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With one school, God as the only controlling agency is a fiction, and man himself is infinite in faculties; the other holds that God is everything and man is nothing. The distinction between these two schools, both of which have had great defenders, is fundamental, such as that between Augustine and Pelagius, between Bernard and Abélard, and between Calvin and Lainez.
In this synod Mennas presided, and the two Roman deacons, Vigilius and Pelagius, who had been the legates of Pope Agapetus, but whose powers had expired at his death, sat next to him, but only as Italian bishops.
I read somewhere that Pelagius, unless I am mistaken, was a British heretic; but I believe that no one has ever been able to compose an account of the mistaken people, or their errors. The Eastern regions were lands cursed on earth in the work of its teachers, bringing forth thorns and prickly weeds for those working it. Out of Alexandria came Arius, out of Persia Manes.
Italy sent forth her choicest soldiers, headed by Pelagius and De Courcon, as legates of the pope. The Counts of Nevers and La Marche, the Archbishop of Bourdeaux, the Bishops of Meaux, Autun, and Paris, led the youth of France; while the English troops were conducted by the Earls of Chester, Arundel, and Salisbury, men celebrated for their heroism and experience in the field.
The imperfections of his picture of man, however, led him to underestimate, even to deny, the significance of heredity and so of original sin in human life. For an age which no longer had any direct experience of the soul's pre-natal life, the doctrines of Augustine were undoubtedly more appropriate than those of Pelagius; Augustine was in fact the more modern of the two.
Dr. Lappenberg justly points out this celebrated controversy in our country as "indicating the weakness of that religious connection which was so soon to be totally annihilated." We may, in some degree, account for the reception of the doctrine of Pelagius by knowing that he was a Briton, whose plain unlatinized name was Morgan.
In certain ways it was the greatest of them all, even though no one but Father Lasse knew about it and the people who wrote the almanac, of course; they knew about simply everything! It came on the twenty-sixth of June and was called Pelagius in the calendar.
Carthage then took the matter up again, and requested that Pelagius should be summoned to return to Rome, and the whole matter be fully inquired into there, the controversy being one affecting the West and not the East. To enable the Bishop to form an opinion on the views of Pelagius, they sent him a copy of one of his books, with the worst passages marked.
According to the historian, Neander, as well as to the testimony of Augustine himself, the life of Pelagius was, from beginning to end, one “earnest moral effort.” As his character was gradually formed by his own continued and unremitted exertions, without any sudden or violent revolution in his views or feelings, so the great fact of human agency presented itself to his individual consciousness with unclouded lustre.
Pelagius was the assumed name of a British monk, who, about the first of those dates, passed through Western Europe and Northern Africa, teaching the doctrines that Adam was by nature mortal, and that, if he had not sinned, he nevertheless would have died; that the consequences of his sin were confined to himself, and did not affect his posterity; that new-born infants are in the same condition as Adam before his fall; that we are at birth as pure as he was; that we sin by our own free will, and in the same manner may reform, and thereby work out our own salvation; that the grace of God is given according to our merits.
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