in itself that it profits all; but if it is not drunk, it does not profit.

All of which utter that Ambrosian sentence — If you do not believe, he did not suffer for you — in still other words. For that phrase, they are aliens to redemption, hints at nothing else than that those who have not yet believed are by no means sharers of the remission of sins and of reconciliation with God.

So also the property of redemption denotes the acquired and as-it-were possessed fruit of redemption, and declares that same fruit to be with believers and the regenerate alone. Finally those words of Augustine — if it is not drunk, it does not profit — plainly prove that the usefulness overflowing from Christ’s death is derived to singular persons only by drinking, that is, by believing.

These things, all and each, overturn the sentence of those who state that either all human beings promiscuously, or the predestinate by a special quasi-privilege, by this alone — that Christ suffered on the cross for them — are restored into the state of grace and of actual reconciliation with God.

55Third in place let Theodoret come forth, writing on those words of the Apostle (Romans 3:25): Whom God set forth to be a propitiatory through faith in his blood, and so on. The Lord Christ, he says, is the propitiatory, and by his blood procured our salvation, requiring from us faith alone.

From which words we gather that Christ, with his death and all his merits, has been so constituted the universal cause of our redemption, reconciliation, and salvation, that before the fruit of this redemption and salvation procured through Christ is participated by anyone, this universal cause must be applied specially to individuals. Now that this fruitful application may happen, as Theodoret well warned, God requires faith from us. Faith being absent, Christ’s death considered in itself confers on no one the state of actual reconciliation, grace, and salvation.

Cyril also stands in the same sentence. Explaining those words of our Savior (John 3:36) — He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who is unbelieving toward the Son will not see life — he gathers thus (book 2, chapter 74): Therefore Christ vivifies believers in himself, because, since according to nature he is life, he dwells in all the faithful through faith.

However much, then, Christ is life itself, yet he does not vivify anyone except believers — which Cyril confirmed by an excellent and most valid reason, namely because he does not dwell in human beings except in believers. As if he had said: the fountain of life does not actually vivify except those joined to himself, and the joined are held to be the faithful alone. Badly, therefore, do they argue who from either the death or the very life of Christ gather that either all or any human beings are constituted in the state of life, grace, and salvation before they are united to Christ by this bond of faith.

56Last I will bring forward the most express testimony of the Venerable Bede, found in his Commentaries on 2 Corinthians 5: Through faith the world is reconciled to God, when it believes in Christ who was sent by God.

The Apostle had said that God in Christ reconciled the world to himself — that is, that Christ by God’s ordination paid that ransom to the Father, whereby it was effected that God does not exact from us satisfaction for our sins before he returns into grace with us, but, content with this alone, is ready to receive anyone into grace.

If you still ask whether, this price having been paid, by the very fact of the payment all human beings are at once reconciled, Bede answers: By no means that; but each one is then reconciled to God when he himself believes in Christ who was sent by God.

Those words of the same author on Luke 15 have the same mind: Then for each of us Christ is slain, when he believes him slain. He was slain from the origin of the world in the Divine acceptation; slain also, when the fullness of time came, on the cross itself; yet for you and for me — that is, for each singular human being — then slain when he believes in the slain. Which is just as if he had said: the benefit of the slain or dead Christ then pertains to us when we begin to believe in him.

57From orthodox antiquity, therefore, they have departed who state that by the very passion of Christ all human beings are placed in the state of grace; nor less those who teach that the predestinate themselves, in this death of Christ, obtained the remission of their sins, or justification and reconciliation with God, from eternity — since this justification or actual reconciliation (as Bernard truly and skillfully) cannot belong to the receiver without consent any more than without the grace of the giver.

And thus you have received our sentence confirmed, and the contrary enervated.

58Now let us bring forward the objections our adversaries can raise, and briefly dispose of them.

In defence of Huber's position—that every human being is already restored to the state of grace and salvation simply because Christ died for humankind—arguments of the following kind are advanced.

59Either Christ's death was a sufficient ransom to wipe away the sins of the human race and put every human being back into grace and reconciliation, or it was insufficient. Call it insufficient, and we diminish divine grace and trample Christ's merit. Grant that it was sufficient, and then—once that sufficient cause has been put into act—nothing else is required to bring about the effect. From Christ's very act of offering himself to God, therefore, there would follow at once the universal liberation of all people from the guilt of their sins, and a universal reconciliation: that is, the reception of everyone into divine grace.

60We acknowledge the fullest sufficiency of the ransom—indeed its infinite superabundance. Our answer, however, is this: Christ's merit, considered in itself alone, does operate sufficiently as a universal cause of human salvation; yet a universal cause does not produce effects in particular persons before it is applied to each one. By Christ's death itself, therefore, a most sufficient universal cause was instituted, from which (as Aquinas says) any sins of any persons could be expiated. But before that cause puts forth its expiatory power for the liberation and reconciliation of individuals, it must be applied to each by faith. The Apostle himself teaches this clearly in Romans 3:25: "Whom God set forth as a propitiatory through faith in his blood," and so on.

So although Christ's death is a sufficient satisfaction for the sins of the human race, it cleanses us by way of a remedy: it must first be applied to each person before it can produce the effect of reconciliation and healing. And that application is made only through faith.

61Suppose that after accepting a sufficient ransom God still does not receive everyone into grace. Then, the objection says, he would wrong Christ, because he would not grant to human beings what Christ merited for them by dying. He would also deal unjustly with human beings, because he would still hold them bound by sins as by debts, even though Christ wiped out all those debts with his blood.

Neither side is injured. Not Christ: he himself did not will that the satisfaction he offered for the sins of the human race should avail for the actual reconciliation of particular persons unless their faith intervened, as we proved above. It would therefore be an insult to Christ if anyone were admitted into the actual fellowship and share of this grace while still not believing in Jesus Christ, the Author of salvation and our Redeemer. Nor are human beings injured when they are not received at once into God's favor simply on account of Christ's dying act, for that was neither owed to them nor promised. We cannot claim from Christ's death any benefit against or beyond the order and covenant established by God and by Christ and opened to us in the Gospel.

That order stands fixed, and the Gospel expressly sets this condition: the grace of reconciliation and the gift of eternal life overflow to sinners from Christ's death if they believe; if they do not, they remain bound by sins and perish in their unbelief. "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; but whoever does not obey the Son will not see life, and the wrath of God remains on him" (John 3:36).

62Adam's sin, they argue, did not have greater force to bind every human being under the guilt of eternal death than Christ's death and merit have to expiate all, reconcile them to God, and call them back into grace and salvation. Yet Adam's very act of sinning did bind everyone with guilt and subject them to divine wrath. Therefore Christ's very act of dying ought to free everyone from death, reconcile them to God, and restore them to the state of grace and salvation.

63This argument smuggles in a false assumption. Its major premise treats it as conceded that the efficacy or virtue of a cause is always to be rated greater or lesser according as it reaches more or fewer subjects. That is quite false. A cause's efficacy—or excellence—must be judged from the nature and excellence of its effects, not from how many subjects it touches. Restoring sight to one blind person shows greater virtue than gouging out the eyes of a thousand; healing one mutilated and sick person shows more than mutilating or poisoning a thousand who are healthy and whole; in a word, recalling one human being to life shows more than handing a thousand over to slaughter. By the same measure, Christ's power in saving even one human being by his death is greater and more efficacious than Adam's power in destroying the whole human race by his sin.

To the minor premise one may also reply that Adam's very act of sinning binds no one with the guilt of death, and makes no one liable to divine wrath, except insofar as that person is propagated from sinful Adam by natural generation. In exactly the same way, Christ's dying act snatches no one out of the state of death, and frees no one from divine wrath, except insofar as that person is derived from Christ by supernatural regeneration. On both sides, then, the condition is equal if the comparison is just. All who are generated from Adam by nature lost God's grace and life; all who are regenerated from Christ by grace recover God's grace and life. No one is subjected to death or divine wrath by Adam's fault unless he has drawn natural origin from Adam; no one is exempted from death or divine wrath by Christ's merit unless he has drawn heavenly birth from Christ.

Aquinas explains this prudently and learnedly in Against the Gentiles, book 4, chapter 55: the effect of the first parent's sin reaches each person through the origin of the flesh; so the effect of Christ's death reaches each through spiritual regeneration. Anyone who wants Christ's merit to work in himself must be regenerated by Christ's Spirit. If someone still presses the point—propagation from Adam, from which wrath and the guilt of death follow, is common to all; why then is regeneration through Christ, on which our reconciliation and salvation depend, not made common to all in the same way?—I have nothing else to answer than this: God himself did not will that what flows to human beings by way of grace should be common to all in the same way as what comes by way of nature. He willed his grace to distinguish one person from another, and therefore did not will to make it equally common to all. Augustine noted this in On the Predestination of the Saints, chapter 5; read him at leisure. Let no one murmur against God, then, because by the working of special grace he regenerates some and grafts them into Christ through faith; let no one ask why he frees that one rather than this. To stop every mouth it is enough that God himself answers (Matthew 20:15), "Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with what is mine?" and so on; and that the Apostle says (Romans 9:18), "He has mercy on whom he wills." See also Augustine, On the Good of Perseverance, chapter 8. So although, as to sufficiency, Christ's death stands equally related to all, as to efficacy it depends on divine election: the effects of Christ's merits are mercifully applied to some, while others, hindered by their own unbelief, do not receive that application.

So far we have answered those who contend for a universal and likewise actual reconciliation of all human beings, each and every one. Now let us hear what can be urged by those who hold that the elect themselves, by the efficacy of Christ's death, were justified from eternity and reconciled to God.

64Objection 1. Those who say that toward the elect themselves, before their faith and repentance, God is only placable and reconciliable—not actually reconciled and placated—seem to put acts and potencies in God, and to admit that God can be what he is not. But God is pure act and altogether immutable. It is therefore impossible that he should now be what he was not before. So if he is reconciled to Peter or Paul after they are known to repent and believe, he was already reconciled to them from eternity. Otherwise some variation would seem to be given in God, who is purest act and altogether immutable. Yet no sane person will deny that such variation is utterly alien to the divine nature, which is free of mutability on every side—especially since that conclusion agrees not only with the dictates of right reason and with the sounder philosophy (which teaches that the same, as the same, always does the same: that is, what remains the same way always produces the same effect), but can also be confirmed and settled by not a few, and those the clearest, places of sacred Scripture: by Malachi’s prophecy (Malachi 3:6), “For I the Lord do not change” (Junius: “I Jehovah do not change”); likewise by Numbers (Numbers 23:19), “God is not as a human that he should lie, nor as a son of man that he should change.” A plainly similar place gives support from the Epistle of James (James 1:17): “Every good giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change or shadow of turning.” So far is any change from belonging in God that in him there is not even the least shadow of turning. But if one may say of God that he is now placable, now placated, now only reconciliable, now reconciled, one may fairly and not without cause doubt whether God always remains like himself and always holds himself in exactly the same way. Placability seems to suggest only a prior disposition and an inclination toward a future placating; reconciliability likewise suggests a readiness and propensity in God toward reconciliation—which at last, when human beings believe, is drawn out from potency into act.

65That God is reconciliable to this or that elect person before that person’s faith and repentance, and is actually reconciled to the same person after faith and repentance, no more proves a change in God from act to potency than this does: that a human being is not justified at all until he believes, and is actually justified by God after he believes. Nor does it prove a temporal change of the divine essence or will from potency to act that someone’s sins are remissible and, after repentance, are actually remitted by God. No one will rightly say that because Paul is now justified as a believer in Christ—though he was not justified at all while he blasphemed against Christ—God himself undergoes some change. So neither does it follow from saying that a person is now reconciliable to God and now actually reconciled. To be justified and to be reconciled to God are either plainly the same, or at least inseparably joined.

To clear the scruple more openly, this must be known: although nothing absolute can newly arrive to God without a change in him, yet countless relative names can newly be predicated of God—at one time, and not at another—according to differences of time, while the divine essence and will remain without any shadow of change. What is affirmed of God in a mutable and temporal way is not affirmed because some change has come upon God, but because a change has come upon the creature. For example, one could truly say “Adam is creatable by God” when one could not yet truly say “Adam is created by God.” By the same measure, one could say before Adam’s actual repentance, “Adam is justificable by God,” or “Adam is reconciliable to God”; but one could not say, “Adam is actually justified and reconciled to God.” Even so we do not put acts and potencies in God, or any mutability at all. These things are said of God in different ways not by a change of God in himself, but by a change of the creature that comes from him.

66As Albert teaches, in things that act through essence the agent always holds himself in one way: he is not called “agent now and not before,” except insofar as the act now is and was not before. Nor do we invent a new or temporal act in God’s will itself when we say that, once faith has come, he becomes actually reconciled to this or that human being to whom, before faith, he was only reconciliable. God does not then begin to will that this believer should be actually reconciled to him—after having been only reconciliable before faith was conceived. From all eternity he willed that at this very moment the person both would believe and would be actually reconciled. Succession of changes is not in the willer, then, but in the thing willed—and those changes follow one eternal and most constant will of God.

67Objection 2. God is actually reconciled to whoever he actually loves. He loves every elect person from eternity. So, the objection runs, he has been actually reconciled to them from eternity—and they have been actually reconciled and justified from eternity.

Solution. Follow the distinction in Aquinas. God loves in two senses: by the purpose to communicate his goodness, and by the very act of communicating it (Sentences, book 3, distinction 19). The love that tracks the eternal purpose—theologians call it the love of eternal benevolence—does not already count the beloved as actually justified or actually reconciled. It only ranks that person among those who will infallibly be justified and reconciled. Words for acts that stay inside God, and words for acts that pass from God to us, therefore do different work. Dilection, Election, and Predestination name eternal, inward acts of God; people are called Beloved, Elect, and Predestined from the hidden good pleasure of the divine will conceived and kept in God himself. Calling, Justification, Reconciliation, and Glorification name outward acts that terminate on a creature who already exists and are as it were received into that creature. No one is properly Called, Justified, Reconciled, or Glorified from the hidden eternal purpose alone, but from the finished execution of that purpose and the effect it produces in human beings. We gladly grant that God has an eternal will to justify every elect person and reconcile each to himself. We still refuse to say they were justified or reconciled from eternity. In the same way we grant God an eternal will to create the world, yet deny that the world was created from eternity. What Zanchi said of the actual remission of sins fits the elect's actual reconciliation: it is most certain in the divine destination from eternity, yet it is not actually given on God's side, nor actually received on the human side, before the person repents and believes (Thomson, Diatribe, p. 96).

68Objection 3. Why do the means work in some people and not in others? Not, they say, from any difference of free choice, but because God is already reconciled to all the elect in Christ before the world's foundations were laid, and is not reconciled to the rest. So we must not deny that every elect person is actually reconciled to God before conversion and faith—since the very dispensing of means powerful enough to produce faith and repentance in them sprang from that eternal, prior reconciliation.

Solution. We gladly admit that the infallible efficacy of means ordained to salvation does not hang on the human will. It hangs on a certain eternal and special love of God for his elect. But so far as that love regards people who are still unbelieving and unconverted, it is nothing but a free purpose to supply them with what will later convert them, justify them, reconcile them to God, and lead them without fail to eternal life. Inferring from that eternal love an eternal justification, an eternal reconciliation of the elect, and an eternal glorification of them is therefore just as bad a leap. What follows is only their certain and infallible justification, reconciliation, and glorification. That certainty—the infallible efficacy of means that tend toward salvation—is born from the love of God just named, not from free choice's power. If someone wants to label this eternal love (the ground of the certainty that conversion and reconciliation will be produced in time) "actual reconciliation," because God himself "calls the things that are not as though they were" (Romans 4:17), I will not stop him—provided he also admits he is using the name of a finished deed for the purpose of a deed still to be done. For God's predestination had already fixed what would come in its own time, as Augustine puts it (City of God, book 12, chapter 16).

69Some Scripture places can also be brought forward that seem, as to the elect, to assert an actual reconciliation with God—and an eternal one—before their faith and repentance.

Ephesians 1:4 says God elected them before the world’s foundation, and verse 6 that he had them accepted in his beloved Son. So, the objection runs, they were elect, and already actually justified and reconciled from eternity. Their reconciliation on God’s side was not made after faith was applied to the gospel; rather, what had already been done before the world’s foundations were laid then began to be manifested and revealed.

70Response. Electing someone to life before the world’s foundation is one thing; actually justifying and reconciling that same person to himself before the world’s foundation is another. Election names in God an eternal will to justify, reconcile, and save the elect person—but to justify, reconcile, and save him in his own time through faith. So the elect person’s actual justification, reconciliation, and sanctification flow from eternal election; they are not coeternal with it. That is easy to gather from Paul’s whole argument in Ephesians 1. He affirms that we were elect before the world’s foundations were laid (Ephesians 1:4), yet he does not say we were therefore sanctified before those foundations were laid. He says we were elect so that we might be holy and blameless before him in love. Nor does he teach, by the power of eternal election, that we were justified or reconciled from eternity. He teaches that this happened in the dispensation of the fullness of time, after we applied faith to the gospel that had been opened (Ephesians 1:9–10 and following).

71Nor does the clause “he had us accepted in his beloved Son” block this (Ephesians 1:6). The Greek verb ἐχαρίτωσεν seems to point to the present state of the elect already regenerated, more than to God’s eternal purpose. So Beza renders it, “he freely makes them gracious to himself”—that is, he has now freely justified believers and admitted them into the state of actual reconciliation. If someone reads that acceptance as God’s eternal love embracing the elect not yet born, then the acceptance names the purpose of communicating his goodness, not the act of communication itself—as was already answered from Aquinas above. Beza also notes rightly in his comments on verse 5 that the elect obtain wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption freely through faith in their own time. They were not, then, justified, sanctified, or reconciled from eternity, though they were elect and predestined from eternity (Ephesians 1:5). No one taught this more clearly than the Apostle himself. The very people he called elect before the world’s foundations were laid he also shows were by nature children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3), and long remained without Christ, aliens from Israel’s commonwealth, strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope, and without God in the world. Then, in Christ Jesus, those who were once far off were made near when, through Christ’s blood grasped by faith, they were reconciled to God (Ephesians 2:12–13 and following). If we trust Paul, then—however eternal human election and predestination are from God’s eternal love—their justification and reconciliation are not to be called a mere manifestation or unveiling when they believe in Christ. That is when they first come to be and are constituted.

722 Timothy 1:9–10. The Apostle says grace was given to the elect in Christ Jesus before the ages of the world, and that the same grace was made manifest through the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ. So God seems plainly reconciled already, before the ages, to those to whom he gave grace in Christ before the ages.

Response. Because the divine purpose is firm and unmovable, that grace is said to have been given to the elect before the ages which was destined for them before the ages. In this place, then, eternal giving is eternal preparation of the grace that will be given to the elect without fail in their own time. So Augustine: the Apostle said grace was given when those who would receive it did not yet exist, because in God’s disposition and predestination what was to come in its time was already fixed (On Christian Doctrine, book 3, chapter 34). So Junius on these very words: grace was given from eternity, the grace to which we were predestined from eternity. Calvin expounds it no other way. “This donation of grace of which the Apostle speaks,” he says, “is nothing but the predestination by which we are adopted as God’s children.” A little later: “He gave”—what, with no merit prompting him, he assigned to those not yet born and kept stored in his treasuries until the thing itself would show that he decrees nothing in vain. From this we may rightly gather that the grace of justification, reconciliation, and salvation was by an eternal act assigned to all the elect, and as it were stored and reserved for them in the treasury of divine love. That it was by an act conferred on them before their faith and conversion does not follow. The elect’s justification and reconciliation themselves are not said to be opened and manifested when they believe in Christ; they are then given and constituted. What is said to be revealed and manifested then is God’s eternal good pleasure—his purpose to save the elect—which becomes known to us after, gifted with the Spirit and with faith, we have obtained justification and reconciliation with God.

73Still other places are brought to prove that reconciliation with God does not begin when through faith we embrace the Mediator, but that every elect person was already reconciled to God from eternity. Romans 5:10 is of that kind: "when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son." So is Ephesians 2:4–5: "because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, he made us alive together with Christ." And so is Colossians 1:21–22: "you who were once alienated and enemies in mind in evil works he has now indeed reconciled in the body of his flesh through death," and so on.

From those places the adversaries infer that reconciliation does not wait on the act of faith. God, they say, is already reconciled to his own even while they still stand unbelieving and hostile to him. Benefits like these, they argue, are not the mark of a God merely placable and reconcilable, but of one already placated and actually reconciled.

74Response. If by reconciliation nothing is meant but an inclination and readiness of the divine will to grant remission and to make peace with all who will embrace the Redeemer by faith, then we confess that God stands reconciled to the whole human race by the force of Christ’s death, even while we remain his enemies. But that (as said above) is a step toward our actual and personal reconciliation, not yet the actual reconciliation of particular persons. Further, if by reconciliation we mean God’s eternal love—by which he decreed to call, justify, reconcile to himself, and save certain people in time—I do not deny that God in that sense can be called benevolent to all the elect, even while they are still sunk in impiety and unbelief. But that benevolence, which precedes faith breathed into the elect’s hearts, holds only the purpose of making peace with them. It does not give them the state of peace already obtained, or of actual reconciliation.

With that said, I answer that in all those places the talk is either about that step toward personal reconciliation, or about believing elect people already set in the state of actual reconciliation only with faith intervening. So the places confirm our view rather than the contrary. Romans 5:10 (“when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of the Son,” and so on) means nothing else than that people are moved from enmity into actual reconciliation with God through Christ’s death as soon as they have believed in Christ. That is plain because in verse 1 of the same chapter the Apostle restricts this peace—or reconciliation—with God to those alone who are justified through faith (Romans 5:1); and in verse 11 he speaks of the same actual reconciliation as newly constituted: “Now,” he says, “we have obtained reconciliation”—that is, now after we have believed in Christ (Romans 5:11).

As for Ephesians 2:4–5, it is most true that God made us, who were dead, alive with Christ. But just as he did not make us alive in act until faith was first inspired, so neither did he reconcile us. To be reconciled to God is to be freed from death’s guilt, placed in spiritual life, and gifted with a hereditary right to eternal life. Those goods do not belong to the elect merely because they are elect. They belong at last when they have been effectually called and turned to God. The Apostle himself teaches this in verse 8: “By grace you have been saved through faith—and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8).

The last place, drawn from Colossians 1:21–22, expressly confirms our sentence: neither God’s eternal predestinating act itself, nor Christ’s merit itself in dying for his elect, makes people at once justified and reconciled to God. What else do the words “once alienated, he has now indeed reconciled” mean, except that we obtain remission of sins and actual reconciliation with God through Christ’s blood only when, inserted into Christ by faith, we are admitted into actual share and possession of his merits and righteousness? There is no need to pile up more for explaining this thesis. From what has been said it is plain enough that those stretch the universal force of Christ’s death beyond its just limits who, by the bare deed of Christ dying, judge every mortal indiscriminately restored into the state of grace—and no less those who defend that all the predestined, for Christ’s merit, were justified from eternity and actually reconciled to God even before faith was applied to the gospel.

75Chapter 6. The last thesis is set out and confirmed.

We have already laid before you the universal force and efficacy of Christ’s death in three theses. In the first we showed that God appointed this death of Christ and set it before the human race as a universal remedy applicable to every human being. In the second we explained in what sense Christ is said to have died for all—or in what sense his death is owned as a universal cause of salvation established for the good of the whole human race. Not, as some want, merely by bare sufficiency or intrinsic worth, in which respect Christ’s death, or the blood of the Son of God, is a price more than enough to redeem every human and every angel. Rather, by the gospel covenant established and confirmed in this death and blood of Christ. By the terms of that covenant every human being gained a right, under the condition of faith, to claim remission of sins and eternal life.

To those two theses we added a third. Even with this universal force of Christ’s death in place, and with this universal gospel covenant looking to any person whatsoever, this or that particular person does have, by the sole benefit of that death, God bound to make peace with him and to give him life if he believes. He does not yet have actual justification or reconciliation—or the actual state of grace and salvation—before he believes. There remains a fourth and final thesis. Its chief work is to clear a scruple from the minds of those who stretch this universal efficacy of Christ’s death, which we defend, farther than the truth of the matter will bear.

76Some people argue at once from the claim that Christ’s death, in the sense already given, was spent for the human race—for every human being—that divine justice and goodness now require God to administer to all for whom he thus gave Christ to death the means needed to generate faith. Yet it is clearer than noon that ethnics and pagans, on whom the light of the gospel never shone, have not been given means that immediately suffice to produce faith in them. So the same people take refuge here: they say even such people are always given sufficient means by which, mediately and as if by degrees, they could have been led to faith in Christ if they had used those means well.

Ask what those means of grace are that could have stood ready for all and led all sufficiently to faith in Christ, and they thrust Nature upon us wrapped in the name of Grace. They say remnants of spiritual life remain in every human—some knowledge of God in the intellect, some desire for the known good in the affection—and that if a person uses those natural gifts rightly, God will heap greater grace on him and gift him with saving faith. Aquinas seems to lean that way in De veritate, question 14, article 11, reply to the first objection, where he writes: if someone reared in the woods followed the lead of natural reason in appetite for good and flight from evil, it must be held with full certainty that God would either reveal by inward inspiration what is necessary for belief, or send some preacher of the faith to him.

So their view comes to this: by the efficacy and merit of Christ’s death God is already bound as by statute to supply everyone with sufficient means to be led to Christ if they will, so that nothing is wanting on God’s side to keep anyone from faith and a fruitful share in Christ’s death. To untie that knot we have taken up this thesis to explain and confirm it.

Thesis IV. Once Christ’s death is posited as applicable to all humans under the condition of faith, it stands with divine goodness and justice to supply or deny the means of application—to nations or to particular persons—according to the good pleasure of his will, not according to the disparity of human wills.

77A few preliminaries, then I turn to confirming the thesis. First, notice that those on the opposite side think God is bound by a fixed decree and statute to give the talent of grace to those who use the talent of nature well. Second, they presume that any pagan, even one sitting in the shadow of death, can by free choice use that natural talent well or badly. Third, from that difference between those who use natural gifts rightly and those who do not, they try to explain why God deigns to light some with the gospel and the knowledge of Christ and does not deign to light others. Use the gifts rightly, they say, and the person is gradually to be led into saving knowledge of Christ; abuse them wickedly, and he is justly stripped of that knowledge.

Augustine seems to stand on the opposite side in De Natura et Gratia, chapters 8 and 9. There he grants that for certain infants the means of salvation could not be applied; and he also owns that adults who died in a region where they could not hear Christ’s name could in no way become just by nature and free choice. We likewise affirm that no decree, law, or promise of God exists by which anyone could safely conclude: this person used natural light rightly, or less badly; therefore God will illuminate him with supernatural grace.

Arminius does say God pledged this by Christ’s word, “To the one who has, it will be given” (Matthew 13:12). But the Reverend of Salisbury speaks more truly and more learnedly: Arminius hints a fallacy here, and commits it—leaping from the one who has in the state of nature to a gift in the state of grace, and making the light of faith the wage of unbelievers’ diligence. For what is promised, and in what kind the use falls, is increase in that same kind. Alvarez, a Roman Catholic writer, votes with us here: no law was ever enacted that helps of grace must be given to those who do all that is in them from nature’s faculty; nor did the Lord Christ by his death merit, or will to merit, such a law. The Apostle Paul teaches that the dispensation of supernatural grace runs not according to the use and works of the human will, but according to the purpose and counsel of the divine will: “He works all things according to the purpose and counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11).

78Second, though we grant that in ethnic people some sparks of natural light remain, and a certain imperfect desire for moral good, still—as the same Salisbury we praised earlier puts it best—those deformed ruins have no inhabitant but the Devil, and of those remnants in the midst of corruption there can be only a corrupted use. Let the adversaries show us even one person since the world began who by good use of nature drew the gift of grace to himself. Speaking morally, it is impossible that an ethnic person in corrupted nature should not set very many obstacles in grace’s way. Far from it that by using natural things well he can haul gratuitous and supernatural gifts to himself.

Aquinas says truly in Contra Gentiles, book 3, page 160: if through a prior disorder free choice has declined to evil, it will not be altogether in its power to present no impediment to grace. So those who think evangelical grace is given to everyone who uses nature’s light rightly and does not oppose an obstacle to grace are dreaming up people in corrupted nature such as it is not credible ever existed, exist now, or ever will. Whatever is objected, no one can remove that obstacle but God—as Bradwardine truly teaches in De causa Dei against Pelagius, book 2, chapter 32.

79Third and last, we assert—with sacred Scripture and experience itself as witnesses—that the gospel and the other means of salvation were not granted or denied to people because some used natural light rightly, or at least less badly, while others abused the same light perversely and wickedly. Sacred Scripture shows that the light of the gospel shone on people who did not expect it, people who were abusing natural light or talent in the worst way. Such were the Romans, Corinthians, and Ephesians: through the apostles the torch of the gospel was lit for them while they were still wallowing in the filth of superstitions and lusts. No less plain is this: to very many who lived less wickedly the gospel was never revealed.

Who does not know that among the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Xenocrates, and among the Romans Fabricius, Scipio, and Cato, used nature’s light well beyond other people? Yet none of them became a partaker of evangelical grace on that account. So the cause of the gospel and of supernatural light, given or denied, is not to be sought in better or worse use of natural light, but in the good pleasure of God who calls or does not call. With those points tasted first, we come to the thesis itself. We confirm it first by an argument drawn from the death of Christ—the very place from which the adversaries think they can infer the contrary.

80If by Christ’s death a covenant has been established under which remission of sins is promised to any believer, but no covenant has been established under which the gospel is promised to any ethnic person who uses natural gifts rightly, or less badly, then it is rash—Christ’s death being granted—to conclude that God is bound by faithfulness, goodness, justice, or any bond whatever, on account of better use of nature, to reveal to people the mystery of evangelical grace. Yet it is most certain that no such covenant exists anywhere. Therefore the revelation or denial of the gospel depends on God’s good pleasure, who hides it or reveals it as he pleases, not on the varied acts of human beings.

We confirm the major premise from this: God is bound to no one and owes nothing to anyone except by a free and voluntary promise—“For who has first given to him, and it shall be repaid to him?” (Romans 11:35). Into that sense Augustine speaks: the Lord makes himself a debtor not by receiving, but by promising (on Psalm 83). He promises nothing spiritual to the works of corrupted nature, however splendid. He has set himself no law that would bar him from giving spiritual goods to people, however wicked and covered with every kind of crime. So we must not explain from the disparity of persons or of human works why the gospel and the knowledge of Christ are given to some and not to others. We must rest in the good pleasure of the divine will, according to the Apostle: “He called us with his calling, not according to our works, but according to his purpose and the grace that was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began” (2 Timothy 1:9).

Still someone may press: even if God is bound neither by debt nor by any promise sealed by Christ’s death to reveal Christ to those who use nature’s light well, still—since from unpromised grace he often gives many things to people—what keeps us from saying he keeps this common pattern in distributing evangelical grace: grant it to those who use natural light more rightly, and withhold it from those who, by abusing nature’s light worse than others, have made themselves more unworthy of the light of grace? Scripture’s steady witness against that blocks us. It refers the gift of saving grace not to the person who works better, but to God loving and pitying one more than another (Romans 9). Experience blocks it too. Often a person more modest and temperate from early childhood, and for the most part master of lusts, lives and dies where Christian grace cannot be preached to him at all; while another given to lust and covered with crimes is so governed by God that he hears, believes, and is saved.

So we say every mortal by bad use of nature makes himself unworthy of the gospel; and that God, in giving or denying the gospel, does not weigh degrees of human dignity and unworthiness and from them draw a common rule for indulging grace or withholding it. Sometimes he denies it to those who have used nature’s remnants less badly, and meanwhile grants it to those who abuse the same remnants far worse; sometimes the reverse. So the reason why God deigns to give grace to this one and not to that one must be referred to God’s own good pleasure, not to unequal human works.

81Second, we prove that it is not contrary to divine goodness—even once Christ’s death is granted—still to withhold the means of application from any people he pleases. Christ’s death itself is a benefit God freely spent on the human race. It is fair and fitting that free application of that benefit remain with the benefactor. From giving one gift he is never bound to give another unless a promise intervenes; and no one can rightly claim such a promise about the means by which Christ’s death is applied—neither the whole race in a lump, nor any single person for himself alone.

What jars with divine goodness is not that God does not lavish every benefit on every person, but that he would injure anyone, or unjustly deny or withdraw a good that is owed. Illumination by evangelical grace, even with Christ’s death supposed, is still not owed to nature already corrupted by sin. So Bannezius (on the First Part, question 23, article 3, page 279): natural and supernatural illumination do not stand on the same footing, for natural light is owed to nature itself, while the light of grace is not owed to nature—least of all to nature already spoiled by sin—but is conferred by grace. If it is conferred by grace, it is not owed to all. Among twelve sentences that belong to the Catholic faith, Augustine set this second one in Epistle 107: that the grace of God is not given to all people. If it is conferred by grace, it is not given or denied according to good or bad use of natural light. Prosper is right (Response 8 to the Chapters of the Gauls): it is impiety to say that the grace by which we are saved is either repaid to good merits or fenced off by evils. And in On the Calling of the Gentiles: there are no crimes so detestable that they can fence off the gift of grace.

Those who try to defend God’s justice and goodness by human guesswork, and contend that he supplies free means of salvation to everyone who uses natural gifts rightly or less badly, but denies them to those who have abused the same gifts, are—speaking with Augustine—ignorant of the height of grace, and have woven improbable fables. Like it or not, if we ask why those means by which people apply Christ to themselves for salvation are granted to these particular persons and not to others, we must set aside the disparity of persons or of human works and rise to God’s freest good pleasure: “When the same cause binds all at once, / nor are they discerned by merit who differ by gift,” as Prosper puts it elegantly in the Poem On the Ungrateful, chapter 25.

82From fact to right we argue this way. God leaves undone nothing that it would be alien to divine goodness, justice, or prudence not to do. It is wrong to doubt that, for he who is Goodness, Justice, and Wisdom themselves cannot, in acting or not acting, ever leave the rule of goodness, justice, or wisdom. So I attach the minor and affirm: even with Christ’s death granted, God has denied in the past, and still denies, to many nations and many particular people those means without which Christ’s death is applied to no one.

That will be plain if we look either at the immediate means of salvation—repentance, faith, regeneration, sanctification—by which a person is set in spiritual life and salvation and in actual share of Christ’s death and merits, or at the external means God uses as instruments to produce those first ones: the sending of teachers and pastors, the preaching of the gospel, and every other help without which those inward, immediate means cannot ordinarily be wrought.

As for the first set, faith itself and saving knowledge of Christ is a special gift given to some and denied to others, according to the good pleasure of the divine will: “To you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven; to them it has not been given” (Matthew 13:11). “No one can come to me unless it has been given him by my Father” (John 6:65). “By grace you have been saved through faith—and this not of yourselves; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). “Faith is not of all” (2 Thessalonians 3:2). The same holds for repentance, regeneration, and sanctification: a special mercy that procures them gives them to some, and the same mercy, not unfolding its riches, denies them to others. “Turn us, O Lord, to yourself, and we shall be turned” (Lamentations 5:21). “He has mercy on whom he wills; whom he wills he hardens” (Romans 9:18). “Not of bloods, nor of the will of man, but of God they were born” (John 1:13). “Blessed be God who according to his mercy has regenerated us” (1 Peter 1:3). I pass over the rest. From these it is clear that God gives or denies those means in which union with Christ and salvation are immediately set according to the good pleasure of his will, not according to a difference in the human will.

All the orthodox Fathers press this hard against the Pelagians. Ambrose on Luke 7:9: God calls whom he deigns, and makes devout whom he wills. Augustine, Epistle 107: We know grace is not given to all people, nor according to the merits of the will of those who receive it. In the same letter he adds that those denied this grace often differ by no merit and no will, but share a like condition with those who receive it. Fulgentius, On the Incarnation and Grace, chapter 19: As in fleshly birth the formation of the divine work precedes every will of the one being born, so in spiritual birth, by which we begin to put off the old self, no one can have a good will by his own motion. And chapter 21: If God has not given to a person through his grace, that person can never will to believe in God, because grace does not find this will already there—it works it in the person. So God does not hand out these inward means promiscuously to everyone who might apply Christ’s death to himself. Nor may our opponents claim that God’s giving or withholding of faith springs from human wills resisting or not resisting, since Scripture expressly refers this to God’s good pleasure to pity or not to pity, and the Fathers in plain words shut out any disparity of human wills before grace is received.

83So far we have argued about the immediate means. Now we come down to the means of those means. Christ’s death and merit have had their force in God’s acceptance from the world’s beginning. Yet under the Old Testament God did not grant the external means of application to every human being alike. As the Psalmist says, “He declares his word to Jacob; he has not done thus to every nation” (Psalm 147:19–20). Paul speaks the same way: “In past ages God allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways” (Acts 14:16).

Prosper marked the same point: it is not far from ordinary observation, he says, through how many ages countless thousands of people, left to their errors and impieties, have perished without any knowledge of the true God (On Free Choice, page 225). Looking to New Testament times (On the Calling of the Gentiles 2.17), he adds: even now in the farthest parts of the world there are nations on whom the Savior’s grace has not yet shone. From this it follows that even with Christ’s death granted, God is still not bound by his goodness or justice to provide and offer to every person the means by which they can apply Christ to themselves. In God the move from fact to right works both ways: God does this, therefore he does it justly; God does not do this, therefore no right binds him to do it.

84Some meet this argument by saying the gospel is not preached everywhere less because God fails to send preachers than because those who are sent refuse to go. So Corvinus against Tilenus, page 105. But if God, by his goodness and justice, as if by a kind of congruence, and with Christ’s death supposed, were bound to communicate sufficient means of application to everyone, he would not let anyone be cheated of an owed benefit by another’s carelessness—least of all a benefit without which no salvation can be hoped for. It is even a contradiction to say that by ordinary law God provides and administers to all these means that look to applying Christ, and yet withholds them from some because of the preachers’ neglect—when the very care of the preachers would have to be counted among those means, without which knowledge and application of the Christ who is preached cannot be had.

Further, if God’s goodness or justice required that these means of applying Christ be administered to all, he would without doubt have kindled in at least some preachers the will and care to preach and carry the gospel to every nation. He himself knows how to thrust laborers into the harvest according to his good pleasure. Finally, what preacher-neglect explains that two hundred years ago the gospel was preached by no one among the Americans, when no one had even dreamed those nations existed? We must therefore rise to a higher cause: God’s free good pleasure in granting or denying these means. By a special providence he sees to it that they are administered to peoples, or not administered, through his ministers—as Acts 16:6 and following shows: “They were forbidden to speak the word of God in Asia, and they were intending to go into Bithynia, and the Spirit did not permit them,” and so on.

Second, they answer that those long without evangelical grace had already repudiated it in their ancestors, and so the descendants are rightly stripped of the gospel proclamation their ancestors despised; therefore the fact that some are not lit by the gospel’s saving light should not be referred to God’s absolute will. But this does not hang with their own views. If God, with an eye to Christ’s death, is bound to administer sufficient means of salvation to all people, it is hardly fair that, because ancestors despised the preached word in Noah’s day, the gospel should be denied to their posterity after many thousands of years. If—Adam’s sin notwithstanding—Christ’s death has (on their showing) secured that sufficient means of salvation be administered to all, it is alien to reason and equity to break that quasi-ordinary law on the pretext of sins committed by any other ancestors of ours.

Just as God could justly deny any spiritual benefit to Adam’s posterity because of Adam’s own sin, so we grant that from other ancestors’ sins God may also take occasion to deny us any free benefit. But if by Christ’s death, with God’s goodness concurring, a law has been set about administering the means of grace, then just as God will not abrogate that quasi-statute because of Adam’s sin—who bore in himself the person of all his posterity—so it is far less fitting that posterity be robbed of this benefit because of the sins of others who do not sustain that common person of the human race. They flee in vain to ancestral sins to explain the denial of a thing which, by the virtue of Christ’s death and of divine goodness, they themselves claim was prepared for all and each by divine decree and as if owed by fixed law.

85Third, they answer that evangelical grace is denied to some because by continual law-breaking they have made themselves unworthy of those to whom divine grace should be offered. This reply will only make our position clearer. First I take what no sober mind will deny: every person in corrupted nature has made himself unworthy of evangelical grace, if you attend to his sins. Then I add that human dignity and unworthiness—or greater and lesser unworthiness—is not the rule by which God proceeds in dispensing or denying the gospel to particular persons or to nations. That being so, unworthiness is always found in those denied the gospel, and also in those who receive it. So this unworthiness has the nature of a circumstance that always accompanies both those who get the gospel and those who do not; it does not have the force of a discriminating cause why it is given to these and not to those. In this matter we must come down to the sole pleasure of the divine will, who, when it pleases him, confers helps both on those who do and on those who do not do what is in them—as Alvarez says in On Helps, disputation 58.

But because this reply, which teaches that human unworthiness fences off evangelical grace, seems quietly to hint that some could have procured the same by their dignity, hear what the orthodox Fathers taught the Pelagians on this very point. Augustine, Epistle 107, page 500, shows that Christ’s saving grace is not granted or denied by the rule of greater or lesser unworthiness. For brevity I omit the words. Prosper presses this again and again (On the Calling of the Gentiles, book 1, chapter 15): a part of humankind is set free while a part perishes; and if we ascribe that to the merits of wills, so that grace seems to have neglected the bad and chosen the good, the case of innumerable peoples will rise against us, to whom through so many ages no announcement of heavenly teaching has flashed. Nor can we say that those later ones on whom the light has risen were better, and so on. In the Poem On the Ungrateful, chapter 12, the same Prosper shows that the Pelagians’ own opinion was this: God by his goodness wills to call all to grace, but the will of some, oppressed by vices under the first light, has been made unworthy of the second. Against them, in chapter 14, he contends that examples can be brought of wicked hearts converted by God’s power, hearts in which nothing of the matter had ever settled, and which bore no sign or sense of justice.

The sum of the argument comes to this: evangelical grace is not given because people are judged worthy of it—no one worthy of so great a gift is found—nor is it denied because some have stood more unworthy than the rest, since this light has been granted to the worst and meanwhile denied to others less depraved. We must therefore rest in the secret good pleasure of the divine will, who, that his mercy may shine the more, does not regularly grant the gospel’s light to those who use nature’s light well or less badly, but on the contrary calls the faithless and negligent to himself, and unworthy, ungrateful sinners. From this it is plain that it always remains free for God, and in no way alien to his goodness, to give or not to give to any people whatever the gospel and the other means needed for applying Christ’s merits, according to the good pleasure of his will, with no account taken of dignity or unworthiness, or of greater and lesser human unworthiness.

86The same point can be proved from the plain inconveniences that press the contrary view. If by Christ's death it has been universally obtained that God is bound—by the decree itself, or by some law of congruity—to grant, as far as in him lies, to every human being the grace of gospel preaching and of inward sanctification, then the chief reason why one person in fact shares both graces and another does not will lie here: that one has thrust up an obstacle and pushed the grace away, or has blocked it from being offered at all, while the other has neither pushed it away nor blocked it. Our opponents do not shrink from that consequence. They do not reduce the difference between evangelical calling and saving grace denied or granted to God's bare will, but to different conditions or dispositions on the human side. So Corvinus against Tilenus, page 489: though God does not preach the word of the cross everywhere, he is still ready to preach it to all who duly submit themselves to the ministry of the law—that is, who follow the light of the natural law alive even in Gentile hearts. Writing on natural gifts, page 118, he says God left those gifts to the nations so that if they used them according to God's intention, they would be led to glorify God in the measure of their knowledge, and on to Christ and the knowledge of him; but if they held down in injustice the truth they had, they would be left in their ignorance. Here he openly hangs the gospel call on the use or abuse of natural gifts.

87The same Corvinus so defends inward life-giving grace as laid open to all by an ordinary law that he reduces the very difference why one person in fact shares that grace and another does not to a difference of human wills, not to the divine good pleasure. Indeed he says it is certain that no one's conversion is precisely intended by God. But however much this flatters human reason, it still runs against divine Scripture and can be crushed by plain inconveniences. If we grant that either the outward gospel call, or the inward and effectual infusion of regenerating grace, is given and denied according to different human dispositions or operations, then first it would follow that free choice in the corrupted state, not yet lit by gospel light, can so well use its natural gifts that God is bound—by the ordinary law his own goodness dictates to him—to give spiritual grace to the natural man. That is against the Apostle: if it is from works, grace is no longer grace (Romans 11:6). We would receive it not by the pity of the giver, but by the equity of a repayor, as Fulgentius says in On the Incarnation and Grace of Christ, chapter 18.

88Second—and every orthodox writer shrinks from this—it would also follow that the reason of predestination and of preterition must be assigned from people's different qualities or acts. For the reason of predestination, which is the preparation of grace, cannot differ from the reason of grace, which is the gift itself. So anyone who teaches that the reason grace is given or withheld must be sought in human dispositions or operations must of necessity seek the reason of predestination and preterition there too. Third, it would follow that God breaks the law he himself set when he as good as forces this grace on those who have put an obstacle in its way—which the Apostle himself most humbly confesses happened to Paul: caught in open sin and rushing against Christ, God mercifully called him to the knowledge and grace of Christ. Fulgentius puts it finely in On the Incarnation and Grace, chapter 18: how God's mercy goes before us, and what sort it finds when it does, the Teacher of the nations shows not in someone else but in himself, saying, I who was formerly a blasphemer, and so on (1 Timothy 1:13). The Father hints that every mortal is refractory until preventing grace has brought him under.

89Fourth, grant that grace is given or denied according as human wills have or have not set an obstacle, and you overturn nearly everything the Councils defined against the Pelagians. First among them is what the Council of Diospolis sanctioned against Pelagius: let him confess that grace is not given from merit, so that it may be true grace—that is, freely given—through the mercy of him who said, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy (Exodus 33:19; Romans 9:15). For to give or withhold grace according as someone has used natural gifts rightly or not, or (as others put it) according as someone has or has not done what lies in him, is for the Fathers the same as giving from merits and denying from demerits. Nor will that word of the African Fathers in their synodical letter stand: grace itself is not recognized at all unless it is given; and as long as it is not in a person, he must of necessity resist it in word or deed. How can it make sense that Gentiles in corrupted nature are to receive evangelical grace by that quasi-law if they have not set an obstacle to grace, when by the necessity of a depraved and habitual disposition they must resist grace the whole time they lack it? Finally those decrees of the Council of Orange fall—canon 4: if anyone contends that God waits for our will so that we may be purged from sin, but will not confess that even our willing to be purged is wrought in us by the Holy Spirit's operation and infusion, he resists the Apostle; and canon 6: if anyone subjoins the help of grace to human humility and obedience, and so on, he resists the Apostle. I leave the rest.

90Let them explain how God is not said to wait for the human will, and to hang the help of supernatural grace on obedience to the natural law written in human hearts, if—Christ's death once granted—God on this way of acting gives grace to all who use natural gifts rightly, and withholds it from those who do not. Since all of that is utterly foreign to the truth, it remains to say that God, the merit of Christ's death notwithstanding, can give or deny the grace of applying that merit, and ordinarily does so to particular persons by the good pleasure and freedom of his will—not by merits, or by the different operations of human wills.

91Our view is confirmed by the most useful ends it serves to bring out—ends the contrary view plainly abolishes. Take this case: grant Christ's death, and still take God as distributing or withholding the grace by which that death is applied to human beings according to his good pleasure, and not according to some difference among human wills or actions.

92First, absolute liberty of God in giving first grace then shines out—an attribute everyone must acknowledge here. "I choose to give to this one as to you," even when human merits are unequal, is God asserting his own liberty (Matthew 20:14). And "I choose to give to this one, and not to you," where on the human side everything is equal, is a voice just as worthy of God, and likewise serves to display his supreme liberty, as Paul proves (Romans 9). For although by the power and efficacy of Christ's death God willed himself bound to give remission to believers, and glory to the regenerate grafted into Christ, yet he did not will himself bound—by any act of theirs, or any disposition of theirs considered in corrupt nature outside Christ—to give the Gospel to these nations or these particular persons, or to give faith and efficacious grace to these definite individuals. So those who teach that grace is given or denied according to the good or bad use of nature diminish the divine liberty God reserved for himself: which is as much as to say that nature anticipates grace.

93Second, our view makes conspicuous what Scripture presses so hard: God's free and special mercy in giving certain people both the light of the Gospel and saving grace. Prosper puts it well: "There is a certain part of the human race that is brought on to eternal salvation by special benefits" (De vocatione gentium 2.31). Those who think Christ's death has this effect—that God offers the means of saving grace to all, yet leaves it to each person's own choice whether to obey or resist the grace offered, so that if they raise no obstacle they receive grace, and if they raise one they are stripped of it—plainly cancel that special mercy. On their view God showed Jacob or Peter no special mercy he did not show Esau and Judas; Jacob and Peter merely applied to themselves by some special act what Esau and Judas neglected to apply. Faustus of Riez taught that openly (De libero arbitrio 1.10), denying any special divine dispensation for the salvation of certain people—a lesson he learned from Pelagius, as Prosper shows (Carmen de ingratis 10). Augustine speaks otherwise: "The Lord gives to whom he wills, because he is merciful; and he does not give to whom he does not will, that he may make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy" (De bono perseverantiae 12).

94Third, our view leaves human beings no handle for boasting, and assigns the glory of human salvation wholly to God, who makes one person differ from another—as the Apostle says: "Who makes you differ? What do you have that you did not receive?" (1 Corinthians 4:7). "From whom," Augustine asks, "except from him who distinguishes you from another, to whom he did not give what he gave you?" (De praedestinatione sanctorum 9). But if their view wins—that by Christ's death God has become equally kind to all people, and that from this equal bent toward all he administers grace so that whoever uses nature's light well, or does what lies in him, draws grace to himself, while whoever uses that light badly, or fails to do what lies in him, does not—then the person who ends up sharing in grace has from himself a fair ground of boasting: by his own choice he set himself apart from another whom no special gift of divine mercy had set apart.

95Suppose Christ's death is granted, and yet by God's decree the gift or denial of grace to particular persons does not proceed from the absolute liberty of the divine will, but from the disparity of human wills and actions. Then anyone can give a ready reason why the Gospel was withheld from this nation and granted to that one, and why these particular people receive faith and vivifying, regenerating grace while others do not. Of those who have it, the story runs: they got the light of the Gospel because they used nature's light well, or at least less badly. Of those who lack it: they stay without Gospel light because they used nature's light less well. Ask among Christians why this person has faith and regenerating grace and that one does not, and you hear the same human ledger—those who have it willed to believe and would not raise an obstacle; those who lack it would not believe and would not clear the obstacle away. Of the special calling according to purpose, by which God powerfully turns the hearts of those he specially chooses to pity toward belief, there is meantime not a word.

96I add this: to give so ready a reason, from the human side, why grace is obtained or missed is the Pelagian trademark—and every orthodox writer has condemned it. The orthodox have always traced the gift or denial of efficacious grace back to the secret purpose of God's good pleasure. They never held that, once Christ's death is granted, God is so bound to administer his grace indiscriminately that having it or lacking it turns on the disparity of human wills. We do not deny that those who stay without grace have earned their unworthiness and choose their wickedness. We do say that everyone labors under that disease until special grace cures it; and that no unregenerate person pulls grace to himself by a better will. Rather, by a more efficacious grace given from God's mere good pleasure, he receives a better will—as the Apostle says: "It is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy" (Romans 9:16). "It is God who gives us both to will and to accomplish, according to his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13).

97Prosper brings the difference between believers and unbelievers back to the same point (Ad excerpta Genuensium, reply to Doubt 4): "Many hear the word of truth, but some believe and others contradict—so these will to believe, and those will not. Who does not know that? Who denies it? Yet when the Lord prepares the will for some and does not prepare it for others, we must ask what comes of mercy and what of judgment." And a little later: "Mercy and judgment have been done in the wills themselves."

98Augustine too, everywhere, traces actual share in grace to this secret good pleasure of God—not to the difference among human wills that, by their native freedom, do or do not apply themselves to grace offered. De bono perseverantiae 8: of two already adult ungodly persons, why one is called so that he follows the Caller, while the other is either not called, or not called so as to follow—God's judgments are inscrutable. And De praedestinatione sanctorum 8: "Why," he asks, "does God not teach everyone? If we say it is because those he does not teach refuse to learn, the reply comes: Where then is the word, LORD, YOU TURN US AND GIVE US LIFE?"

99Aquinas too will give no other reason why these particular persons receive the gifts of saving grace, and others do not, than the simple will of God (Contra Gentiles 3.161). "Though the sinner," he says, "puts an obstacle in grace's way, and so far as the order of things requires ought not to receive grace, yet sometimes, from the abundance of his goodness, God also goes before with his help even those who put that obstacle there, turning them from evil and converting them to good," and the rest. He adds at once: "He does not go before with his help all who block grace, but some in whom he wills his mercy to appear, so that in others the order of justice may be shown."

100Finally—lest we pin on the disparity of human wills the fact that these obtained efficacious grace and were converted, while those did not and stay unconverted—he adds in the same place these weighty words: "When God, among people held in the same sins, converts some by going before them, but sustains or permits others to go on according to the order of things, we are not to ask why he converts these and not those. That hangs on his simple will—just as it was by his simple will that, when all things were made from nothing, some were made more worthy than others." So far Thomas. Christ's death, then, established no divine decree that grace should be administered promiscuously to all, with a kind of annexed law that particular persons share or do not share in that grace according as they will or will not raise an impediment. The very distinction between those who raise an obstacle and those who do not must be resolved into God's bare good pleasure as its first and radical cause.

101Suppose God's will, by Christ's death, is taken as somehow fixed to administer grace to every person who applies Christ to himself and is saved—yet so that only those receive and keep it who either used nature's light well, or raised almost no obstacle against the grace offered them, while everyone else does not receive it. Then the last account of grace obtained or missed, and of salvation gained or lost, would be charged not to the divine good pleasure but to human free choice. The consequence is plain and solid. On that view God is presumed, because of Christ's death, to administer grace and to offer everyone a grace sufficient for applying Christ and obtaining salvation; and he is also presumed, by absolute will or bare will, to give saving grace to no one specially.

102So the Remonstrants put it in the Declaration of their view on the third article (Acts of the Synod of Dordrecht, p. 15). Saving efficacy of grace, they say, hangs neither on the fitness of the calling (as some Roman writers hold) nor on omnipotent divine force (as Prosper in the Carmen De Ingratis 14-15, and Augustine Against Julian 5.3, On the Predestination of the Saints 2, On Grace and Free Choice 20, and On Rebuke and Grace 14), but on an operation that most surely gets its effect when a person does not set rebellion against it—rebellion he could of himself have set.

103As if they said grace is efficacious in this or that particular person because he himself raised no obstacle—when they ought to have said he raised none because God, of his good pleasure, gave him efficacious grace. I now add the Minor, and I affirm it is wholly alien to theology and to truth for anyone to hold that Christ's death established a decree by which the sure attainment of grace and salvation is shifted from God's absolute will onto the free choice of the human will.

104For that account of gaining or missing salvation which resolves into the liberty of human choice belonged to the first grace given to the first Adam—as Augustine well noted. But the grace given in Christ to all who are to be saved is far stronger: by it they will, and will so strongly, that in fact they always overcome the flesh's unwilling will. (See Augustine, On Rebuke and Grace 11-12.)

105So after Christ has been given us, the distinction that some have the grace by which they apply Christ to themselves for salvation, and others do not, is brought back not to the unevenness of human wills, but to the good pleasure of the divine will.

106Our last argument comes from the Fathers themselves. They freely grant that some people are not given the means and gifts by which they can believe in Christ and obtain salvation—and that this denial rests on the good pleasure of the divine will. God would never leave that undone if, once Christ's death is granted, divine goodness, prudence, or justice already required those means to be supplied to every person. We will not parade every Father in turn. We will take a few passages from those who fought the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians.

107One caution first. When we say the orthodox Fathers who fought Pelagius refuse to grant that grace is given to all merely because of Christ's death, we are not letting the word grace run loose past its proper bounds—the very move the Pelagians once made. Anything God freely grants to people can, in a loose sense, be called grace.

108Natural light by which God lights every person who comes into the world; the witness of the creatures that steers the nations toward some knowledge of the Creator; outward benefits by which God shows his love of humankind to the whole world; inward stirrings that sometimes check a Gentile from evil or move him toward good—all these can, in that wide sense, wear the name grace. Under that blanket the Pelagians hid the poison of their teaching. Scripture does not mean the grace given through Christ that way, and neither do the holy Fathers once Pelagius forced them to speak more carefully.

109So by "grace of Christ" or saving grace, in Scripture's sense, we mean only those supernatural benefits and gifts aimed straight at salvation in Christ and eternal life. They fall into two ranks. Some are ordered to salvation through Christ, but not infallibly: Gospel preaching, illumination of minds in the mysteries of the faith—in short, whatever supernatural help tends to join people to Christ and set them in a state of salvation, yet has not actually joined them or moved them from death into life. The Apostle himself calls that preaching and knowledge of the Gospel "grace" (1 Cor. 1:4; 2:11). That is why 1 Peter 4:10 names preachers stewards of God's manifold grace. Augustine calls the Gospel itself Christian grace; Prosper calls it the Savior's grace—and in that sense says some nations live outside God's grace when no one there preaches Christ to them.

110Other supernatural gifts actually bring the state of salvation: a good will, faith, conversion, regeneration—in short, what belongs only to people grafted into Christ and reconciled to God. Those, Augustine says, deserve the name "grace of Christ" in the proper sense. Preaching and knowledge of Christian doctrine he refers to that proper grace only so far as they help produce and advance it. In On the Grace of Christ he makes the point expressly: the name does not mean mere lighting of the mind or stirring of the will, but the gift of faith itself and of a good will. He paints that grace in bright colors—the grace by which we are justified from iniquity and saved from weakness; a grace we barely share with the ungodly, but the grace by which we are children of God. Now for the Fathers' own words.

111First, the Fathers who deny that—Christ's death granted—the grace of Gospel preaching is owed or given to all, and even say it is withheld from some by the purpose of God's will. That could not happen if grace were owed to everyone on the strength of Christ's death. Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance, chapter 8: take two ungodly adults—why is one called so that he follows the Caller, while the other is not called, or not called that way? God's judgments are inscrutable. He plainly owns that some are not called at all. Chapter 14 adds that for some not cut out of the mass of perdition by God's higher judgment, the means by which they could believe are simply not applied. In both places he affirms that the means are denied, and he traces it to the unsearchable depth of divine predestination—not to uneven human wills or works, the Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian habit. Chapter 11 says the same: God chooses not to help some, and that rests on his will and hidden predestination.

112Prosper grants the objection that not all are called to grace, at least of everyone to whom Christ's cross and the redemption of his blood have never been made known. Sentence 4 on the Chapters of the Gauls: we cannot say there is a calling of grace where Mother Church has not yet regenerated anyone. That strikes those who, to keep grace prepared and offered to all because of Christ, invent some calling and enough-grace in the thick of pagan darkness. What Prosper said of little children we may say of adults: prove them called somehow, when neither planter could preach to them nor irrigator help them (Response to Objection 4).

113Fulgentius, On the Truth of Predestination book 1: to people who use reason God either supplies or withholds the persons fitted for their salvation—holding justice toward some, showing mercy to others. Meaning: he sends Gospel preachers, or does not, by his good pleasure—sends when he means to display mercy, withholds when he means to exercise justice. From the same Fulgentius I add: the common guilt all contracted in Adam is enough for Gospel grace to be justly denied to anyone. So he says there: the grace by which we are saved is never given for a prior good desert, yet it is denied only for a prior evil desert; for the first man passed the deserts of his sin to all. So for Fulgentius original demerit is already a just reason to withhold Christ's grace from anyone. Aquinas owns the same (2a 2ae q. 2 a. 5 ad 1): helps of grace are given to some in mercy, and in justice not given to others, as punishment for prior sin—at least original sin. All this confirms what we set out first: there is no decreed law, tied to Christ's death, that the means of Gospel grace must be administered to the whole human race. God, even with Christ's death in view, can by right deny—and has in fact denied to some—the very calling of grace.

116Third witness: On the Predestination of the Saints 8. Faith begun and faith perfected is God's gift. No one who will not fight the plainest Scripture should doubt that this gift is given to some and not to others. Why not to all should not unsettle the believer who holds that from one man all went into condemnation. Augustine teaches outright that the grace of faith is not given to all; we need no further reason for the gift withheld, because the damnable state in which we are all born already upholds God's justice—even if he gave saving grace to no mortal at all.

117Fourth, On Rebuke and Grace 5. Unbelievers and rebels argue: I would deserve rebuke if by my fault I lacked faith and obedience—if I could give or take it myself and would not, or if when God gave it I refused. But if the Lord himself prepares the will, why rebuke me? Chapter 6 Augustine answers: the first crookedness that disobeys God is from the human, who by his own evil will fell from the uprightness God first made in him. So rebuke the damnable root, that pain may birth a will to be regenerated—yet only if the one rebuked is a child of promise, so God works inwardly in him by hidden inspiration even to will. Epistle 105 is the same case. Pelagius asks: what have we done who live badly, if we never received the grace to live well? Augustine answers only that people who live badly of themselves cannot truly claim they have done no evil. A little later: let them blame themselves; they were made from the mass God justly condemned for one man's sin. In both places Augustine grants that God has denied his grace to some; that those not given it could not take it for themselves; and that original guilt and pravity are reason enough for God, of his will, to withhold Christ's grace from anyone. Note too: he does not picture saving grace as something merely offered to the human will, knocking to be let in, but as something poured in—healing and vivifying the will that receives it.

118Our last Augustine witness is Epistle 107. Against the Pelagians he lists twelve catholic sentences; the fourth is, We know God's grace is not given to all. And lest anyone claim Christ's death made this grace prepared and offered to everyone, had or missed only as people choose to take or refuse it, sentences five and six shut that door too—more on that shortly. From Augustine we come to Prosper. In the Genoese Excerpts, answer to doubt 7: when the word of truth is preached, some believe willingly and some do not—but only because God has opened some hearts and not others. That is to say, the grace of faith is given to some and denied to others. Answer to the eighth doubt: of Tyre and Sidon what can we say but that it was not given them to believe? Why denied—let them tell if they can. Prosper asserts two things: the gift of faith is denied to some, and the reason is unsearchable. In On the Ungrateful 6 he sets out the Pelagian error: that without choosing persons, law or Christ's grace wills to save every human, and the Caller's gift is so laid open that anyone can reach it by his own liberty and strength. Chapter 10 paints the Semi-Pelagian colors; chapter 11 rejects them: Tell us how you prove Christ's grace passes by none of all who are born. For Prosper, to defend grace given to all is a strand of Pelagian poison. Hear Fulgentius. On the Truth of Predestination: the holy Fathers, holding apostolic truth, knew for certain—and left it in books—that God's grace is not given generally to all. A little later: no one can desire, ask, or even know that grace unless he first receives it from God. Again: do not think God's grace is given to all. Not all have faith; some do not receive God's charity so as to be saved. That they neither believe nor love the Lord is the fault of the human will, which, until divine gift-grace changes it, either fails to understand God's commands or despises them once understood. What could be plainer? Vivifying grace is not given to all, and no one has it unless it is given from above. Clearer still, On the Incarnation and Grace of Jesus Christ, p. 89: God who prepares the will is the One who gives it. If he has not given that will by his grace, a person can never will to believe in God—because grace does not find the will ready; it works the will in the person. So the Fathers who warred on Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians speak with one voice: vivifying, saving grace is not given to all; the spoiled will that lacks it can by its own fault scorn grace and push away what is offered in outward means; but it cannot, by right of native liberty, snatch this life-giving grace and drag it to itself.

119But the marrow of Pelagianism sits in the mode they invent for how God administers vivifying grace and how people take it. So we will set out what the Pelagian party claims and what the orthodox Fathers settle, with witnesses from both. The Pelagians hold that from Christ’s death and merit vivifying, regenerating grace flows to everyone from God’s mercy in such a way that being vivified and regenerated—or not—depends first on the human will that embraces or spurns the grace. Their view comes to this: saving grace is offered to all from sheer mercy in Christ, yet given to no one by absolute good pleasure. Ask why this person received Christ’s saving grace and that one did not, and they answer: the one willed to take what was offered; the other would not. Let them speak for themselves. Vitalis of Carthage, in Augustine Epistle 107, holds that grace follows the human will and is therefore given because people willed it. The Massilian leftovers of Pelagian heresy, in Prosper to Augustine, say that as far as God goes eternal life is prepared for all, but as far as free choice goes it is seized by those who freely believed God and received helps of grace by the merit of that belief. Pelagius himself, in Augustine, says people who use free choice well merit the Lord’s grace; others who have free choice by which they could come to faith and deserve God’s grace, by misusing their liberty, lack grace and run into damnation. Faustus of Riez: from God’s goodness that a person is called; from his own will that he promptly obeys.

120From the old Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians we come down to people who hate the Pelagian name yet will not drop the error. In that class I put those Papists who teach that grace is efficacious by the consent of the human will: if the will happens to assent, God pours in vivifying grace; if it resists, God’s operation that would vivify and regenerate the soul is made void. With them I also count Arminius and his disciples, who hang the gift or denial of saving grace so far on human wills that they say God by absolute good pleasure wills to convert and regenerate no one, yet wills to convert and regenerate all on condition they have not resisted his exciting grace—and leaves them unconverted if they have resisted. So the Remonstrants: ask why this person is converted and that one is not, and the answer is that God converts the one who does not oppose with fresh obstinacy, and the other is not converted because he does oppose with fresh obstinacy. They take the reason for given or denied saving grace from different acts of human choice. About God removing the stony, stubborn heart by special mercy—or not removing it by the freedom of his own will—they keep a deep silence. Corvinus likewise refers whether we have or lack the grace by which we are converted and saved not to a discrimination of God’s will but of ours. Against Bogerman, p. 263: It is certain that nobody’s conversion is precisely intended by God. A little later: once all the operations God uses to work conversion in us are in place, conversion still remains so much in our power that we can refuse to be converted. That is their position.

121The holy orthodox Fathers speak far otherwise. They taught that vivifying, regenerating, converting grace for the soul itself is not given or withheld by the contingent yes or no of free choice, but by God’s free and absolute will, which does or does not choose to take away the mad hardness of the human heart. Augustine comes first. He always held that, once the work of human redemption was finished on the cross, some people have grace because God by special mercy worked in them so that they received it; others lack it because God would not, by pitying them, soften their rebellious hardness. Fine is Retractations 1.10: When I said all people can turn themselves to keep God’s commands if they will, let the Pelagians not take that as spoken on their side. It is wholly true that all can do this if they will; but the will is prepared by the Lord, and is so enlarged by the gift of charity that they can. From those words it is plain that conversion of the human will to God does not hang on this condition—If the will, once excited, chooses to obey—but that its very willing and its very ability hang on a preparation of God and an infusion of charity. The same Augustine, Epistle 107: How can one say everyone would have received grace if those to whom it is not given had not refused it by their own will, when it is not given to many infants who have no contrary will? A little later: How are merits of human will weighed here, when those to whom that grace is not given have a like case with those to whom it is given, and yet by God’s just judgment it is not given?

122Hear others too. Prosper: Who doubts that free choice obeys so great a call from the Caller, when in that choice God’s grace has already generated the affection of believing and obeying? So God’s grace is not given to the will on condition that it obey; once given, it makes the will obey. The same writer, On the Calling of the Gentiles 1.18: for people of every condition and age, the cause of receiving grace is God’s will, with whom the reason of election is hidden—merits begin from that grace which they receive without merits. Note the witness. Even if this author (whoever he was) holds that helps of grace have not been wholly withdrawn from anyone, he still does not think grace stands ready and offered to all in such a way that the difference—why this person received it and that one did not—is traced to one willing to take and the other willing to resist. He reduces the cause of grace received to God’s hidden election; and, as far as non-reception is a mere negation, he reduces that too to hidden non-election. If you treat it as a moral omission by people who resist grace, then refer it to human viciousness. But that is by the way.

123Fulgentius everywhere beats back the Pelagian error that imagines saving grace prepared and offered to everyone in Christ the Redeemer under a kind of law: some have it because they willed to take it; others lack it because they willed to push it away. He teaches instead that the good will itself is given to some, and that everyone to whom it is not given cannot help but refuse it. We have already cited witnesses of that kind; now we add more. On the Truth of Predestination 1, p. 158: Not because we will have we received grace—nor was grace given even while we were willing. A little later, p. 159: Grace alone makes a good will in us; grace alone gives faith to the will. A will that does not have faith can have no merit toward receiving faith, because not to have faith is to displease God.

124The same writer, book 2 near the start, p. 169: It is God’s to decide which people receive his grace, and how much. He does not pay it as wages owed to human wills or works; as merciful and kind he pours it freely into hearts he means to light. So he gives it to whom he wills and as much as he wills, because no rising of a good will and no fruit of any good work invites him before he bestows grace. That cuts the throat of the Pelagian view—and of the Arminian too—which will not have vivifying, saving grace (Fulgentius’s subject) prepared or given to anyone by the purpose of divine election, but given or denied to people by chance, under the shifting condition of a human will that yields or fights. Sounder Papists disliked that theology. A few of their witnesses we will add to the places already set down.

125Dominicus Bannes, on Aquinas I q.22, last conclusion, p. 278: God, he says, decided from eternity—by a will either absolute or consequent—not to give supernatural helps to everyone. If anyone asks why he confers these gifts on certain people in particular and denies them to others, that hangs on God’s bare will; as Augustine and St Thomas teach, you should not hunt a further reason. A little later: So the Christian theologian who is humble should learn with St Thomas and Augustine to leave some things unknown rather than, with the curious, to know more than he ought, lest he slide into the Pelagian heresy by tracing this difference to free choice as its first cause and root—“because this one wanted to convert, and that one did not.” He also adds a line that cuts the sinews of Pelagian and Arminian theology: the will’s own concurrence is itself an effect that necessarily follows, by necessity of consequence, from efficacious divine help.

126With those rulings the learned Bannes rejects and condemns the view that regenerating, life-saving grace is prepared and laid open to every human being because of Christ’s merit. He also refutes those who locate the reason why some are regenerated and others are not—or why some convert and others do not—in human willing and refusing. And he teaches that our concurrence, or our non-resistance—our willing—is a necessary effect of efficacious grace once given, and so is not the reason or condition for its being given and received.

127Alvarez, On the Helps of Divine Grace, Disp. 58, p. 263: Suppose we assert a law God has set, that he will infallibly give efficacious help to those who use well—or who choose to use—sufficient help from their innate liberty alone. Then the start of efficacious grace would already come from nature and from the creature’s innate liberty of willing to use sufficient help well. That is the very law, the very decree of God, that Arminius, Corvinus, and the rest of that school defend with such zeal. They say sufficient grace is given to all because of Christ the Mediator’s merit; but efficacious grace—grace that in the act itself converts and regenerates—is to be given only if people use that exciting or sufficient grace well, that is, if the will, once stirred by grace and made able, puts forth the power of willing planted in it. That makes the beginning of efficacious grace belong to Nature. The same Alvarez, same place: this causal is false—“because the person stirred by God wills to consent, therefore he is helped.” This causal is true—“because the person stirred by sufficient grace is helped by efficacious help, therefore he cooperates.” He proves it at length in Disp. 59, and there also holds this proposition most true: because God wills that the person will, therefore the person wills.

128That stands diametrically against Arminian teaching. They deny that any antecedent will of God is why some rather than others believe, convert, and are saved with effect. They put the whole difference down to the prior human will of people who, stirred by the same common grace as others, chose ahead of the rest to believe, to turn, and to take hold of salvation.

129William Estius, once professor at Douai, on I Sentences disp. 46 §2, p. 222: We must not picture in God a will, a zeal, some straining by which he wills, labors, presses, and does all that is in him so that every human being may be saved—only to fail because human bad will blocks his good will and, by prevailing and getting in the way, frustrates God’s will. Yet that is nearly the whole of what some claim Christ’s death procured: that God, by offering saving grace to all alike, wills to save those who freely apply themselves to grace and to damn those who resist it.

130Last, let Bellarmine step forward. He does not grant that Christ’s death is tied to any divine decree by which God would give efficacious grace—grace that regenerates in very fact—to every human being on the condition that they do not refuse it by their will. In On Grace and Free Choice book 1, chapter 12, he rejects those who teach that people have it in their power to make grace efficacious when otherwise, of itself, it would be only sufficient. He shows they stand against Augustine and Holy Scripture when they say everyone would have received God’s grace if those who do not receive it had not refused it by their will (p. 423). He presses the view with this trouble: if efficacious calling hung not on God’s purpose but on the human will, no room would be left for predestination. Add book 2, chapter 8, p. 455: We believe God by absolute will wills to save many, both infants and adults, and by absolute will does not will to save others, both infants and adults. See Augustine’s Enchiridion, chapters 102–103.

131But why so much on grace and free choice, when our question is the Death of Christ as the universal cause of human salvation? Because the Pelagians once taught—and many today still slide into—the view that by the Redeemer’s death and merit, saving or efficacious grace stands open equally to every human being, to be given if they do not refuse it by their will, and denied if they do. As if Christ’s death itself had been granted from pure mercy, while efficacious or saving grace reaches people only as they use free choice well or badly in embracing or rejecting exciting grace. Then salvation would belong to those “worthy to be saved” as willing from themselves—as Prosper sang in On the Ungrateful 1.6. So in this Dissertation on the universal efficacy of Christ’s death, just as we had to show against those who try to narrow it that a universal covenant stands with the whole human race to give remission and eternal life to each person under the condition of faith, so we also had to show against those who stretch that universal efficacy past its bounds that no law and no decree stands, in connection with Christ’s death, to give the means of supernatural grace—or saving efficacious grace itself—to everyone on the condition that they use nature’s light well or less badly, or that they do not refuse that grace by their will. Christ’s death being granted, God is bound by faithfulness, under the gospel covenant, to give remission of sins and eternal life to anyone who repents and believes. By no covenant is he bound to give faith itself, charity, or saving grace to someone who only performs some other act by free choice’s own powers. Indeed, once Christ’s death is granted, the gift or denial of efficacious saving grace remains as free to God as the gift of Christ himself, which is owed to no human acts of choice. So the coming of efficacious saving grace must be traced to God’s purpose of mercy or non-mercy as its first root—not to the human choice of willing or not willing. Thus far we have had to treat Christ’s death as its force and efficacy reach all. Next we must explain how it is restricted to God’s elect children.

132We have treated Christ’s death as it regards the whole human race—with the universal scope of his life-giving power, under the condition of Faith, as that power is to be brought into act for any person. For although, when that condition fails, Christ’s death does not put forth its saving force in the greater part of humankind, still it must neither be denied—what the Scriptures everywhere and clearly witness—nor doubted that God has within himself most just and wise reasons for his counsel when he ordained his Son’s death applicable to all under the condition of faith, and yet did not decree to effect or procure that the same death be applied to all by a faith given to each. So we must not set these divine decrees against each other as if they collided: “I will that my Son so offer himself on the cross for the sins of the human race that all and each who believe in him can be saved”; and “I will so dispense my efficacious grace that not all, but the elect alone, receive this saving faith by which they are saved.” If anyone thinks those two decrees fight, he ought rather to own the weakness of his understanding than to deny anything so plainly set down in Holy Scripture. Let this then stand fixed: by God’s own decree Christ was so offered on the altar of the cross for all human beings that his death is already established as it were a universal remedy for all and each, applicable by faith for obtaining remission of sins and eternal life.

133But now, lest under this universal virtue of Christ’s death—which extends to all by power—we crush that special efficacy of the same which belongs and reaches to the predestined alone, we must take up the other part of the dispute we have undertaken. It will explain and defend the elect’s special prerogative in Christ’s death, both from the will of God the Father who gave his Son to death and from the Son who offered himself. For we must not so defend that Christ died for all that, with the Pelagians, we believe the life-giving efficacy of that death stands open in equal measure to all in common from the intention of the divine will, and yet in the event becomes saving for some and not for others from nowhere but the contingent use of human liberty. Nor must we rave with the Arminians as if God gave his Son to death intending absolutely nothing else than that he himself should thence have a bare power of saving any sinners he pleased, his justice notwithstanding, and that any sinners should have a way or means by which they could be saved, their sin notwithstanding. Hence that famous corollary of Grevinchovius in his dissertation On the Death of Christ, p. 9: that the dignity, necessity, and usefulness of the obtaining could have stood abundantly even if the redemption obtained had never been applied by him to any individual. Likewise also that at p. 14: that redemption could have been obtained for all, and yet applied to none, because of the intervening unbelief of all. But we by no means judge that Christ’s death was cast like a die; rather it was decreed from eternity by God the Father and by Christ that by the merit of this death certain persons, whom Scripture marks by the name of the elect, should be saved infallibly; and so by God’s will Christ’s death was offered and accepted for redeeming those same persons in a special mode and counsel.

134Nor is it necessary here, for defending this special counsel, to settle that thorny little question—vexed by many, and vexing all who take it up—whether the decree by which certain persons are predestined to the infallible sharing of eternal life is prior, or that other by which Christ was ordained to the Mediator’s office. For although, to shore up the weakness of human understanding, we are forced in God’s eternal decrees to conceive some as prior and some as posterior, still to contend about these imaginary signs of our reason, or to take from them questions of faith to establish or refute, seems to me slippery and very dangerous. This at least must be set beyond every cast of doubt: those decrees of God which we think according to an order of prior and posterior stand, in God himself, in the equal eternity of infinity; nor can or should any separate instant be given in which, one decree being fixed, the other is rightly thought not yet reviewed and fixed. Conceive then as prior in order the decree of constituting and sending the Mediator (which seems to me fitter to our way of understanding), and as posterior the decree of electing certain persons to the unfrustrated obtaining of eternal life in the Mediator so constituted; yet never so pull these apart that the Mediator’s passion was not from eternity foreseen as to be offered in a special mode and regard for those to be elected, and as specially offered for them was from eternity accepted by God. Or on the contrary, conceive as prior the decree of electing certain persons to salvation, and as posterior the decree of destining Christ to the Mediator’s office; yet never so separate them that Christ’s passion, specially offered and accepted for those same persons, was not the cause of preparing and giving those elect both efficacious grace and salvation. Since therefore either opinion serves our purpose alike, leaving aside a question of little necessity, we will propose and confirm a single thesis on Christ’s death, under a special consideration restricted to the predestined alone. It runs thus:

135Thesis. Christ’s death, from the special Intention of God the Father who from eternity ordained and accepted that sacrifice, and of Christ who offered the same to God the Father in the fullness of time, was destined for certain human beings (whom Scripture calls the Elect) and for them alone, to be applied efficaciously and infallibly for the obtaining of eternal life. We oppose this thesis to the Arminians’ error, which Grevinchovius tries to establish in his Dissertation On the Death of Christ, p. 7 ff., where he teaches that God, in delivering his Son, intended the obtaining of reconciliation to be common to all and each, but absolutely willed the application of that obtained reconciliation for no mortal. “I acknowledge,” he says, “in God indeed a constant and perpetual affection of applying the obtained good to all and each: I deny that the application itself is destined by God’s sure counsel and will to any human being except as a believer, and as a believer.” So this new little master thinks God wills eternal life in Christ equally for all, and does not by an absolute and antecedent will destine and prepare for some efficacious grace by which Christ is infallibly applied to them; but by his eternal foreknowledge looks ahead who will believe and who will remain in their unbelief, and only then destines to believers as believers the efficacious application of Jesus Christ’s death and merits. But we hold that in predestination to faith itself the application of Christ’s death is infallibly destined to certain persons; and we say this faith is prepared not for believers as believers, but for unbelievers, that by it they may become believers. So application not destined but done is understood in those considered as believers; but destined application is understood in those for whom the gift of faith is destined, through which that application will be made. And these are the elect, and the elect alone, whose special prerogative is that by the absolute will of God the Father and of Christ the Mediator they are decreed and procured to be saved infallibly through Christ’s death. With these preliminaries we come to the arguments, and first take up the plain testimonies of the Scriptures.

1361. First here belong those places that mark the Father’s absolute will to give certain persons to the Mediator and as it were commend them, to this end: that from him and through him they may receive all things needful for salvation, and finally salvation itself. John 6:37, 39: “All that the Father gives me will come to me; and him who comes to me I will not cast out. This is the will of the Father who sent me, that of all he has given me I should lose nothing,” and so on. It is clear from this context that not all promiscuously, but certain persons, were given to the Mediator by the Father’s singular mercy, from a sure and gracious purpose of bringing those same persons infallibly and efficaciously to eternal life. Like texts are found in John 17:2: “You have given him authority over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to all you have given him.” This special donation can be understood as done in no other way than in eternal election. And that those so given to the Redeemer have a special prerogative in the very work of redemption no sane person will doubt. Certainly the Apostle marked it openly in Ephesians 1:4, 5, 6, and following: “He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world was laid. He predestined us to adoption as sons through Christ according to the purpose of his will.” Here you have that special donation of certain persons known to God alone. Then verse 7 shows that according to God’s purpose those same persons always obtain efficacious and applied redemption in the Mediator—“in whom we have redemption through his blood,” and so on. Therefore those specially given to Christ in election always draw faith, remission of sins, sanctification, and salvation from Christ’s death, the fruitful application of that same death being given them together with it. Saint Augustine understood by this donation nothing other than eternal election (On John, tract. 107): “The Father,” he says, “would not have given them to the Son unless he had chosen them.” The same Father, in On the Predestination of the Saints, chapter 16, shows that those so given to the Son are also called in that peculiar way, so that Christ crucified does not become to them a scandal or foolishness, but the power and wisdom of God for working faith and salvation efficaciously in them. See the author’s words, which for brevity I omit. Either, then, it must be denied that certain persons were specially given by God the Father to Christ the Mediator, or it must at once be granted that the Mediator in his offering had a special regard to those same persons.

1372. The same is proved from those places that teach Christ, conscious of the Father’s will, directs and infallibly leads to salvation the aforesaid persons specially given to him, with special care. That would doubtless not happen unless Christ’s death—which is the meritorious cause of every saving grace granted us—had been destined to those same persons as saving and life-giving by a special intention. But let us hear the words of Scripture. John 17:9: “I ask for them; I do not ask for the world, but for those you have given me, because they are yours.” And verse 12: “I have kept them; those you gave me I have guarded.” And verse 19: “For them I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.” Nothing is clearer than that two things are affirmed in these places: first, that not all promiscuously, but certain ones, were specially given by God the Father to Christ the mediator—which has been shown to be understood of the Elect; second, that Christ, in discharging the very office of Mediator and Savior, embraces and pursues those same persons with special love, intention, and care—that is, with such love, intention, and care as produce in them the infallible effect of eternal life. That is plain from Hebrews 2:13, where Christ presents these children given him by the Father to his Father safe and sound: “Behold, I and the children God has given me.”

138But now, to gather all this as into one bundle: those whom Christ by special intercession commended to the Father—that is, by absolute prayer (as Bannes has it on I q.23 art.5 p.297), or (as Suárez in tom. 3.1 q.19 disp.31 p.634) those for whom he prayed with an efficacious and absolute will that the merit of his death be applied to them efficaciously; those for whose keeping and guarding he mounts as it were extraordinary watch; those for whom he so sanctified himself that from him they efficaciously receive that sanctification which is worked in the hearts of the saved by the teaching of the Gospel; finally, those whom he will at last present to the Father, every one, safe and glorious—those, beyond all controversy, he also embraced with special intention in the very act of offering, and so in the whole work of redemption. For it is absurd that salvation was procured for them by the Mediator with special intention, if Christ’s death, which is the cause of human salvation, was not destined to them with special intention.

1393. The third argument is drawn from those Scripture testimonies in which Christ’s death, joined and as it were folded together with a sure and absolute purpose of giving eternal life, is not spread out to all human beings but is restricted to certain persons—and that by Christ’s own special intention. Such are John 10:15: “I lay down my life for my sheep.” John 11:51–52: Jesus was about to die that he might gather into one the scattered children of God. Ephesians 5:25–26: “Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her and present her to himself in glory.” Titus 2:14: Christ gave himself for us that he might cleanse for himself a people of his own, and so on. He purchased the church with his blood (Acts 20:28). Ephesians 1:22–23: he gave him as Head over all things to the church, which is his body. Add also Ephesians 5:23: “He himself is the Savior of his body.”

140In all these places three things must be noticed. First, by the names sheep, Church, children of God, and body of Christ are meant sheep, children of God, or members of Christ—not so much already united in act by a faith received as still to be united by God’s counsel and intention through a faith yet to be received. Second, under those titles the human race cannot be meant promiscuously. Third, when it is said that Christ died that he might gather these children, sanctify this Church, acquire this Church, and the like, what is marked in Christ as he offers himself is not an inefficacious will, or some conditioned intention that might miss its intended effect, but an efficacious will and an intention joined to an infallible outcome.

141First, then: in those places the speech is of sheep, members, and children taken according to God's eternal and hidden purpose of election, not according to what they are in the present act. Nobody becomes Christ's sheep in fact, or a child of God, or a member of his mystical body, unless the merit and benefit of Christ's death are actually and efficaciously brought down and applied to him. So Christ died for the sheep, for the children of God, for the Church, for the members destined to him from eternity under the purpose of election—so that by the merit of his death God's predestination might be fulfilled in them. Augustine puts it so on John, tract. 46: "The Lord knows who are his; they are sheep according to that predestination, that foreknowledge, that election of sheep, before the world was founded." And in tract. 49, p. 366, on the scattered children of God: "These things were spoken according to predestination; for neither his sheep nor the children of God yet existed, because they had not yet believed."

142The second point is proved: in the places alleged Christ’s death is marked as restricted under a special reason to certain persons. For otherwise why would Scripture have named sheep, children, and church, if it had meant to designate that death as it extends to all? It would have used in vain words that mark out a small part of the human race, unless it also meant to show that Christ’s intention in that matter looks not to the whole human race but is referred to those few. Christ’s death and God’s intention embracing all promiscuously is best expressed in John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” And so he loved the sheep, the children, his Church, that by his death he decreed to merit for them faith and eternal life efficaciously.

143Holy Scripture meant to open to us this special intention of Christ in offering himself, sprung from special love, whenever it mentions Christ’s death as related to the Church alone, to the sheep alone, to the members alone of the mystical body—according to that word of Aquinas (Part 3, q.24 art.4): “God preordained the salvation of the elect, by predestining from eternity that it be completed through Jesus Christ.” The last point is proved: the testimonies brought forward contain the will of God the Father and of Christ—not inefficacious or conditioned, but absolute and efficacious—concerning the saving of those sheep through Christ’s death. For speaking of the same sheep Christ says in John 10:28: “I give them eternal life, and they will not perish forever.” And in John 17:24: “Father, I will that where I am, they also whom you have given me may be with me.”

144And of this Church for which Christ gave himself up, the Apostle says in Ephesians 5:23: "Christ is head of the church, and Savior of his body." All of that marks an absolute will joined to its effect. So Christ is truly named Savior and Redeemer of the world insofar as he brought a remedy that is salutary for the whole world and applicable by faith; yet he is Savior and Redeemer of his sheep, of his Church, of his body—in one word, of the predestined children of God—insofar as by special intention he destined and procured that this same remedy be applied to them, giving them enlightened eyes of the heart (Ephesians 1:18) so that by faith they may possess Christ as efficaciously united and applied to them.

1454. Lastly, we can confirm our view from those places in which God absolutely promised Christ, as he died, that by the merit of this death the Church would infallibly be set free from death and given eternal life. Genesis 3:15: “The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head.” What else is that than that by the power and merit of Christ’s death Satan will be trampled down, and that all those of whom God in Christ specially willed to have mercy will be freed from his power? Who then can doubt that Christ referred his death—Satan’s vanquisher—with special regard to those who were to be freed through him by a special benefit? And that those to be infallibly freed were the elect is confessed by all sound theologians. Rupert (On the Victory of the Word of God, book 2, chapter 18) expressly calls the elect the serpent’s conquerors, because the efficacy of Christ’s death and resurrection crushing the Devil is destined and procured to be applied efficaciously to them alone from special mercy. So Marlorat on this place: the Devil and the wicked generation fight against God’s elect, but the elect at last prove stronger because of their Head, Christ, who by his death abolished him who had the empire of death. Christ’s death was therefore specially intended and destined to crush Satan under the elect’s feet and to save them efficaciously—and that from God’s own most firm promise.

146Isaiah 53:10–11 gives a like promise of God the Father about the efficacy of Christ’s death for the elect. The words run: “If he shall put his soul for sin, he shall see a long-lived seed; and the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. For the travail of his soul he shall see and be satisfied,” and so on. By these words the Father promises the Son that his passion and death will not be useless or barren, but will surely yield him seed. I ask, then: does this promise look to vague, indefinite individuals, or to certain persons singularly known to the Father and to Christ the Mediator? To invent a confused promise of some who will be saved, yet not yet singularly designated by God himself, is most unworthy of divine perfection and wisdom. But if God and Christ have settled that this seed will be efficaciously saved through Christ’s death, it follows that in the dying Christ there was, with respect to their salvation, an efficacious and singular intention. All interpreters of the place have taken it so: that through Christ’s death a most efficacious and certain liberation and salvation was promised to his mystical body—that is, to the Church, or the elect. So Luther: the posterity or seed spoken of is the Church; “he shall see seed” means he will have a kingdom and royal children. So Calvin: “he shall see seed” means Christ’s death will be the cause of begetting offspring, because the One who died, making alive, will acquire a people of his own. Musculus agrees, explaining “from the travail of his soul he shall see and be satisfied”: Christ already saw this bond of the elect and those to be saved, still sees it, and will see it to the world’s end, and is satisfied in seeing, because the Father’s good pleasure is directed in his hand. All agree that from the Father’s special good pleasure an efficacious salvation of the Church—certain persons known to God alone—was promised to Christ as the price of his passion, and that Christ intended and labored with a singular, efficacious will to save these elect, this peculiar people singularly given and committed to him by the Father.

147If someone objects with Grevinchovius that there was no absolute promise or will of God to redeem any particular persons efficaciously, but that God willed and refused the application of Christ’s death to each and all only conditionally—willing it for all if faith intervened, refusing it if unbelief mediated—and that therefore, even when Christ laid down his life, his death might be applied to no one, and he might be cheated of the promised seed by everyone’s intervening unbelief: the reply is that in this promise by which the Father as it were bound himself to the Mediator to give him seed if he put his soul for sin, there is contained a tacit promise of faith to be given to the elect themselves; without that faith they would not be Christ’s seed. So it was as much decreed that God, because of the Son’s death, give faith itself to some, as that he give the Son an everlasting offspring. Christ, foreknowing this promise and counsel, could not but offer the sacrifice of his death to the Father with special intention for this seed, for these future believers. So far we have argued from express Scripture testimonies; next we will add some reasons also grounded in holy Scripture.

148He who by his death not only established that evangelical covenant looking promiscuously to all—“Whoever believes will be saved”—but also that secret covenant which takes in certain singular persons known to God alone, described by the prophet in Jeremiah 31:33: “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after these days: I will put my law in their mind and write it on their heart, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people”—he who procured such a covenant by his death offered his death and merit to the Father to be applied efficaciously to certain elect persons. That is clear, because putting his laws into people’s minds, writing them on their hearts, and making them God’s peculiar people marks the efficacious application of Christ’s merits and names the privileges of the elect, or spiritual Israel. I add the minor and affirm that by his death Christ was Mediator of this secret covenant, which includes application and embraces God’s Israel—or the elect children of God—and them alone. Besides the prophet’s words just cited, we have the Apostle citing the same prophet (Hebrews 8:6): “Our High Priest is Mediator of a better testament, established on better promises.” What are those better promises Christ the Mediator established? Verse 10 rehearses them in Jeremiah’s own words; they reduce to two heads—the promise of an inward reforming of hearts, and of free remission of sins—as Calvin notes on the place. So by his death Christ merited remission of sins for all if they believe and turn; and for some he also merited and procured this free, secret covenant to be fulfilled by the promising God—namely that they believe and turn to God, through and because of the Mediator reforming their hearts efficaciously and putting his laws into them. Those for whom he merited this (as Augustine makes plain) are all who belong spiritually to the house of Israel and Abraham’s seed: what else is that than all the elect? So from God’s and Christ’s intention the elect have had destined and given to them the special benefit of a fruitful application from Christ’s death.

149A second reason is the price paid on the cross for redeeming the human race. That price was the blood of God’s Son, the only-begotten and beloved. It is not credible that so great a price was spent on an outcome dangling from the uncertain dice of human choice. So the Father and Christ the Mediator meant by this precious death to redeem and save certain people infallibly and efficaciously; and those can be none other than those who are in fact saved—the elect. Therefore Christ’s intention in offering himself regarded the elect in a special way. I know Grevinchovius and others of that school boldly claim the proper end of impetration God intended was only that he might save the sinner with his justice intact, and that this redemption obtained for all might still be applied to none because of everyone’s intervening unbelief. That is as much as to say God gave the Son to death with no certain purpose of saving anyone by that death’s merit, but only a bare possibility of salvation procured for all in general, leaving efficacious share in salvation to each person’s choice—so that Christ’s death, taken in the whole breadth of its merit, might have redeemed no one from death. But whoever weighs how precious the Son’s death was in the Father’s eyes cannot even think he meant to expose the Son to death without a certain purpose of applying that death efficaciously to some. Isaiah 53:10: “The will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.” Hear Malder, a papal writer far sounder than the Arminians here (Anti-Synod, p. 138): if you look only at the offering itself, it is equal for all; otherwise, if you look at that for whose actual obtaining he offered. For the elect obtain the perfect fruit of his passion that actually follows and is applied, as given them by the Father for this. So Christ’s blood could not run to waste; by the price of his blood, from God’s decree, he merited for the elect the fruitful application of that same price.

150Whatever spiritual, saving good Christ’s Spirit works in any people, Christ’s poured-out blood merited for those same people. But Christ’s Spirit produces in certain persons repentance and faith, and through faith and repentance an infallible application of his death. Therefore he merited these special goods for those same people; therefore, sacrificing himself on the cross’s altar, he meant to merit them. It is not right to suppose by chance that Christ procured greater spiritual benefits for these than for those. What will the adversaries say? That Christ’s Spirit gives people benefits Christ never merited for them? They will not dare so to trample Christ’s merit. That faith itself, the will, and the act of fruitful application are not special gifts of the Holy Spirit? They will blush at so crass a Pelagianism. Let them confess with us: just as through Christ’s death special goods were procured for the elect, so in the will of the dying Christ, and of the Father accepting that death, there was an efficacious intention to procure and confer those goods. And that is the singular privilege in Christ’s death we claim for the elect alone, because the fact shows God destined them alone to be saved efficaciously by his Son’s death. Hence Hebrews 7:25 establishes the office of Savior of certain ones—that is, of the elect—both by merit and by efficacy.

151A fourth argument is the distinction most received among all theologians: that Christ died for all sufficiently, for the elect efficaciously. Just as from the first half we refuted those who deny that Christ’s death, by God’s decree, is an applicable remedy for all people, so from the second half those must be refuted who deny that Christ’s death, and that by God’s decree, is a remedy to be applied to the elect efficaciously and infallibly. What else can “He died for the elect efficaciously” mean than that he died with an absolute intention and efficacious will to save the elect?

152If someone twists the distinction as if Christ’s death, sufficient for all, became efficacious for some only by a contingent act of human free choice, the words themselves refute him: “Christ died efficaciously for these or those” marks a singular efficacy flowing from the dying one’s special will, not from the believer’s contingent act. Second, even the Jesuits do not take “efficacy” in this distinction as mere eventual efficacy, but as efficacy specially intended and merited by the dying one himself. So Suarez (On 3, disp. 41, p. 629): Christ did not merit remission of sins for all as to efficacy, because he did not apply his merit so that all would infallibly gain that effect. To merit efficaciously is to apply his merit to certain persons with the intention that they infallibly obtain eternal life from it. More plainly (p. 635): Christ’s merit stands equally toward all as to sufficiency, not as to efficacy—understood not only in the effects (in one, not another) but also in the will by which Christ offered his merits differently for different persons. Scripture’s witnesses that join Christ’s death to a sure purpose of redeeming his sheep, gathering God’s sons, acquiring the Church, and cleansing a peculiar people show that the efficacy theologians speak of is drawn from the dying Christ’s will, not from contingent free choice. By a special intention in his offering Christ obtained that it be made efficacious for the elect; the elect did not make it efficacious for themselves by some free-choice apprehension.

153Ratio 5. From divine predestination we take a fifth reason. Given the predestination of certain persons before the world’s foundations, Christ’s will in offering himself must include a special regard for producing their salvation efficaciously by the merit of his passion. Whether we place election before or after the decree of the passion (as we understand the order), this stands: in Christ’s will—whether about to suffer or already suffering—there was an efficacious, singular intention to save these elect (or to-be-elect) efficaciously. His will never fails to conform to the Father’s. So it is incredible (as Suarez notes, On 3, disp. 41, §2, p. 615) that he offered his merits one way for those he knew the Father had chosen and another way for the rest, when he saw the Father’s will that they—and not others—be saved infallibly, and conformed himself to that will in all things. Isaiah 53:10 points here: “The will of the Lord shall be directed in his hand.” Election to eternal life from God’s free will is executed through Christ’s merits; therefore the Redeemer specially and efficaciously destined his meritorious death for these elect to be redeemed and saved infallibly, and offered it to the Father. Scotus puts it well (Book 3, dist. 19, p. 74): Christ foresaw his passion offered to the Father for the predestinate and elect, and so offered it efficaciously in effect; the whole Trinity accepted it efficaciously for them, and for no others was it efficaciously offered or accepted from eternity. By efficacious offering and acceptance he means offering joined to an absolute purpose to save those for whom it was so offered and accepted. Malderus, Bishop of Antwerp, on this argument rejects those who think Christ died equally for all as to efficacy, and concludes (p. 137) that, given predestination, Christ by his death conferred far more on these predestinate than on others.

154Ratio 6. Sixth, keep the proportion between Christ’s offering for people and his prayer or intercession for them. From John 17, and from his named prayer for Peter that Peter’s faith not fail, it is plain that Christ interceded with the Father for the elect to keep a firm, unconquered faith to the end and obtain salvation efficaciously. Anyone who denies that the gift of perseverance was won for special persons by Christ’s special prayer would credit free choice with the greatest of all spiritual benefits. That granted, I add: just as Christ specially prayed for special benefits for the elect, so he specially offered himself to merit those same benefits. On this special prayer and offering Suarez says (On 3, disp. 41, p. 635): as Christ prayed in different ways for people, so he merited in different ways; though he is universal Redeemer of all and a sufficient cause of salvation, in a special mode he is the efficacious cause of salvation for those he makes obedient. So the prayer by which he specially and efficaciously prayed for the elect rests on the offering by which he specially and efficaciously offered himself for them. See the force: whatever Christ obtains for particular persons by special intercession, he merited for them with the Father by an offering specially pertaining to them. By intercession he obtains for the elect faith, perseverance, and salvation itself; therefore, to procure those goods for them infallibly, he specially offered himself for them. Vázquez does not doubt (On 1, q. 23, art. 5, disp. 94, ch. 3) that by peculiar prayer and will Christ applied his merits to those who were predestinate and elect.

155Ratio 7. Christ’s death and merit is the means God ordained to carry out his eternal counsel for human salvation. If God’s will stands differently toward effecting people’s salvation, then Christ’s death is likewise intended and applied differently toward that end. Means always serve the end, and the mode of application follows the agent’s intention. All sound theologians confess that God does not will everyone’s salvation in the same mode in which he wills some people’s. Therefore he did not will the means—Christ’s death—applied to all as it is applied to some. So for those for whom God by efficacious will decreed salvation, Christ’s death was destined so that by its merit everything needed to produce salvation infallibly would flow to them; for those for whom he did not so decree salvation, Christ’s death was not destined in that same mode. From the Father’s special intention in ordaining that sacrifice, and from Christ’s self-offering conformed to the Father’s will, the death is understood as destined and applied one way to the elect, whom God decreed to save infallibly through it, and another way to the rest, whom he allows to perish by their own fault even with this death. Whoever denies that discrimination in the offering and application can as easily deny that the wisest and most powerful God knows how—or is able—to intend and fit the means he instituted to different people as his will’s different reason requires.

156Ratio 8. The event shows that some people really and efficaciously apply Christ’s death, with its infinite merit, to themselves for salvation. Was that application made according to Christ’s antecedent, efficacious intention in offering himself on the cross—or against it, or without it preceding? If they grant in the dying Christ an antecedent special will for this efficacious application that falls to all the elect and to them alone, we have what we aim to prove: that by God’s and Christ’s special intention this death is destined for the elect as to be applied efficaciously. No one will say a person can apply Christ’s death to himself efficaciously against Christ’s intention. The only remaining claim is that people make the application efficacious by free will without any preceding special, efficacious intention of the divine will. Piety forbids that. First, in good and saving acts God’s efficacious will stands before the human: “It is God who works in you both to will and to accomplish” (Phil. 2:13), and he works nothing in us antecedently that he did not antecedently decree to work. Second, in works that belong to salvation we can do nothing without Christ: “Without me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). What we can do through Christ we receive power to do because of Christ’s merit—which, without the dying and meriting Christ’s antecedent special intention, is assigned to no one. So whoever has obtained this excellent grace and already applied Christ’s merit to himself efficaciously must confess he received that applying faculty above others from the special kindness of God and of Christ, who specially intended, destined, and applied his merit to him. The fruitful application in the predestinate itself shows that in Christ offering himself, and in God accepting the sacrifice, there was a special efficacious intention of that application for the predestinate. And that is the singular privilege of the elect in Christ’s death this thesis aims to establish.

157Ratio 9. Suppose Christ’s death, by God’s ordination and Christ’s intention, did not merit for the predestinate an efficacious application and the infallible obtaining of salvation that flows from it. Then this follows: the Mediator’s merit, under the Father’s accepting will and the Son’s exhibiting will, regards the elect no more than the passed-by, but reaches both alike. The consequence is clear, since it is granted that by God’s will the dying Christ’s merit extends to all under the condition: if by faith they apply it to themselves. Unless Christ by his death also meant to merit for the elect that, through faith given, this fruitful application be made in them, no singular privilege in his merit is assigned to them. By God’s ordination Christ’s death merited for Judas that he could, under the condition of faith, reach eternal life; for Peter it obtained besides that, because of Christ’s merit, he receive persevering faith and all other spiritual benefits required to obtain eternal life infallibly. Paul’s reasoning in Romans 8:32 looks here, treating the predestinate’s privileges: “He who did not spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how will he not also with him give us all things?” Just as he had hinted a special calling of the predestinate—“according to purpose”—so he marks a special offering of Christ for those same predestinate, an offering according to purpose: with a sure purpose to confer efficacious grace on the elect and lead them infallibly to life by this death’s merit. Those who erase that discrimination of divine intention in Christ’s death toward elect and passed-by, as Báñez truly says (On 1, q. 23, art. 5, pp. 296–297), make Christ’s merit no more perfect a cause of the predestinate’s salvation than of the reprobate’s. As to sufficiency the merit regards all equally; the difference is that it is applied to some and not to others. So if application itself for the elect does not fall under Christ’s merit, that merit regards predestinate and reprobate alike. So Báñez.

158Ratio 10. If Christ did not offer himself to the Father with a peculiar absolute will to redeem and save the elect efficaciously by his death's merit, then efficacious grace and eternal life would be prepared or given to no one in Christ on any better footing than they were in Adam. The first Adam already gave the race the chance of grace and eternal life under a condition that hangs on our free choice.

159So if by his death Christ did not merit grace and life for anyone absolutely, but only for all alike under the uncertain condition that they choose to receive the offered grace, believe in him, and persevere in faith, leaving to each person's free choice whether to believe and persevere, then we would be no better off in Christ than we were in Adam. That is so as to how and how surely we obtain efficacious grace and eternal life.

160But that clashes with Scripture. Scripture hangs the grace and eternal life prepared and to be given in Christ to all who will be saved on God's sure purpose of good pleasure, not on a contingent turn of human choice. The treatise on Election and Passing-by will show this.

161It also clashes with the orthodox Fathers who opposed the Pelagians—above all Augustine, On Rebuke and Grace chapter 11. After showing what grace was given to the first Adam, he says of the grace prepared and given to the predestinate in Christ: “So much more largely is the help of grace given through Jesus Christ to those to whom God was pleased to give it, that it not only is present—without which we cannot remain even if we will—but also is so great and of such a kind that we will. For through this grace of God, in receiving the good and holding it perseveringly, there is in us not only the ability to do what we will, but also the will to do what we can.”

162This grace, given for Christ's sake to the elect alone, and producing in them alone the fruitful application that saves, flows to them not from some special act of human choice but from a special decree of God's will, and that through Christ's merit. So Christ's merit was destined for those same persons in a special way by God, and applied by Christ himself.

163Ratio 11. We must reject any view that is the same as—or at least close kin to—the condemned Pelagian dogma. Those who hold that on God’s will and intention Christ’s death stands equally efficacious toward all, while on the human will’s side it happens that in the event it becomes fruitful for some, come as near Pelagius as can be. The orthodox, roused by Pelagius to weigh this carefully, have always taught against him that fruitful application of Christ’s merits hangs on the grace of predestination, by which faith and even the good will itself are mercifully given to some and, by God’s just judgment, denied to others.

164That it is Pelagian to shift the fruit of Christ’s death—eternal life—from God’s special intention to a special act of free choice is plain from Prosper’s Letter to Augustine. Hilary’s Letter to Augustine shows the same: the Pelagian remnants treat eternal life in Christ’s death as so set before all that they flatly deny any singular purpose of God to save the elect by that death, and put the whole divide between the saved and the unsaved down to human wills. Against them, the orthodox saw a special hidden purpose in God accepting Christ’s death-sacrifice and in Christ offering it—toward efficacious fruitful application to certain persons. That is clear from Augustine’s On the Predestination of the Saints, On the Good of Perseverance, and his other anti-Pelagian and anti-Semipelagian books, where the special will to save the elect through Christ is if not the only then the chief conclusion. Prosper and Fulgentius say the same throughout: efficacious obtaining of salvation in Christ comes from God’s efficacious special will destinating Christ to the elect in a special way, not from human free choice applying Christ’s death and merits to itself as chance may have it.

165Lest we seem to argue by empty labels, our last proof comes from the express witnesses of the Fathers and of later writers who give the predestined, in this death of Christ, a special privilege — nothing other than the sure attainment of grace and glory by God's special ordination, drawn from the dying Christ's merit and from his offering himself for them with a particular regard. Let Augustine speak first. 1. Outstanding is the word in In John, tractate 48 (vol. 9, p. 352): How did he say of those, YOU ARE NOT OF MY SHEEP? Because he saw them appointed to everlasting ruin, not bought for eternal life by his blood's price. Soon after: Of those sheep neither wolf snatches, nor thief carries off, nor robber kills. He who knows what he gave for them is sure of their number. Two points follow: first, our Savior offered his blood's price for redeeming the predestined in a special way — the way from which their sure salvation follows; second, for the passed-over or non-predestined he did not offer it that way, so they are denied to have been bought for eternal life by that price — meaning an absolute, efficacious ordering to eternal life that Christ's death is to carry out and bring into act.

1662. Closely related is Sermon 56 On the Lord's words (vol. 10, p. 194): The predestined were not yet gathered. Still, he who had predestined them knew them, and he who had come to redeem them with his blood knew them. He saw them while they did not yet see him; he knew them while they did not yet believe in him. Nothing is clearer: Christ came into the world to redeem the predestined by his blood — and to redeem them efficaciously and infallibly as people to be brought through to share eternal life. He never resolved with himself to redeem the non-elect in that way.

1673. A third witness from the same Augustine is On nature and grace, chapter 5: Those who are delivered are called not vessels of their own merits, but vessels of mercy. Whose mercy, if not his who sent Christ Jesus into this world to save sinners? Whom he foreknew, predestined, called, justified, and glorified. As if to say: by a decree of special mercy God sent Christ to deliver and save the predestined efficaciously and infallibly — and in that sense they alone are vessels of mercy. Piling up more Augustine would be wasted work. Anyone at home in him knows his teaching on the absolute predestination of some to eternal life, and on the eternal gift of those same persons to Christ the Mediator so that he may lead them to that life without fail. That predestination, gift, and leading cannot be understood — or even thought — without this special intention of applying his death and merits to them. See On the Predestination of the Saints 18; On the gift of perseverance 7; On rebuke and grace 9.

1684. Ambrose supplies a fourth witness: And Christ suffered for all, yet for us he suffered specially, because he suffered for the Church. So she who received more doubtless owes more (On Luke, book 6, chapter 7). On Ambrose's reading, the suffering Christ had a special regard for his Church, and from that she drew a special fruit of the passion. He can say Christ suffered for all, and still hold that the will and intention of the suffering Christ does not regard everyone alike, but turns in a singular way upon his mystical body — the Church of the firstborn — which he meant by his blood to make his own and by the Spirit to join to a share in eternal life that cannot fail. He did not suffer for all under that special intention.

1695. After Ambrose comes Remigius of Rheims on Romans 8: Those he predestined — or marked out beforehand — to reign with him in eternal blessedness he also called and justified through his passion, through baptism and faith adorned with good works, and he justified them to the world's end. Soon after, on Who did not spare his own Son, Remigius says: he did not keep him from death, but delivered him for all of us predestined to eternal life. That shows Christ suffered for the elect, and for them alone, with a fixed purpose to save them — the very special intention we are establishing, and which we insist must be limited to the elect alone in this offering of Christ.

1706. Fulgentius, On the Incarnation and grace of Jesus Christ 29 (Bibliotheca Patrum, vol. 6, p. 92): Those who treat God's will that all be saved as the same toward the redeemed and the damned — when asked why God wills all to be saved and yet not all are — what answer have they? Fulgentius implies that God by a special will decreed to procure, through Christ, the salvation of those who are in fact saved; and that their opponents have nothing solid left when pressed to explain why some are actually saved by Christ's death and others are not. He shows this difference cannot be reduced to a difference of human wills (chs. 30-31). 7. Another from the same Fulgentius, On the truth of Predestination, book 3: No Christian should doubt that those God predestined to the adoption of sons were predestined in Christ before the world's foundation not only to the reward of glory but to the grace of justification, and by that predestination's benefit called and justified according to purpose. Anyone who grants that God's elect sons were so predestined in Christ to grace and glory will freely admit that Christ's death and merit were ordained and accepted in a special way for those same elect, so that from them they might obtain without fail the grace and glory marked out for them.

1718. Paschasius (Bibliotheca Patrum, vol. 9, p. 930) on Matthew 1:21, He shall save his people from their sins: Hence Zechariah says, And he made REDEMPTION OF HIS PEOPLE IN THE HOUSE OF DAVID HIS SERVANT. So the people he foreknew as his he surely came to save; all the rest he left, by his hidden judgment, in the mass of damnation. That teaches Christ came and died with a special intention to save the predestined — an intention he did not have for making others' salvation actual, even while he willed to make salvation obtainable for all under the condition of faith. 9. Gregory the Great, Morals 22.18 (p. 132): For the Only-begotten to intercede for man is to present himself as man before the coeternal Father; to ask for human nature is to have taken that nature up into his Divinity's height. So he intercedes for us not by voice but by compassion, because what he would not have damned in the elect he set free by taking it up. Those last words show plainly that in his whole Mediator's work Christ kept a special eye on freeing the elect without fail. 10. Bernard on Psalm He who dwells in the help of the Most High, verse 9: Christ died for friends — that is, for friends to be won, to make friends out of enemies. A little later: So according to time Christ died for the ungodly, but according to predestination for brothers and friends — as much as to say that Christ dying on the cross had a singular regard for his predestined brothers and future friends.

172Setting the older writers aside, we come down to the Scholastics and modern Romanists. They defend Christ as having died for all, yet they also grant he died for the elect alone with a special intention to apply that death to them so that eternal life follows without fail. 1. Start with Peter Lombard, master of the Scholastics: Christ offered himself on the cross's altar for all as to the price's sufficiency, but for the elect only as to efficacy, because he effects salvation only for the predestined (Sentences 3, dist. 20, litt. c). The reason he gives for calling Christ's death efficacious for the elect alone is worth marking. He does not say what Pelagians and Arminians would say — that only those were foreseen who, stirred by grace in free choice, would apply Christ to themselves — but that in them alone, by the kindness of special mercy, he wrought salvation. What his death wrought in the elect he surely decreed to work. That is the special intention under which we say Christ's death is related and ordained to the elect alone.

1732. Aquinas (ST III q.24 a.4): God preordained our salvation by eternally predestining that it be completed through Jesus Christ. He is speaking of the elect, and he holds that from eternity God ordained their salvation to be finished through Christ without fail. How then could Christ have matched that eternal ordination of his Father if, in his saving passion, he did not apply his merits in a peculiar way to effect and complete the elect's salvation without fail? So we must grant a special intention — God accepting this victim, Christ offering himself — restricted to the elect alone, so far as Christ's passion is joined to an infallible saving effect in particular persons.

1743. The same Aquinas, On the Grace of Christ (disp. q.), art. 7 ad 4: Christ's merit stands equally toward all as to sufficiency, not as to efficacy. That inequality comes partly from free choice, partly from divine election, by which the effect of Christ's merits is mercifully given to some and justly withheld from others. When he says free choice partly explains unequal efficacy, read that of the lost, who turn themselves from the fountain of salvation. When he says divine election partly explains it, read that of the saved, who, under God's special mercy according to election's good pleasure, receive from that fountain whatever is needed to effect their salvation. His reply to the last objection shows the mind: God freely confers on people that they obtain the effect of Christ's merit. If election mercifully gives that effect to some and denies it to others, who can doubt that Christ — knowing election and his own calling — specially offered himself and his merits for those persons, and added to a price already sufficient in itself a most effectual, singular will to work their salvation? John 10:15 points the same way: I lay down my life for my sheep — with a singular intention to redeem, free, and bring them to life, as the whole discourse there shows.

1754. Scotus (Sentences III, dist. 19, single q.) has much that illustrates our view. First: just as the Word foresaw his passion to be offered to the Father for the elect, so he offered it effectually unto its effect, and the whole Trinity effectually accepted that passion for them; for no others was it effectually offered or eternally accepted. So Scotus grants that by the Trinity's eternal decree Christ's passion was offered and accepted for the elect in a singular way, with special intention. 5. Hugh of St Victor (On the Sacraments I.8.7), treating Christ's passion: Human nature was corrupted by sin and wholly owed to damnation; if all had been damned, that would not have been injustice. But grace came and chose some from the mass of the whole by mercy unto salvation, and left some by justice unto damnation. Hugh teaches plainly that Christ, coming and offering himself for the race's sins, kept a singular eye on the elect he chose from that mass, whom he decreed — and in fact always does — to bring to salvation by his death's merits according to God's eternal good pleasure.

1766. Cajetan on Romans 8: He who did not spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how will he not also with him give us all things? Paul saw that the earlier chain of gifts did not yet prove effectually that God works all things for the elect's good — only that he works with them unto good. So, to conclude ALL THINGS effectually, he added that God freely gave even the Son for the elect, and from that inferred that with the Son all things are given to them. Cajetan's words cannot be bent to a universal gift of Christ given equally to the whole world: if that were so, God would give all things equally to every human being — which is plainly false. A special donation must be granted, under which Christ is given to the elect alone, and which alone carries after it an infallible, most certain gift of everything needed for salvation.

1777. Stapleton (Moral Promptuary, Second Sunday after Easter, p. 254): Dying, Christ died effectually for friends alone — for friends-to-be after each one's conversion, not for those who were already friends. This Romanist does not shrink from granting Christ's dying a singular intention toward the elect. They are the future friends after conversion for whose effectual redemption he laid down his life while, with the rest, they were still ungodly, enemies, sinners, dead in sins. He is said to have died for all humans as to sufficiency; for his sheep — his elect — as to this efficacy, that is, with a singular intention, from his death's merit, to give them the effectual grace by which they believe and are saved. 8. Estius on Titus 2:14, Who gave himself for us: that is, who in assumed flesh delivered himself up, whether for all humans or specially for the elect, in whose person Paul often speaks. Christ's death-price suffices to redeem and save all, yet is applied unto salvation to the elect alone. Estius thus hints two things: Christ's offering had a general respect to all and a special to the elect; and that special respect must be defined as joined to an intention of applying it with certainty. He did not say the elect alone apply Christ's death to themselves by free choice's powers, but that it is applied unto salvation to them alone — by electing God, intending this good for his elect from Christ's death by special favor.

1789. Next the Jesuits. However they defend universal grace and universal redemption, they dare not deny this special, effectual ordination and intention of the saving passion toward the elect alone. Let two chiefs speak: Suarez and Vasquez. Suarez on Aquinas III q.19 (Disp. p. 635 §41): as Christ prayed diversely for humans, so he merited diversely — for some sufficiently, for others effectually. So though he is everyone's universal Redeemer and a sufficient cause of salvation, in a special way he is the effectual cause of salvation for those he makes obedient. It is incredible he offered his merits no differently for those he knew the Father had elect than for others, when he saw the Father's will was that they be saved without fail, and not others. Suarez thus grants that Christ's death and merits save the elect from the special mode of offering and the offerer's will — not from a chance act of human will laying hold of them. 10. Vasquez clearly owns this special intention toward the elect in applying his merits (on Aquinas I q.23, disp. 49, c.3, p. 687): I do not doubt Christ by peculiar prayer and will applied his merits to those predestined and elect. The same on Aquinas III q.19, disp. 77, c.5, p. 384, cites Andreas Vega: Christ's merits do not profit all effectually, because for those they do not profit he did not pray effectually or offer his passion. So not only the old Fathers but even newer Romanists confess what we aim to prove: God constituted Christ's death a universal saving cause applicable to all, yet by a special intention of offerer and accepter it is also a particular saving cause to be applied without fail, and singularly, to all and only the elect. See also Malderus, Antisynod, p. 138.

17911. Last, our own theologians. They do not deny that Christ suffered for all, yet they also confess that in his death he redeemed the elect under a peculiar regard. Bucer states it on Matthew 1 at He shall save his people — that is, the elect whom the Father himself brings to him. By his death he expiated all the elect's sins and merited that the propitious Father give them his Spirit. So Christ's death merited something for the elect that he did not merit for others. Whatever he merited for anyone, he merited under the Father's ordination and acceptance. From that Fatherly will and ordination, then, Christ's death belongs to the elect in a special way that does not reach the rest.

180Musculus, who in the Common Places presses hard that Christ must be held universal Redeemer, still grants Christ's special intention to redeem the elect. On Romans 8 he says Christ came into this world for the elect's sake — which can only mean he came with a peculiar intention to save the elect without fail. That special aim, securing for the elect the applied fruit of his passion, belongs to them so properly that it does not stretch to others.

181Calvin on Hebrews 2 at Behold I and the children God has given me: Christ brings none to the Father, he says, except those the Father himself has given him. That gift hangs on eternal election: those the Father destined for life he places in the Son's keeping to guard them. Mark three points. First, the Father from the election decree has singularly destined some for life. Second, Christ the Mediator received those elect as peculiarly entrusted to him by the Father. Third, Christ keeps a singular care of them, guarding and ruling them in this life until he brings them to eternal life. With that set down, it would offend all reason and piety to deny that, in the very work of his offering and of mankind's redemption, Christ intended these elect's salvation by a peculiar intention — absolute and effectual.

182Zanchi (Miscellanies, On the Predestination of the Saints, p. 14): it is not false that Christ died for all men — his passion is offered to all in the Gospel. Yet he died efficaciously only for the elect, because they alone share the passion's efficacy. That they alone so share it must be referred to the special, effectual will of Christ suffering and of the Father accepting this victim — for the elect in a more peculiar way than for others. In sharing saving good, the divine will goes before the human.

183Finally — not to weary by stacking more writers — even Vorstius could not deny that the redemption finished on the cross belongs to the elect in a peculiar sense. In the Friendly Duplicate (p. 230) he grants that redemption can be taken in different senses for several species of the same kind, so that some only, not all, may fitly be called redeemed in a special reason or peculiar sense, as Scripture often names them. On p. 235, answering Hebrews 13:20 (Christ the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant), he concedes Christ is Shepherd of these sheep, and of these alone, in a peculiar way: as to the saving, spiritual act of feeding them (which includes the actual gift of the Holy Spirit), and as to a special acquisition of those sheep. So far Vorstius.

184What exactly does Vorstius grant us when he allows that not all but some were redeemed by Christ's death in a special reason and peculiar sense, and that Christ is Shepherd of his sheep in a peculiar way as to a special acquisition? If he means only that, in the outcome, by diverse acts of human wills, redemption's fruit reaches some — that is, believers — in a special way, he trifles and never answers the texts brought against him. For He purchased the Church with his blood; He gives salvation to his body; He lays down his life for his sheep; He died to gather God's children — these and like sayings do not mark some special act of the Church, body, or sheep. They mark the Bridegroom's, Head's, and Shepherd's special intention and work toward this Church, this body, these sheep, decreeing and securing their salvation by his death's virtue and merit under a special will.

185Against all we have argued about Christ's special dying intention toward the elect, and about the saving application of his death that hangs on and flows from that intention, objections can be raised. 1. If Christ's offering carries an intention limited to the elect, and from it they receive efficacious application and sure salvation, then we seem to ground their justification and salvation less in God's eudokia and special mercy than in a kind of justice. Ask why Peter rather than Judas received efficacious grace and salvation from Christ's death, and on our view the answer must be: because by special intention and application of his merits Christ merited for Peter what he refused to merit for Judas. Yet what comes from Christ's merits peculiarly applied to one person seems to come not from bare mercy of Divine good pleasure, but from justice — for it is just that what Christ merited for these or those persons be specially assigned to them. That seems to clash with the Apostle, who traces the grace and sure salvation of the predestined to God's pure grace alone.

186These two claims do not clash: God justifies and saves Peter by pure grace — his mere eudokia — and God justifies and saves Peter with an eye to Christ's merits specially ordained and accepted for Peter's salvation. The reason is plain. The same God who, from bare good pleasure and pure mercy, decreed faith and salvation for Peter also decreed to give them only through and because of Christ's merits, destined and granted to Peter in a singular way — and that from the same eudokia and pure mercy. God's eudokia stands against our merits; yet through Christ's merits applied to us it is filled out, not voided. So the Apostle says (Hebrews 13:21) that God himself works his good pleasure in us through Jesus Christ. It is therefore mere Divine eudokia that God wills to give Peter efficacious grace and save him; still that good pleasure is carried out only through Christ's merits. Our whole answer comes to this: every work of special grace in the elect is for Christ's merits specially applied to them, yet their justification and salvation show true mercy, not justice — because Christ, with his merits and with this very way of meriting and offering them under a special regard for the elect, drew the whole plan from God's free will toward them.

187Suppose the elect gain efficacious grace — saving faith — because Christ's death and merit on the cross were applied to them by a special intention. Then we seem to allow the merits of his passion to be imputed or applied to some people before they believe. That clashes with the received theological rule that faith is the instrument or means without which Christ's passion-merits are not applied to particular persons. So whoever has Christ's merits singularly applied or imputed must already stand as a believer. How then can we defend this special application of Christ's merits to the elect before they are made faithful and believing?

188To meet the objection, take Ephesians 1:3 as foundation: God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ — that is, every saving good that comes down from God is given through Christ and for his merits. Saving faith, proper to the elect, ranks among the chief spiritual blessings; so it is granted, for Christ's merits, to all who in fact receive it. When theologians say faith is the instrument by which Christ's merits are applied to us, they mean application on the human side: the elect cannot apply those merits to themselves for any spiritual benefit unless faith is already presupposed in them. But if we view application or imputation from God's side alone, God can and does apply — impute and communicate — Christ's merits to people so that, with regard to those merits, he gives spiritual goods even while they still count as ungodly and unbelieving. Faith, when first given, is not given to a believer but to an unbeliever; yet it is given to the elect for the Mediator's merits. So we must confess: no elect person could, by believing, apply Christ's merits to himself for eternal life's fruit unless God, from special mercy and for that merit of Christ, had first infused the faith by which they would believe. That is the special application of Christ's merits which, from Christ's special will in offering himself and the Father's in accepting the sacrifice, we say belongs to the elect by a peculiar privilege. Scotus saw this in a saying worth marking: the chief thing in Christ's merit was that he merited the joining of the unjoined (lib. 3, dist. 19, unique q., p. 75) — as if to say the main force of those merits is that some from among unbelievers should become believers and, joined to Christ by faith, obtain eternal life. That special ordination and application of Christ's merits hangs wholly on God's good pleasure, not on human choice.

189Obj. 3. If Christ in offering himself, and God in accepting that sacrifice, had a special intention to vivify and surely save all the elect by that sacrifice's virtue and merit, we seem to shut Old Testament elect out of the privilege — those born and dead before Christ's sacrifice was shown on the cross. Sol. On general sufficiency or special efficacy I answer: Christ's sacrifice had the same virtue under the Old Testament, before the outward act of exhibition, that it has under the New after Christ was really shown and offered on the cross. Just as special grace reaches New Testament elect from God's special intention by the merit of this sacrifice already actually exhibited, so special grace flowed to Old Testament elect from the same God's special will by the merit of that same sacrifice still to be exhibited. For Christ was the Lamb slain from the world's beginning, both in the readiness of his will and in the Father's acceptance. Note the difference: a cause that works physically or naturally must already be in act before its power yields an effect; a cause that works meritoriously or morally — such as Christ's passion — can yield an effect before it actually exists, if it at least stands beforehand in the knowledge and acceptance of him who, with regard to it, dispenses the benefits of his grace. Here a meritorious cause is kin to a final cause: not yet existing in act, but only foreseen and weighed, it still moves the agent to act. So we say Christ's passion and its dependent merits, foreseen as to be offered to God and applied specially to Jacob, not Esau, moved God to give Jacob the special grace he denied Esau. Suarez puts it well (In 3, q. 49, art. 4, comm.): that special love by which, for Christ's merits — exhibited or foreseen — God sanctifies and reconciles people can fall under Christ's merits, whether by meriting for us the effect of that love, or God's love (or election) freely fixed on us.

190Obj. 4. Last comes this charge: it is hardly fitting — indeed plainly incongruous — that God, who willed Christ's death, with its rich treasury of merits, to be equally applicable to all under the condition of faith for obtaining eternal life, should meanwhile refuse to prepare and give that same faith, for those same merits, equally to all, and should give persevering saving faith to the elect alone — and that for Christ's merits by a special Divine intention, a special regard restricted and ordained toward them.

191I answer: once a Divine fact stands, it is rash — not to say impious — to quarrel with its equity or fittingness. We have long shown that by Christ's death that covenant with the human race was fixed, by whose terms eternal life is promised to anyone under the condition of faith. On that covenant Rupert of Deutz (on Genesis 4.34) says: we call it a covenant many times promised but once struck, by which alone the enmities between God and humankind are dissolved — namely the passion of Christ the Son of God. There peace is settled without contradiction when God, receiving human faith, gives people the same Christ his Son that they may be saved through him. So there is no doubt about this Divine ordination, founded in Christ's death and merits and looking to every person. What is still doubted is whether, given this universal covenant of eternal life for all who believe, God may freely show special mercy in giving the elect the saving faith by which they believe — and that through Christ, for his merits applied to them by a peculiar privilege. The fact itself speaks. We see the elect alone, in the outcome, receive from God persevering saving faith. To imagine so great a gift given them in any other way or regard than for Christ's merits, ordained and applied by a special Divine intention, is plainly unlawful. As Ambrose says devoutly, every gift of grace is in Christ — pointing to Ephesians 1:3, He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ. That settled, though it is needless to debate the fittingness of Divine deeds when the deeds themselves are clear, still, to leave no scruple: first, this special intention by which God decreed, for Christ's merits, to give the elect the special benefits of efficacious grace and salvation does not fight the conditioned covenant Whoever believes will be saved; it is rather a special counsel subordinated to that universal covenant's sure fulfillment. Those left to their own choice under any helps of grace either push faith away or shake it off. Lest that universal covenant bring salvation's effect to no one, God by this special and secret intention saw to it that Christ's death-merit would be applied to some for the sure obtaining of faith and eternal life. Second, nothing unjust or incongruous follows if this special intention of efficacious application of Christ's merits puts forth its force in some, not in all: Christ's death is God's free gift to the human race, so free distribution and application of the overflowing merits ought by every right to hang on God's mere will. Third, God, who in the Gospel promised every person eternal life for Christ's merits if they believe, never promised any unbeliever that for those merits he would make him believe surely and perseveringly. So where is the incongruity? Not on the side of believers and the saved: to give singular persons, for Christ's merits, what was never singularly promised them is not blameworthy injustice but goodness to praise. Not on the side of the unbelieving and lost: to deny someone a benefit you owe him by no title is neither unjust in itself nor unfit for God's highest goodness.

192Let this be the sum and close of the whole controversy On the Death of Christ. The Mediator between God and humankind, Jesus Christ, in sealing that evangelical covenant by which eternal life is due to every believer, made no partition or sorting of people by which we could say anyone was shut out from the benefit of his death if he believed. In that sense — with Scripture, the Fathers, and solid reasons agreeing — we hold that Christ suffered and died on the cross for all human beings, for the whole human race. We add this too: the same Mediator, when he decreed to lay down his life for sin, also had this singular intention — that by the virtue of his merits he would efficaciously and surely vivify and bring to life certain ones singularly given him by the Father. In that sense we defend that Christ laid down his life for the elect alone, or to acquire his Church — that is, he died for them alone with this singular, fixed purpose of efficaciously regenerating and saving them through the merit of his death. So Christ's merit stands equally toward all as to sufficiency, yet not as to efficacy — and that not only from the effect, which lands in one and not another, but from the will by which Christ himself merited and offered his merits in different ways for different people. The first root of that diversity was Divine election and will, to which Christ's human will conformed. From this Suarez rightly draws that this merit of Christ is the cause of spiritual regeneration itself, gives it efficacy, influences its effect, and is at once the cause that this person is regenerated for whom he specially offered his merit (In 3, q. 19, disp. 41, §2, p. 635). Let Robert of Salisbury, of rare learning and pious memory, speak for our side (in Thomson's Diatribe, p. 94): though we do not deny that Christ died for all, yet we specially and properly believe he died for the Church, and that redemption's benefit does not belong to all by equal right. On that benefit's peculiarity — not on human will — hangs the efficacy of every means, so that they are and are useful only for those whom Christ redeemed in himself as elect under a peculiar regard; nor do they take effect because we will, but because in the elect and redeemed, according to the purpose of his grace, God works the willing for which he chose them. He who by his death most sufficiently merited eternal life for all — to be given to all under the evangelical covenant if they believed — also, by a peculiar application of his merits, most efficaciously merited for some that they should believe and receive eternal life as God's free gift through and for our Lord Jesus Christ. That is the elect's peculiar lot. May the Father of mercies make us all partakers of it; to him, with the Son and the Holy Spirit, be honor, praise, and glory now and forever. Amen.

194Preface delivered to the University. What the poet said of farmers — "The finished labor returns for farmers in a circle" (Georgics 2) — fits theologians still more truly, especially those whose chair itself demands labor and sweat, not leisure or quiet. So I will enter these rounds of theological work that my office requires, eager and willing; and I will ask God first to steer me through the whole course of this undertaking so that I do not swerve even a little from the fixed center of sacred truth. The work I take up is steep in itself and blocked with many difficulties. For what is higher, or farther from human sense, than that eternal decree of Divine predestination by which, before the world's foundations were laid, we confess that certain ones were chosen before others — indeed with others plainly passed by — to share eternal life in Christ? We have given our labor to explaining that business, yet under this rule: let no one of you expect that I will touch every question theologians treat in this matter (that would be immense labor, and superfluous too), or any of those curious little puzzles by which unhealthy little men torture themselves, vex others, and finally obscure and twist the Christian faith. Steady faith rejects captious and useless questions; and whoever truly hears as a believer shows himself devout toward Divine wisdom, not craving his own (Hilary, On the Trinity 1; so also Tertullian, On the Resurrection). In this inquiry, then, we will set ourselves only a few of the most necessary points, and we will not dig deeper than Scripture's light lets us go. If we keep to that rule, Augustine rightly judged that this doctrine of predestination should be taught not only among the learned but also to the people (On the Perseverance of the Saints 2.16), and that it can be said so as to be milk for little ones and solid food for the grown.

195If we follow Paul's steps, imitate holy Augustine, and hold the doctrine received in this our Church, there is no danger of scandal. But if we let the doctrine of free election be overwhelmed and buried — or, worse, if we calmly endure it when certain Papal writers and others have badly corrupted it and twisted it the other way — that lazy silence will not escape suspicion. A ready defense of the truth would meet us if published falsehood displeased us. None of you, I think, fails to see that many Papal writers have reduced this whole mystery of election and reprobation — at which Paul stood astonished — to an all-too-clear and easy account of the difference, teaching that some are chosen from foreknowledge of merits, others rejected from foreknowledge of demerits.

196And what hurts more: from the Arminian school new teachers have come out who try to shake the catholic Church's most settled doctrine, and to raise I know not what new fabric of election and reprobation, wholly unknown to orthodox churches. What Papists assign to foreseen works, these assign to foreseen faith and unbelief. So they think they have secured Divine justice if, before the world's foundations were laid, God is said to have chosen only those he foresaw would believe the offered call and persevere in faith to the end; and, on the other side, to have reprobated only those he foreknew would refuse grace, remain unbelieving, and die in unbelief. Fine theologians indeed — who bring in a man already justified by faith, already set in adoption and salvation, before God has predestined him or chosen him to salvation in Christ! Splendid heralds of Divine grace — who will not trace the difference of good and bad wills in believing or not believing to the electing God's special mercy toward believers, but strain to refer whatever difference there is to a contingent act of free choice in admitting, keeping, and exercising grace. How much better — and closer to the Apostle's mind — is Augustine, scourge of the Pelagians (On the Predestination of the Saints 1.17): "God chose the faithful, but that they might become so, not because they already were. By choosing he makes them rich in faith, as heirs of the kingdom." So after Pelagius arose, Augustine and Catholics generally held and ratified this: people were chosen not from works but unto good works, not from faith but unto faith. That is: the elect became faithful and eager for good works; they were not chosen because God foresaw they would be such. This doctrine must be defended in the schools and preached in the churches. When Papal writers pour out their error's poisons everywhere, let us with no less care prepare antidotes for our own. Aristotle's saying is known. Let us also count it shameful to fall silent in God's cause while enemies of the truth shout against us on every side with writings and noise. Lest neighboring error's contagion seize ours too, I will, according to my slender measure, undertake to explain that most true doctrine which this Church of England has commended to all her people to embrace in the matter of predestination. And as far as I can I will refute those sophisms by which adversaries try to overturn the Church's sound teaching and to settle their new inventions.

197Chapter I. Prolegomena. But so that this whole matter may come into the light more easily, it will not be out of place to set a few things before the dispute itself — things whose explanation will open the way into this controversy. First: in questions of predestination or reprobation the very order of our thought breeds the sharpest fights, while one claims that in God's intellect and decrees this is prior which another holds is posterior. So we must speak briefly of this whole account of priority and posteriority under the diverse signs of reason. Second: because the words Election, Predestination, and Reprobation are used differently by different writers, we must explain the force of the words themselves, and show in what sense others take them, and in what sense we do. Third: because writers argue differently about the qualities or conditions of the subject, it will be worth setting out what is absolutely required and presupposed in the subject of predestination or reprobation when that subject is considered in common. Last: besides the common conditions required equally and without distinction whether someone is made the subject of predestination or of reprobation, some place further distinguishing qualities or conditions, by whose difference the act of Divine predestination falls on one and the act of reprobation on another. Those too must be weighed for what force they have. For some who refer the difference of election and reprobation to such things — whether our qualities or our acts — still will not let them be called causes, much less merits, and only grudgingly allow them even to be named conditions of our predestination. But let us gird for the work, and begin from those signs or distinct instants that theologians usually assign and separate according to prior and posterior order in the acts of both the Divine intellect and the Divine will.

198First, then, this must be known and held: if we consider God's nature and perfection in itself, he does not first see one thing and then another, nor first decree or will this and then that. By one most simple act from eternity he has seen all things at once and decreed all things at once in himself. The firmest ground is Divine immutability — James 1:17: with God there is no change, or shadow of turning. Those words shut every change — in being or in working — out of the Divine nature. If we imagine God acting by turns in those operations understood as immanent in him, so that he first understands this then that, first wills this then another, we place in God a move from potency into act — which contradicts his most absolute simplicity. So Ambrose is right (or whoever wrote book 2 of On the Calling of the Gentiles, chapter 10): In God there is no accident, motion, new will, or temporal counsel; his thought is not varied by the inequality of changeable things; he comprehends all times and temporal things together with an everlasting, steady gaze. Hilary agrees: he denies piecemeal thoughts of things in God, and holds that all things stand with God in the even infinity of eternity (On the Trinity 12, p. 193). Every Scholastic and theologian I have seen assents — except one Vorstius, whose ravings are not even worth refuting in a theological school.

199Second: although every act in God's mind and will is eternal, and so not parted even by the lightest instant of before and after, still, from the side of the things God understands and has decreed, certain signs of priority and posteriority can be marked — according to our way of understanding. In that sense theologians ask whether God first decreed to give the elect eternal life, or faith and obedience that lead to eternal life; and whether he first reprobated some and cast them from eternal life before he foresaw them fallen and stained by sin. Hence nearly everyone who has written on predestination and reprobation draws a kind of series, almost a little table, trying to sketch the order of the Divine decrees — not because they judge that in God himself one decree is really before or after another, but because, given the ordered dependence of the things in themselves, our intellect ought to conceive one before another. Yet among the Scholastics themselves this teaching about those signs or instants of before and after — props by which our weak reason steadies itself when it thinks of God's decrees — is not very fixed or constant. Scotus, the chief craftsman of these signs, seems to some not only to have set them as prior and posterior in our mode of understanding, but also to have held that one is prior by nature to another in God himself — as if that before-and-after order could be assigned from the nature of the thing in the Divine acts themselves. But when I read carefully what Scotus teaches on these signs (1 Sent. dist. 41 q. unica; 3 Sent. dist. 7 q. 4 and dist. 19 q. unica), he seems to me to teach only this: that in the things themselves there is some foundation from which we conceive that one decree of God is to be set before another by a certain order of our reason. From the other side our Occam denied these signs however considered (1 Sent. dist. 9 q. 3); and Biel, taking that view, attacked them (3 Sent. dist. 2 q. 1 dub. 3): "Priorities are not to be placed in Divine things, any more than pluralities of ordered acts. For there is one act in Divine things, indistinct in reality and in reason, which is the Divine essence itself; by that one cognition God foresaw Christ's incarnation, the future beatitude of all the elect, the fall and the repair — not one before, another after." And he adds at once that not even according to our consideration can such an order of before and after be conceived in the Divine decrees without that consideration becoming a false speculation. Dominic Báñez, though he does not wholly explode these signs with Biel, still weighs the theologians' discord in assigning them and says: notice how freely, in the business of predestination and reprobation, theologians multiply instants, and how little those help assign the account of the difference between the predestined and the reprobate. So let this brief warning stand: do not trust too much, or cling as to fixed dogma, to any certain order of the Divine decrees, whether drawn by Protestants or by Papal writers. It is hard to find two — among ours or among adversaries — who agree to the line in every point when they describe this series of Divine decrees. Let each take care not to bring in a view of predestination and reprobation that runs against Divine justice or free grace; and since these decrees are in reality altogether simultaneous in God, it matters little in what order of before and after we distribute and arrange them according to our mode of understanding.

200Third: because our intellect is weak, we are often forced, when explaining predestination, to conceive something as before and something as after — as when we think God first considered the human being as fallen, before as elect in Christ; or when we say God first destines a person to eternal life, before to efficacious grace. So let us see where this order of before and after, which we mark in the Divine acts, is founded. Not in God's knowledge or will considered in itself: in Divine things all are simultaneous in duration. It is founded in the relation of the things themselves, insofar as one depends on another. Therefore, in our mode of consideration, that is prior in the Divine mind and will from which another hangs in the order of causality; that is posterior which hangs from another. If one stands wholly independent of another, neither is prior or posterior to the other. Next, mark carefully: the same thing can be prior and posterior to another in different kinds of cause. Compare an efficient or dispositive cause with a final one. In the kind of final cause, health is prior to the drug: it moves the physician to give it and the sick person to take it. But in the kind of efficient cause the drug is prior to health: by its virtue and efficacy the sick person is brought back to health. So in predestination: the will to give eternal life is conceived prior to the will to give efficacious grace in the order of final cause — for from the intention of giving life arises the decree to give such grace. But in the order of efficient cause the will to give grace is prior, and grace is given so that by its virtue and efficacy going before, the person may be led through to glory. That is what the Philosopher hints (Ethics 3.8): what is last in intention is first in execution, and the reverse. The reason is plain. In the act of willing and intending, that has the account of a cause which by desire and love of itself moves the agent to seek and apply such means; but in the act of executing, that has the account of a cause which advances the end itself and works toward obtaining it. So Báñez: the end which in the agent's intention has the account of a cause with respect to the means, when set in execution has the account of an effect, and the means themselves have the account of an efficient cause toward it. Mark this well: although in reality there is one and the same act of will in God by which he wills both means and end, the end through the means, and the means for the end, still in our mode of understanding all these are distinguished — and hence the tangled questions which of them is prior or posterior in the Divine will. To meet those questions, always weigh what order of causality the things themselves have among themselves: they are understood to carry the same order of priority. Add this too: although in the acts of the Divine will as to the thing there is no before or after, God does not will created things in a confused, unordered heap. It is true that in God there are not many volitions, nor one prior to another; yet by one most simple act of his will he willed one thing to be for another, and one to depend on another. Hence that consideration of before and after which properly belongs to the things themselves is attributed by us to the Divine decrees. So whenever the dispute is about God's knowledge — asking of two which he knew first — or about his will — asking of two which he decreed first — always remember: this priority or posteriority does not inhere really, truly, and formally in the acts of the Divine mind and will themselves, but is considered from the side of the things God has known and decreed, among which he willed a true and real before and after. And for our purpose, that is enough on this point.

2012. Let us now explain the three words that will keep returning through the whole dispute ahead. First is Election. Scripture uses that word in more than one way. Sometimes it means setting a people apart to share the word and the ordinary means by which people are led to salvation. So God is said to have chosen the Jewish nation and passed by the other nations. "The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples," and so on (Deuteronomy 7:6). Sometimes the same word means setting a particular person apart for an office in the state or in the church. So God is said to have chosen Saul as king of the Jews: "See whom the Lord has chosen" (1 Samuel 10:24); and Christ chose the Twelve as apostles: "Did I not choose you, the twelve?" (John 6:70). Those elections are not our question now. Still, in them and in every case of the same kind, election always means taking someone — or some — out of a larger number for a special end the agent intends.

202The election we must treat, then, is the singular act of the Divine will that from eternity sets certain ones apart for the end of glory — eternal life — and passes others by. Thomas rightly notes that this election, like love, is presupposed to predestination. All the predestined are understood as elect and beloved: beloved insofar as God wills them the good of eternal life; elect insofar as he wills them that good and does not will it to others. Taken properly, election looks only to the end: it is God's will to confer glory on particular persons while passing others by. Theologians do sometimes blur election with predestination. When the words are kept apart, election belongs chiefly to the end itself; predestination belongs to the means — as we will now show.

203I turn next to Predestination. Theologians sometimes — though rarely — use that word for a bad end too: destination to death. So Augustine on John, Tractate 48: How did he say to them, "You are not of my sheep"? Because he saw them predestined to everlasting ruin, not purchased for eternal life by the price of his blood. And in City of God 15.1 he says there are two cities or societies of human beings: one predestined to reign forever with God, the other to suffer eternal punishment with the devil. Augustine's disciples Prosper and Fulgentius sometimes speak the same way. The Fathers at the Council of Valence even confess a predestination of the elect to life and a predestination of the ungodly to death. We, following what has nearly become school usage, narrow "predestination" and "the predestined" to that special providence of God by which from eternity he proposed to secure, by efficacious means, the salvation of those he chose in Christ — and, matching that eternal purpose, he works their salvation in time efficaciously and without fail.

204In predestination, then, we can mark two acts: one of the Divine will, one of the intellect. The will's act is to will salvation for this particular person, to choose him before others, to show him mercy and not show mercy to others — an act Aquinas (as we noted earlier) treats as prior to predestination and calls election. The intellect's act is to foreknow, and to direct these particular persons by infallible means to the end destined for them. That second act is where predestination proper chiefly lives. Augustine's description fits here: Predestination is nothing other than God's foreknowledge and preparation of the benefits by which whoever are set free are set free with certainty. So by predestination we always mean that part of Divine providence which directs its elect by infallible means and leads them through to eternal blessedness. How necessary this is becomes clear once you see that the life of glory surpasses what human nature can reach: free election to that end is not enough unless Divine wisdom and power also supply fit, infallible means that guide us there. Aquinas's likeness is not strained. An arrow is first aimed at a mark by the archer's purpose; then by his power, through the bow, it is sent toward that same mark. So every person destined from eternity by God's purpose for the mark of eternal life is, in time, by that same power, through efficacious grace, directed to glory's goal and at last brought there. That whole account of transmitting the elect into eternal life — as it is understood to stand from all eternity in the Divine mind — is what we call predestination.

205On the opposite word, Reprobation, a few points. As for the bare term, Scripture's "reprobate" and "to reprobate" point more to the present state of the ungodly than to God's eternal decree about them. ἀδόκιμος — a reprobate — is one who lives ungodly, does not carry himself as a son of God, and by his deeds shows himself counterfeit, spurious, adulterate. God is said to reject or reprobate such people because of that impurity, as goldsmiths throw out counterfeit coins. Even in Augustine — who treated this matter more richly and clearly than the other Fathers — "reprobate" and "reprobating" in the school sense barely appear, or do not appear at all. Still, the thing itself is plainly in Scripture. First, when Scripture affirms what forces the reprobation of some by clear necessary consequence: as when certain named persons are said elect and predestined by God before the world's foundations were laid. Election of some imports passing by — rejecting — others. Second, when equivalent phrases express the decree: God is said never to have known some, not to have given them to Christ, to refuse mercy to some, not to have written some names in the book of life — and the like, which plainly prove that from eternity the Divine mind and will marked a difference between elect and non-elect. Finally, though Augustine and the other Fathers seldom use the school word "reprobation," they use other words that mean the same. Those the School calls reprobates, they call foreknown and predestined to destruction.

206Drop the bare word; come to the thing. As to elect and to predestinate name that eternal act of the Divine will by which God decreed to direct certain persons to blessedness they will infallibly reach, so to reprobate names the opposite act: the decree to permit certain persons to fail and fall short of that end. That fits providence itself — which allows some defect in the things under its care. See Aquinas, ST I q.23 a.6. In reprobation we mark two quasi-acts of the Divine will. The first is unwillingness to elect someone to blessedness obtained without fail. Why that act lands on Judas rather than Peter has no reason on the reprobate's side; it is referred to the liberty of the Divine will. So Báñez: in the particular case, why God chose these and reprobated those has no adequate cause but the Divine will. In the same article he says this predestination of some and reprobation of others manifests the greatest liberty the Divine will has in dispensing supernatural goods — and that liberty is a great Divine perfection. The act we call passing-by or non-election, Bellarmine calls the negative act of reprobation. Guard this point: do not follow Scotus in treating God's will toward the reprobate — whom he does not choose but passes by — as merely negative. In the act we name by a negation there is an expressed, affirmative will of God; it does not mean God simply suspends willing about their falling short of blessedness. Read that act affirmatively, not only negatively. Passing-by / non-election involves affirmative decrees: I will to permit Judas to fall short of eternal life; I will and decree not to give Judas that special grace which, if he received it, would bring him to eternal life. So much for the first act. The second is to destine to punishment. That act terminates on the reprobate as foreknown and foreseen stained by sin — and that from the fault of his own will. Scotus calls this privative reprobation; Bellarmine, the positive act of reprobation. It designates the will to damn the reprobate person. Note also: God shows the reprobate certain effects that do not flow from their reprobation — that they are created, called to know the Gospel, illuminated with supernatural knowledge. Those are effects of common love and common providence, not of reprobation.

207The proper effects of negative reprobation are these: unwillingness to decree the efficacious liberation of a person lying under damnation; and the will to deny that person the efficacious helps by which he would in fact be converted. The last effect is the eternal punishment of the obstinate sinner. That does not properly rise from mere passing-by or non-election, but from the other reprobation-act one may call pre-damnation — which presupposes foresight of sin and leaving the person in it. Weigh this too: reprobation's effects are not chained to one another the way predestination's are. In predestination the earlier effect usually causes the later — efficacious calling begets faith, faith justification, and so on. In reprobation the effects are not ordered that way, though taken together they serve one end: the shining of Divine justice. Finally, against certain malevolent slanders, mark this: In the fallen human being, sins such as unbelief, wickedness, and hardening — and the penalty due them, eternal damnation — follow reprobation as infallibly as faith, holiness, and perseverance follow predestination; yet they do not follow in the same way. Acting from the decree of predestination, God works those earlier goods by the influx of efficacious grace. From the decree of reprobation he does nothing that makes the reprobate worse, nothing that blocks believing and holy living, nothing that drives him into unbelief or wickedness. Watch that carefully. Old Pelagians and new alike see that, given reprobation as we have described it, none of the reprobate perseveres in faith or holy life — and they cry at once that we make God the author of sin and the cause why people do not believe or spring back from faith and holiness. With the Prophet we answer every reprobate: your destruction is from you, though help is from God alone. Reprobation takes nothing from the reprobate's own power; God simply does not put forth toward him the efficacious power he could put forth if he willed. So Prosper long ago: God despoils no one of the possibility of the good. It does not follow — as the objectors think — that those to whom God has not given penitence he has robbed of repentance, or that those he has not lifted he has struck down, and so on. Reprobation causes in a far different way from predestination. God predestinating works every good in the predestined by grace's influx, and is properly called an efficient cause. God reprobating works no evils in the reprobate by subtracting grace; the evils break out from nature's corruption — and God is no more their cause than the sun is cause of darkness when it does not light the air. So much I thought should be set down first on election, Predestination, and reprobation.

208III. Third: the qualities or conditions of the subject taken commonly and without distinction — what must clothe that subject on which the Divine act of predestination or reprobation, taken without discrimination, terminates. First, beyond dispute: for either act to fall on any subject at all, that subject must be endowed with a rational nature. Rationality is therefore a necessary condition always to be supposed in the predestined or the reprobate. The reason is plain to anyone. Both predestination and reprobation are God's decree about the supernatural end of eternal blessedness, and brute nature cannot be capable of that end. So when we say someone is ordered to blessedness by predestination, or shut out of it by reprobation, both must be understood of a rational creature. What is clear need not be long.

209Another quality most writers treat as necessarily presupposed in predestinating and reprobating — though not all agree: the infection of sin, which they think God foresaw in the subject before it could be predestined or reprobated. On their view rationality is not enough; the creature must also be presupposed a sinner, stained with sin. I do not gladly make this quarrel my own; still I will open briefly what others hold and what I hold. We must admit that the opinion which puts predestination before foresight of sin is neither new nor the property of obscure theologians. Nearly everyone who took predestination as bare designation to the end itself, rather than preparation of means, reasoned this way. Scotus, ordering instants in the Divine mind and will, always set the will to give beatitude before foresight of the fall (I dist. 41; III dist. 19 q.1): God first wills glory for a fixed number of elect, next orders grace for them, then foresees their fall in Adam. With Scotus stand many who claim the Scotist name. Maclantus, Galatinus, Alfonso Mendoza, and countless others teach the decree of predestination prior even to permitting the fall — and prior to creating man. So they do not treat foresight of sin as a condition of the subject on which predestination falls. Among recent Jesuits Suarez follows the same line and calls it the common opinion: I judge more probable the theologians' common view that the election of the predestined preceded permission of original sin.

210That God can elect and reprobate before any foresight of sin is plain in the angels. Those who stood were elect; those who fell were passed by or reprobated — and that before any foresight of standing versus falling. Before the decree to create or save them, God knew which angels, given such grace, would in fact persevere and reach eternal blessedness, and knew which would infallibly fall if given only the grace he later in fact gave. Why give the good angels grace he knew would bring them to glory? Only because a will to save them — election or predestination — came first. Why give the wicked angels grace he knew, taken alone, would leave them to perish? Because a will to permit their falling short of blessedness came first: otherwise he knew and could have given them, no less than the others, grace that would have carried them infallibly to glory. So toward the angels God's will to elect some and not others did not arise after foresight of who would stand or fall; it is rather the cause of that different outcome, and prior in order. Election and passing-by therefore do not, from the nature of the acts themselves, necessarily presuppose foresight of sin in the subject — not in angels. Nor does it seem necessary in humans to place foresight of sin as a condition in the subject prior to the decree of predestination and reprobation. Thomas notes rightly: motion takes its species from the terminus to which, not from the terminus from which. As whitening does not care whether the thing whitened was black, pale, or red, so predestination does not care whether someone is destined to eternal life from a state of misery or not. On Thomas's showing the act of predestination can fall on a subject not yet tangled in sin's misery.

211Aquinas even seems to lean toward saying reprobation in fact preceded foresight of original sin. When he calls reprobation that part of Divine providence which permits some to fall short of beatitude, he implies that permission to fail from the means that lead to beatitude flows from reprobation — and so, in our way of understanding, is posterior to it. If permission to fail follows reprobation, then foresight of the actual fall follows all the more: it is foreseen only on the hypothesis of permission. I bring this in not because I cling to that opinion, but to touch in passing the ignorance — or malice? — of those who curse Calvin or Beza as if they invented a view no less current among Scholastics and even Pontificians than the contrary view that puts the sin-infected human as predestination's subject. As for Calvin (so far as I can judge): he rightly denies that foresight of sin is the cause of predestination or reprobation; yet with Augustine he always holds that consideration of foreseen sin stands before God as he predestinates or reprobates — as a common condition of the subject. Clear words: If all whom the Lord predestines to death are by natural condition liable to death's judgment, if all are taken from a corrupted mass, no wonder they lie under damnation. Hear clearer still. After Paul taught that God from a lost mass elects and reprobates whom he wills, why and how so little helps that, terrified, he breaks into O the depth! (Tractate on God's eternal predestination, p. 711). Beza, Zanchi, and other learned men speak more harshly and set consideration of the corrupted mass wholly after the decree of predestination — yet they never think anyone's damnation decreed except on presupposed sin.

212My judgment in brief. First: if by Predestination you mean bare designation to the end of glory (as many older Scholastics do), and by Reprobation only the negation of that act — the decree to pass by and not elect — I do not think foresight of sin must be supposed as something prior in the subject so predestined or reprobated. Why? In God's mind and will no act is really prior to another; all before-and-after is taken from the mutual dependence of the things themselves. Where the things have no causal dependence, Divine decrees about them admit no before or after. Sin is altogether beside the point for the act of Divine election or non-election. It is not the reason of either act (all confess that), nor a qualification of the subject without which those acts cannot fall — as rationality is; the angels already showed that. Since sin is neither cause why someone is elect to glory or permitted to fall short of it, nor a disposition required for either act, it is improper to say the decree to elect or not elect is prior in God's mind to foresight of sin — and improper to say foresight of sin was prior to that decree — for among independent things there is no before or after in God's mind or will. Those who try to blacken, with I know not what horrid consequences, the view that considers election and passing-by without foresight of sin are twisting ropes out of sand.

213Yet Scripture and Augustine, glory of the Fathers, do not take predestination and reprobation as bare election to the end, or bare passing-by. With the decree to give the end they join the decree to prepare and give certain, designated, infallible means; with the decree to permit falling short of the end they couple another — to punish and damn forever the one who fell short. For that reason I judge it better, fitter, and in this sense truer that foresight of sin be presupposed as a condition of the subject on which such a decree of predestination and reprobation falls. In Scripture predestination usually means not bare designation to glory's end, but destination to glory through means — and not any means, but means of efficacious grace derived from Christ our Head and Mediator. So Ephesians 1:4: he chose us in him that we should be holy; 2 Timothy 1:9: he saved us according to his purpose and the grace given us in Christ before the ages. From these and many like them it is plain the Apostle means destination and direction to glory's end by infallible means of efficacious grace from Christ. Augustine, as everyone knows, takes predestination as preparation of the grace that leads infallibly to glory: Predestination is the preparation of God's benefits by which whoever are set free are set free with certainty. So Aquinas describes it as special providence ordering and directing the elect to salvation's end not by any means, but by means that produce the event infallibly. Take it thus: Predestination in Scripture is not an abstract decree about the end alone, but a compounded decree — to give eternal life through means of grace in Christ. Reprobation in Scripture's use is not bare passing-by or non-election, but pre-damnation — appointment to destruction — bound inseparably to non-election, at least as to the event. Scripture calls the reprobate vessels of wrath fitted for destruction (Romans 9:22); formerly marked out for condemnation (Jude 4). Augustine calls reprobation predestination to destruction. Under "reprobation" we must include not only the bare decree to pass by, but also the will to pre-damn. That kind of predestination and reprobation cannot be conceived or explained rightly unless sin is preconceived as a common condition in the subject.

214That can be shown by these reasons. First: predestination of humans to eternal life includes giving certain ones to Christ as Physician and Life-giver, and freeing them from the stock and head of old Adam, corrupter and killer of his posterity. So Scripture: "Those you gave me I have kept" (John 17:12); "Behold, I and the children God has given me" (Hebrews 2:13); "He chose us in Christ" (Ephesians 1:4); "Those who are well have no need of a physician" (Luke 5:31); "While we were still weak, Christ died for the ungodly" (Romans 5:6); "If many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many" (Romans 5:15). From these we gather: in the decree of predestination all the elect were given to Christ as Redeemer, Life-giver, and their future Physician. But a redeemer presupposes a captive, a life-giver a dead person, a physician a sick one — so those predestined in Christ the Redeemer are considered by God as such. As any act presupposes an object, such an act presupposes such an object: the acts of redemption, vivification, and healing, all included as future in our predestination or election in Christ, presuppose an object to be redeemed, made alive, healed — which is nothing other than one corrupted by sin. So Augustine (Serm. 9 on the Apostle's words): There was no cause for the Lord Christ's coming except to save sinners. Take away diseases and wounds, and medicine has no cause. If Christ was incarnate in time to save sinners, then from eternity too those given by predestination to the incarnate Christ to be saved were considered as sinners. Second: predestination means not only giving some to Christ as Redeemer and Liberator, but also the eternal preparation in God's mind of the means by which they are most certainly set free. All those means prepared for the elect can exercise their proper force only on a subject stained with sin — so predestination presupposes such a subject. Begin with efficacious calling to repentance and faith: what use is repentance except in a sinner? what force has faith except to justify a sinner? what does the Spirit of regeneration do but reshape the sinner to the image of Divine holiness lost in Adam? Since predestination prepares these and like means for the elect, God clearly considers them corrupted by sin and to be drawn out of that corruption by those efficacious means. As for reprobation, one argument seems enough: it falls only on a human considered as a sinner. Its aim is to display Divine glory by way of vindicating justice, as predestination's aim is to display that glory by way of sparing mercy. It does not serve God's glory to conceive him as destining to eternal punishment a creature not yet worthy of punishment. By absolute liberty God may decree not to communicate to an innocent creature some good he will give others; yet standing in his justice he cannot decree to inflict punishment on an innocent creature. Since reprobation includes the will to inflict punishment on the reprobate, on that side the person must be set before God as bound and stained by sin. Scripture always teaches wrath and vengeance provoked by sin: tribulation and anguish on every soul that does evil (Romans 2:9); the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23); because of these (their sins) the wrath of God comes on the sons of disobedience (Colossians 3:6). The Fathers carefully refuse to attribute to God a will to punish or damn anyone except as arising from preceding sin. Tertullian (On the resurrection): God is good from his own, just from ours — meaning vindicative justice. Augustine (Against Julian 3.18): God can free without good merits, because he is good; he cannot damn anyone without evil merits, because he is just. Prosper (Reply to Vincent's objections 2): That many perish is the merit of those perishing; that many are saved is the gift of the one who saves. And in the Reply to the eleven: Nothing can be referred to God's predestination except what belongs either to due retribution of justice or to undue largess of grace. From all this I judge it clear enough: not only a rational nature but a sinful one underlies the Divine act of predestination or reprobation — as common conditions of the subject without which neither act can fall on humans in the way Scripture describes those acts.

215A few words now on distinguishing conditions. IV. By distinguishing conditions I mean contrary acts or qualities which, when foresight and weighed beforehand in the subject, bring about contrary acts in God toward that same subject. Take free choice: its good use and its bad use are contrary acts. If someone holds that, by God's ordination, foresight of the good use always means predestination, and foresight of the bad use means reprobation, then that person makes the good and bad use of free choice into distinguishing conditions required in the subject of predestination or reprobation.

216So too if someone maintains that only those are elected to glory whom God foresees clothed with merits or good works to the end of life, and that only those are reprobated or not elected whom he foresees clinging perseveringly to demerits or evil works — then that person makes foresight works, good or evil, into distinguishing conditions, and by their difference different Divine acts of predestination and reprobation are assigned to different people. Likewise if someone teaches that God elects only those he foresees will persevere in faith, and passes by and rejects only those he foresees will persevere in unbelief — then faith and unbelief become the distinguishing conditions by whose discrimination the distinct acts of predestination and reprobation fall on distinct persons.

217You already see the great difference between those earlier subject-conditions we called common, and these later ones we call distinguishing. Rational nature, and nature under sin, is presupposed in the predestined and the reprobate so that nothing in them is set as cause, reason, or occasion of the divide. Good and evil works, faith and unbelief, are instead set as foresight conditions in people so that the very divide between the predestined and the reprobate proceeds according to them. We grant the earlier conditions as prerequisites — so that a subject can, commonly and without distinction, lie under God as he predestines and reprobates. But these later ones, which many try to fix in place, we flatly deny: they are not presupposed or foreseen by God in the person to be predestined or reprobated, nor do different foresight varieties of them always drive different acts of predestination and reprobation onto different persons.

218One more prelude. Pontifical writers who hold that foresight works or sins are conditions God looks to in predestination to glory and in reprobation also frankly grant that those conditions are causes why some are elected to glory and others are not — just as, once the decree is executed, they are causes why some are admitted to the kingdom of glory and others shut out. Recent doctors of the Arminian school press hard that there is no election or reprobation of humans except by the foresight divide of faith or unbelief in them, yet they stubbornly deny that faith is the cause of election. They call it a Mode by which God regards the person to be elected, an antecedent of election; but they deny it is election's cause, and at the same time deny it is an effect flowing from election. That dodge shows how weak their case is. If they set faith only as an antecedent condition without which this or that person's election would not occur, they could fairly say they do not make faith the cause of that election. But when they further teach that faith posited means election posited, and foresight faith denied means election denied, they openly give faith not bare precedence but causality as well.

219I dare say Augustine and the other Fathers treat it this way: whenever some human quality or act is so required beforehand that when it is present some following gift of God is present with it, and when it is absent that gift is denied, they set that quality or act in the place of a cause — a cause, as they put it, meritorious in its own way. A condition demanded by God's ordination and performed by the person through God's grace has, for the Fathers, the force and nature of a meritorious motive cause with respect to the benefit conferred under that condition. So Augustine in Epistle 105: the very remission of sins is not without some merit, if faith obtains it. By the same reason, election to glory will not be without some merit on the elect person's side, if faith obtains it. For among the Fathers merit is nothing but a work which, by God's ordination, obtains some benefit. So if the benefit of election is conferred on us from our foresight act of believing, that is not a mere condition sine qua non — it is a cause, indeed the merit of the following benefit, in the sense in which the Fathers use the word merit.

220When the Fathers argue against the Pelagians that grace is not given or withheld according to free choice's merits, they mean simply this: it is not given according to a foresight condition of free choice's good or bad use. Had the Pelagians proved that, the Fathers would never have denied it was a true cause of the grace conferred. So too when our theologians contend against some Scholastics that God does not predestine people from foresight congruent merits, they mean that these so-called congruent merits are not antecedent distinguishing conditions by which everyone in whom they were foresight is elected and everyone in whom they were not is rejected. If the Scholastics ever prove such conditions, their case is finished — and we will freely admit that those conditions are causes of the divide between elect and reprobate, in the sense in which cause and merit are spoken of.

221So it is mere word-trickery when they say foresight faith and unbelief are conditions — not only ones that precede predestination and reprobation taken commonly and without distinction, but ones from which the very distinction of elect and reprobate arises — and yet deny those conditions any causality. Every theologian who has ever argued the reason or cause of election assumes this: whatever, when posited and foresight by God, brings election with it, and when denied or not foresight leaves election absent, has the force of a cause. These are the points I thought should stand as a preface. From here our whole coming dispute will be drawn into certain fixed theses.

222CAP. II. Here I set out the various opinions of those who teach that election rests on our foresight merits. We come at last to the business this labor was meant for. First we will argue election — or predestination — to salvation and eternal blessedness; then the other half of the controversy: non-election, passing-by, or reprobation.

223The chief question for the first half of the coming dispute is this: in those elected and predestined to glory, is there some act or quality God foresaw and weighed beforehand — or anything at all — that stands as merit, cause, reason, condition, or antecedent so bound to the decree of election that when that prior thing is set in the Divine foresight election follows, and when it is denied election is denied? Let us see what Pelagians, Scholastics, and certain recent doctors hold on this.

224Blinded self-love in human reason claims there is always some prior ground on which the decree of election rests — and Scripture cries against it. That British serpent spat out this poison: that a person can keep God's law and reach eternal life by free choice alone. He joined to it another venom of the same kind: that God, foresighting who would live holy by their own will's choice, elected them all to glory before the world's foundations were laid.

225Augustine supplies both. First, Epistle 89, where he hurls anathema at the Pelagians for that heresy: their claim that free choice alone is enough to keep the Lord's commands is to be anathematized and cursed outright. Second, On the Predestination of the Saints 1.18: God foresaw, says the Pelagian, who would be holy by free will's choice, and so before the world's founding he elected them in that very foresight by which he foresaw them to be such. But since theologians of every party already reject Pelagius and this Pelagian dogma — or at least want to look as if they have — I will not waste effort refuting what no one dares openly defend.

226The Semipelagians took up part of Pelagius's poison. Count among them Faustus of Riez, Cassian the Conferencer, the Massilians, and all who admit grace is needed to live godly, persevere, and reach eternal life — yet still claim that from us there first comes a beginning of labor and effort, which God's grace then follows, and for the sake of which saving grace is given. Consequently they hold that once a person has gained God's grace by striving and labor, he stays in that grace, faith, and good works not by any gift flowing from election, but by his own free choice; and that election to eternal life rests on foresight of that will.

227On that prior effort and labor Faustus writes (1.12): just as the prodigal's flight from a pious father's eyes is his own crime, so his return to the father's embrace — deliberating and rising by the good planted in him — is his own devotion. Chapter 17: the Lord invites the willing, draws the desiring, raises the striving. The last chapter: he waits for the will of the one to be cleansed. On progress and perseverance by free choice's powers — not by any special gift flowing from the predestination decree — he reasons (2.5): human salvation is set not in the Maker's predestination, but in the working of the one who serves the Giver of grace. Chapter 12: a person's state can turn this way or that not by God's constitution, but by liberty of choice. At last he openly teaches election from foresight of such good will and working of ours, not from any prior decree of God (2.2): God's foresight begins from the matter of human acts. A little later: to foresee is one thing, to predestine another. Foresight knows beforehand what is to be done; then predestination marks out what is to be repaid. That foresights merits; this preordains rewards. Foresight belongs to power, predestination to justice. Unless foresight has searched, predestination decides nothing. In these words he does not draw merits from the grace of predestination — he draws predestination from foresight merits.

228These Semipelagians are clearest in the letters of Prosper and Hilary to Augustine — both prefixed to Augustine's On the Predestination of the Saints. Prosper reports their definition: God foresaw before the world's founding who would believe, or who would stay in the faith later helped by his grace, and predestined to his kingdom those he foresaw, once called by grace, would be worthy of election and would leave this life with a good end. Hilary: the Massilians say it empties preaching to speak of some as elect according to purpose, and so on. A few lines later: they claim that by the merit of each person's willing and believing, one can be healed of disease and gain both the increase of that faith and the full effect of one's holiness. In short, they put the reason for elect or reject in this: each is paired with the merit of his own will. They grant God does not elect anyone's works in foresight of gifts he himself will give; yet they affirm he elects faith in foresight — so that whom he foresaw would believe, he elected, and to him gives the Holy Spirit so that by good works he may reach eternal life. Finally they hold that no one is given such perseverance that falling away is impossible; and so they deny any fixed number of those to be elected and rejected. I thought this worth quoting a little more fully, so you may see how near they stand to the Pelagians or Semipelagians who in our own age try to explode Augustine's teaching — rooted in Scripture and long confirmed by the catholic Church's witness.

229Next, down from the Semipelagians to the Scholastics. Not a few of them teach that predestination — or election — has a cause insofar as it falls on this man rather than that. Some plead good moral works before justifying grace; others good works after it; others foresight of a good use of God's grace. I need not linger refuting these views: one blow from the Apostle flattens them all (Rom. 9:11) — the children not yet born, having done nothing good or evil, so that God's purpose according to election might stand, not from works but from the One who calls.

230Why do Pelagians, Semipelagians, Scholastics, and so many others agree that election to grace and glory rests on something in our power to have or do? The causes of the error are plain. First: pride and self-love native to the race, which hates having every ground of boasting torn away. Second: thick ignorance of our corruption and of the will captive under sin's yoke. Third: put any cause of election in us, and the hard questions that otherwise force us up to an unsearchable height are easily waved off — and human curiosity hates that height. Once election tracks foresight of some human act, ask why one gets grace and another does not: because one disposed himself by free choice, the other did not. Why one perseveres and another not: because one wills to persevere, the other will not. Why this one was elect to glory before the world, that one not: God foresaw from eternity that one would admit offered grace, use it well, and stay in it by free choice to life's end — the other reject it at once, or at least shake it off before death.

231A last motive for many who will admit no election except one resting on foresight of some act free choice can elicit: they took as a necessary postulate what is utterly false — that God would be cruel unless he put it in every person's power to recover by himself the salvation lost in Adam. Leave the old Pelagians and Scholastics. Engage those who disturb the Church in our age by dressing old errors in new formulas. First certain Papal doctors, then the Arminians: both refuse any election to salvation that does not rest on foresight of human acts elicited from free choice, grace having gone before.

232First into the arena: the Papists. For all who hold this view (many of the sounder sort do not), let Vasquez speak. He tries to prop this thesis with many arguments (on ST 1.23.3, disp. 89): There is no efficacious election of particular persons to glory from God's will alone; each is elect to glory from foresight merits which God's grace will bring about. A few notes first so the thesis is clear; then the adversaries' arguments, stated and dissolved.

233First: by efficacious election Vasquez means God's absolute, particular will that settles on certain persons to be blessed — Peter, Paul, and the rest one by one. He calls it efficacious election, or an efficacious will to give glory, to mark it off from the common antecedent will (a bare desire or affection) by which they say God wills eternal life for all, even the reprobate. Second: when he says this efficacious election to glory is from foresight merits, he does not make those merits the cause of God's willing — no cause of that is sought outside God — but the reason why the divine will freely terminates on glorifying this person. Third: adding "which God's grace will bring about" cuts him off from Pelagians who let merits flow from free choice without Christ's grace, which Augustine everywhere proved from Scripture necessary. Last: though the Jesuit holds there is no efficacious election to glory except from foresight of merits, he gladly grants predestination to special grace that infallibly leads to glory rests on no foresight of merits, and no cause, start, or occasion can be invented on the predestinate's side why God gave that grace or decreed in foresight to give it (ST I q.23, disp. 91.11). On predestination of particular persons to special grace, then, the Jesuit is far sounder than the Arminian and Vorstian school. Now their arguments for the thesis: they start from Scripture and usually cite these for election from foresight works.

234First argument (Matt. 25:34ff.): "Come, you blessed of the Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the world's beginning. For I was hungry, and you gave me…" Vasquez: here Christ offers a kingdom prepared from the world's origin — that is, from eternity — and at once gives the reason they should receive what was prepared and destined, which is to mark the cause of that preparation. If the preparation rested on some other ground, and not on these very works named, the cause Christ himself assigns would be empty and none. Therefore people are elect to heavenly glory from foresight of their good works (ST I q.23 a.3, disp. 89.2).

235From these words you may gather only this: God's children, freely predestined from eternity to glory, at last enter it — others shut out — because they alone took the straight road God ordained. Vasquez's claim that the works named here are causes of the preparation itself, or of God's eternal destination, is utterly false. The true cause is hinted when they are called the Father's blessed: he destined them to the heavenly inheritance because by grace he willed to be their Father in Christ. Their works, neither as foresight nor as done in time, caused predestination to glory — only introduction into it; and even of that they are not meritorious causes, only subordinate ones, as motion on a road is a "cause" of reaching the end. Vasquez's slip: he missed that decreeing or predestining to glory can be purely gratuitous in God and rest on no foresight of human acts, while the way of arriving at glory for man is laborious and needs many acts without which God ordained and foresaw he would never put in to glory's kingdom. Scotus (I dist. 41) marks the solution: "God wills to give Peter eternal glory on account of merits" is false if "on account of merits" construes with "wills" — God did not form the will to glorify Peter from foresight of merits — and true if it construes with "to give": he will not bring into possession of glory until it is foresight that Peter walked in the good works God prescribed and preordained. Bellarmine uses the same reply (De grat. et lib. arb. 2.13): "God from eternity predestined to give men the kingdom through foresight good works" is false if "through foresight works" hangs on "predestined," true if it hangs on "to give" — glorification in execution as the effect of justification, sanctification, or good works. This argument will be pressed again, harder; we will answer more fully then.

236Second: they press the places where election or predestination to glory is joined in so many words with foreknowledge — Rom. 8:29–30 ("Whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to his Son's image…"); Rom. 11:2 ("God has not cast off his people whom he foreknew"); 1 Pet. 1:2 ("elect strangers according to the Father's foreknowledge, unto sanctification of the Spirit…"). From these they infer that God elected to glory those he foreknew would be conformed to the Son's image — holy and good — so that foresight of future goodness or holiness was the cause of election to glory.

237Reply: those texts do not say God elected or predestined certain people to glory because he foresaw they would be conformed to Christ's image — holy and good. They say he elected those he foreknew, and predestined them to become conformed, or elected them unto sanctification. So foresight of future holiness was not the cause of predestination; predestination was the cause of the holiness foreseen. God foresees no saving spiritual good in people except what he himself works in them; he works none except what he decreed to work. The decree to work grace and holiness — already wrapped into predestination — always comes before any foresight of grace and holiness as in them.

238Weigh the words more closely. Paul did not say "whom he foresaw," but "whom he foreknew" (οὓς προέγνω). This foreknowledge is practical, not bare intuition — what theologians call the knowledge of approbation. Sense: those God loved and, by his eternal good pleasure, set apart from others and approved — those he predestined. Scripture often uses "know" for love or approval, and "not know" for hate or rejection ("I never knew you," Matt. 7:23; "The Lord knows the way of the righteous," Ps. 1:6). So Catharinus on this place: What is "he foreknew," if not "he foreloved"?

239Second: Paul did not write "whom he foreknew would be conformed, he predestined," but "whom he foreknew" (that is, foreloved) "he predestined to become conformed" — as the Vulgate rightly supplies what the Greek leaves open. So God is not said to predestine from foresight of our works, but to foreknow the good works he prepared for those already predestined.

240Hear Augustine (On the Gift of Perseverance 2.14): predestination is the foreknowledge and preparation of God's benefits by which whoever is freed is most surely freed. More plainly still (ch. 17): to whom God gives his holy gifts, he without doubt foresaw he would give them, and in that foreknowledge prepared them — for to arrange his own future works in his foreknowledge is exactly, and nothing else, to predestine. So you see how craftily and wickedly they cloud free predestination with foresight of works: God foresaw no good works in us, foresaw faith or holiness for no one, except what he prepared for us in the decree of predestination itself. He did not predestine us because he foresaw we would do good works; he foresaw we would do them because in our predestination good works were prepared for us to walk in (Eph. 2:10).

241Third: they bring 1 Cor. 2:9 — "Eye has not seen… the things God prepared for those who love him." On ordinary speech, "for those who love him" looks like the cause of the preparation. Say a king prepared a crown for whoever scales a besieged city's walls: that would mean the crown was destined to this or that man from foresight of the climb — and no other way.

242Reply: "for those who love him" tells what sort of people finally receive the glory he prepared from eternity — it does not make foresight of that love the cause why glory was destined to them. The same love that freely destined them to glory also destined them to love God, and by that love they take the road that leads to glory. So our love of God is an effect of the divine love that elected and predestined us to salvation — foolishly taken as election's cause. So the Apostle: "We love God because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

243Augustine (In John, tract. 86) puts it best: they defend God's foreknowledge against his grace when they say we were elect before the world's foundation because God foresaw we would be good. They were not elect because they were good — they would not have been good unless elect. So we may say the same of those who claim we were elect because God foresaw us as loving him: we would never love God unless we had been elect.

244Last: the earthly-king crown analogy fails at the very hinge of the argument. If no one could climb by his own strength, and the king could breathe that strength into whomever he chose, the crown would not be destined from foresight of the climb — the climb foreseen, and the strength given, would flow from the crown's destination. That is exactly how it stands between God and men.

245No one would love God unless God poured charity into him; God would pour saving charity into no one unless he had first destined him to salvation. So he does not destine eternal life from foresight of our love — from the purpose of election to eternal life he infuses that love. Close with Augustine, who hammers the Pelagians everywhere: "That we might receive the love with which we should love, we were loved when we did not yet have it" (On the Grace of Christ against Pelagius, ch. 26).

246Fourth: they bring 2 Tim. 2:21 — "If anyone cleanses himself from these, he will be a vessel unto honour, sanctified and useful to the Lord." So the vessels of election (or mercy) are those God foresaw would cleanse themselves: election, they say, rests on foresight of holy works.

247Reply: of course God foreknows the holiness of those he elects to glory — he cannot fail to foreknow what he himself will do, and he works all our good in us. But proving that he foresees the elect's good works is not enough for their cause, unless they also show he elects from that prior foresight. And that they can never force out of Paul's words.

248In that place Paul does not teach why vessels are elect to glory, but by what mark they are known. He stamps a double mark on them: one God alone can read — the seal of eternal adoption ("The Lord knows who are his"); the other men can see — flight from impiety and the practice of holiness and justice ("Let him depart from iniquity"; "If he cleanses himself, he will be a vessel unto honour").

249Add: "vessel unto honour" is said two ways. From God's eternal electing purpose to honour — and then being such a vessel does not hang on foresight of sanctification; sanctification afterward flows from that decree. Or from actual sanctification — and in that sense someone becomes a vessel unto honour when, purified and renewed by God's Spirit, he begins among God's honoured servants to serve the divine honour in a holy life.

250So Lyranus seems to take the place: "he will be a vessel unto honour" means a vessel set apart for divine worship. However you read it, the text does not prove God elects us to glory from foresight of our holiness. It proves the elect to glory are filled with true holiness, known by that mark as vessels destined to honour, and actually put to honourable use through that holiness.

251Fifth: from 1 Timothy 2:4 — "God wills all men to be saved" — they argue that from this common will to save all, God gives everyone sufficient grace to reach salvation. So some are elect to glory and others passed by only because he foresaw who would cooperate with that grace and persevere in holiness, and who would not cooperate at all, or would not remain in good works and faith. Therefore, they say, there is no election to glory except from foresight of merits.

252This divine will for the salvation of all men must be read with the will joined to it — the will to teach all men. Paul binds them: God wills all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4). Yet it is certain from God's word and from history that he has not willed to teach all, or to lead every person one by one to saving truth. Romans 10:14: how will they call on him in whom they have not believed? how believe without hearing? how hear without a preacher? how preach unless they are sent? In past generations God let the nations walk in their own ways (Acts 14:16) and gave knowledge of the truth to Israel alone. After Christ's coming the light did not at once shine on all by his will: for a time the apostles were barred from the Gentile road (Matthew 10:5), and later forbidden to preach in Asia (Acts 16:6). Come to our own age: how many nations found in the New World have for centuries not felt even a breath of saving truth? Can God be said to have willed them to know the truth when he would not send them heralds of it? See Prosper of Aquitaine on the Gallic chapters (Response 4 and Sentence 4). If they take Paul to mean that God, as far as in him lies, wills to give every fallen child of Adam saving knowledge and salvation itself for Christ's sake, you must either call their reading a clear error or confess weakness in the divine will — for the one who wills, and can, acts.

253Some, to save the opinion, press that through every age God willed each person to come to truth and be saved insofar as they stood in his covenant, not insofar as they fell from it in themselves or in their parents — and that he called everyone to the truth either in their own person or at least in parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Nothing is more foolish. First: if for some prior cause God decreed, before they were born, never to call countless particular persons to the truth, he did not will to call those same people one by one. Next: how far from common sense is it that God called this one person to saving truth in the person of his grandparents? Is that the universal sufficient grace by which they prove he wills everyone's salvation person by person? Is each ancestor one person with his grandchildren? Or did God will to give something personally to a grandson because he once gave it to impious grandparents who threw it away? Anyone who wants to defend sufficient grace and a general will to save all this way should go not to grandparents but to the first parent of the race. In Adam — the root, the common person of humankind — we may fairly say God willed the salvation of all. But to say he personally willed the salvation of this Indian or American, and that he was sufficiently called to saving truth, though God never sent him a herald of saving grace — and to rest that only on some ancestor five hundred or a thousand years ago who by his own fault rejected the Gospel and cut his line out of the covenant of grace — that defense belongs to someone with nothing left to say; refuting it belongs to someone with nothing better to do.

254If that reading fails, what do Paul's words mean? First notice: he did not say God wills to make all men saved and drag them to the truth by the force of preaching and the Spirit. He said he wills all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4). When God wills to make someone saved, no human will blocks him — so Augustine, On Rebuke and Grace 14. These words show what God wills people to do, more than what he wills to work inside them. He wills gospel ministers, as far as they can, to labor that all may be saved and come to Christ; he wills each Christian, by prayer and every means he can, to further the salvation of all. It is ours, Augustine says, who do not know who belongs to the number of the predestined, to will that all be saved (On Rebuke and Grace 15). So the text belongs to the preceptive will that directs us — not to the decretive will that infallibly gives the good God has destined for a person.

255Second: God is said to will something by a will of affection or of effect — so Thomas in the Disputed Questions on the will of God, art. 1 — or, as others put it, approbatively (what is good and lovable in itself) or efficaciously (what he has decreed to work for his glory in some particular person). The first is only the divine will's simple delight in a thing as fitting God's nature; the second is an absolute decree to give that good to someone in particular. Chastity, wisdom, faith, salvation are lovable goods, and in themselves agreeable to God's will — so we rightly say God wills all people to be chaste, wise, faithful, and saved. Hear that of the approving will, which looks at the thing as such, not of the effecting will, which decides to work it in this or that person. From that prior will — which of itself settles nothing about particular persons — they cannot force the claim that God wills to grant each person whatever suffices for his salvation. Still less can they hang on it that, from foresight of who will use those means well and who will not, he elects some to salvation and passes by and reprobates others.

256Last: if someone still insists Paul's words mean God's efficacious will, he will never get free unless he reads the place as Augustine, Gregory, and the scholastics long did. Augustine, On Rebuke and Grace 14: "God wills all men to be saved" — understand all the predestined, because every kind of human being is among them. Gregory: he wills all men to be saved because from every kind of people he elects those he draws to the joy of eternal salvation (on 1 Kings, book 5, ch. 4). Aquinas on the same words: the distribution is for the kinds of individuals, not for the individuals of the kinds. So this text does not prove that by the will of good pleasure God wills the salvation of every single person — and far less that he elects people to salvation from foresight of the future cooperation by which they would fit themselves to that will.

257Sixth: Vasquez leans on James 2:5 — "Has not God chosen the poor in this world, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom he promised to those who love him?" The Jesuit reads it: God chose those who were poor in this world because they were rich in faith and charity — chose them to glory, the inheritance of the kingdom. So, they say, election to glory hangs on God's foresight of who will finally be rich in faith and works.

258Reply: James's point is that we must not despise the poor. Far from neglecting them, God in spiritual gifts mostly prefers them to the richer. The rich, for their part, are not to be overrated and honored while the poor are ignored — God often sends the rich away empty and fills the poor with goods. 1 Corinthians 1:26 runs the same way: not many wise by flesh, not many mighty, not many noble — God chose what the world calls foolish to shame the strong. So the Apostle shows God has chosen more from the poor, to give them faith and the heavenly inheritance, than from the rich.

259That is why he binds the two phrases: rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom. He did not say the elect are heirs because they were foreseen as going to be rich in faith. He said they were elect so they would become rich in faith — and heirs of the kingdom.

260Vasquez tries a cheap jab at that reading: if "choosing the rich in faith" means making them rich in faith, then "choosing the poor in this world" would mean making them poor — yet James does not say God made people poor; he says those who already were poor, because they were rich in faith, God chose to glory. Reply: no absurdity if we say God made people poor in this world — the rich/poor split itself comes from the divine decree. We grant James's words are not about that. And that does not hurt our reading;

261a near parallel shows why. If we say God chose fishermen as his Apostles, "choose" there means make them Apostles — not make them fishermen. They were already fishermen by their own trade before they were elect Apostles. So when I say God chose the poor who are rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, "choose" means make them believers and kingdom-heirs — not make them poor. Poverty is already assumed when faith and adoption to the heavenly kingdom are given.

262Add this for the full sense: God does not elect from foresight of faith, yet he is rightly said to have chosen the rich in faith — because in time he makes such everyone he elected from eternity; and because, once made such, he already actually and almost visibly elects them, sets them apart from unbelievers, and takes them as his own. Close with Augustine on this very text (On the Predestination of the Saints 1.17): "God chose the faithful, but that they might become so, not because they already were. By electing he makes them rich in faith, just as he makes them heirs of the kingdom." That choosing is rightly said of them: he chose them so that he might do this in them.

263Bottom line: foresight of future faith is not why God elects. He foresaw them faithful because election itself is what makes them faithful.

264Last: they take Revelation 3:11 — "Hold what you have, lest another take your crown." From that they say the crown of glory can be lost by an ungodly life, so God predestines no one to that crown unless he sees the person will persevere to the end in piety and faith. Without that foresight, they argue, predestination would be unsure — someone God meant for glory could drop out by weakness or wickedness.