Book II, Chapter 25

CHAPTER XXV. He corrects the fourth.

The fourth false writing1 set out above can still be demolished like the earlier ones. This too was specifically the gloss of Pelagius, as is clear from 21 of this. It runs: God would then act or give equally to the one who works well in regard to any object whatever and to the one who does not work, or who works badly in regard to a like object presented to him in like manner. Hence these persons also would be bound equally to give thanks to the Lord their God, as can be gathered from 31 of the first. So Lucifer and Michael, Cain and Abel, Linus and Peter, any imperfect man and any perfect, would be bound equally to the love of God and to the giving of thanks. No grateful Catholic will presume to affirm this, and scarcely even an ungrateful heretic. The first argument, which wants to show this, is answered as the preceding one was, for the opinion immediately preceding. Augustine's authority also amply testifies that this is one way of causing, or making, an act of the will, namely to present an object to the will. But he does not say that God in no other way brings about the act of the created will. Nor does he speak there universally of every act whatever of the created will, but ‖D2 only of an evil one, and he denies that the Lord is its author. This can be understood with respect to the deformity of the act, not with respect to its substance, as Augustine himself maintains in On Grace and Free Choice 48.2 There, among many testimonies of sacred Scripture, he shows also through this same place of the Psalm that God works in the hearts of men every act of will, good and evil, by his hidden but just judgment, as the twentieth of this second more fully alleged. D1 Isaiah, Anselm and the Parisian article hold the same, with the passages alleged in chapters 20, 19 and 18 of this second, and 26 and 34 of the first. This can also be suitably understood in another way: God did not turn the heart of the Egyptians so that they would hate his people. That is, he did not turn it in such a way as to compel them, to the extent that3 they themselves would be excusable, or he himself accusable of sin. There are also other understandings of similar Authorities, set out more fully in 34 of the first. E1 Hence Augustine too, in On Grace and Free Choice 48, has shown by this place of the Psalm together with other places of Scripture that God works in the hearts of men to incline their wills wherever he wishes, whether to good things or to evil. But this seems less so in the case of evil things, and from it someone might perhaps think that God would be unjust. So Augustine shows that God does this in accordance with the merits of men, by his judgment, sometimes open, sometimes hidden, but always just. "For it ought to be fixed," he says, "and immovable in your heart, because there is no iniquity with God.

And therefore, when you read in the books of truth that men are led astray by God, or dulled, or that their hearts are hardened, do not doubt that their evil merits went before, so that they suffered these things justly. Otherwise you will fall into that proverb of Solomon: 'The folly of a man ruins his ways, but he blames God in his heart.'"4