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Updated: May 5, 2025
But what shall we say to that lost sheep? Shall we terrify it by threats of hell? Shall we even allure it by promises of heaven? Not so not so at least at first for that would be to appeal to bodily fear and bodily pleasure, to the very selfishness from which Christ is trying to deliver it; and to neglect the very prevenient grace, the very hold on the soul which Christ Himself offers us.
"With too general terms, one does not explain the individual case or produces only the appearance of an explanation whereas in every case the true causative relations remain in the dark. But it is the duty of scientific investigation to establish for each observed effect the prevenient cause, or more correctly, since nothing results from a single cause, to discover the various causes."
Shall we go to it by internal stillness, agreeably to the direction of Moses and David ... or shall we press after it by an internal wrestling according to the commands of Christ?... The way to perfection is by the due combination of prevenient, assisting free grace, and of submissive, assisted free will.... 'God worketh in you to will and to do, says St. Paul.
And knowing that perfect fruition of him cannot be without the perfect conformity to him, herein do they exercise themselves to grow in grace, and to be still advancing towards some more likeness to his image, forgetting all their attainments, as things that are behind, and by their Teachings forth unto that which is before, make it evident that they make every begun degree of grace and conformity to God, a prevenient capacity for a new degree which yet they have not attained.
Of the thirty-one students, eighteen were from Oxford, twelve from Cambridge, and the thirty-first from Durham. Even he was looked at with a good deal of suspicion. As for Mark, nothing less than God's prevenient grace could explain his presence at Silchester.
Without such conviction prevenient, "we doubt not" that books on serious subjects, even if clever, and public speech either from platform or pulpit, "do verily have the nature of sin," and the more eloquent they are the worse the offence; with it, the very incompleteness and imperfection in the mode of presentation may even stimulate others to more thought, and to make up deficiencies all the better for themselves.
Solemn Bishops and high Dignitaries, our divine "Pillars of Fire by night," debating meanwhile, with their largest wigs and gravest look, upon something they call "prevenient grace"? Alas, our noble men of genius, Heaven's real messengers to us, they also rendered nearly futile by the wasteful time; preappointed they everywhere, and assiduously trained by all their pedagogues and monitors, to "rise in Parliament," to compose orations, write books, or in short speak words, for the approval of reviewers; instead of doing real kingly work to be approved of by the gods!
For though it be said in the most lenient system that God wished to save all men, and though in the other systems commonly accepted it be granted, that he has made his Son take human nature upon him to expiate their sins, so that all they who shall believe in him with a lively and final faith shall be saved, it still remains true that this lively faith is a gift of God; that we are dead to all good works; that even our will itself must be aroused by a prevenient grace, and that God gives us the power to will and to do.
III. In order to render human actions meritorious or otherwise, liberty from necessity is not required, but only liberty from constraint. IV. The semi-Pelagians, while admitting the necessity of prevenient grace—or grace preceding all actions—were heretics, inasmuch as they said that this grace was such as man could, according to his will, either resist or obey.
Though he had never regarded himself as other than an orthodox Christian, and would argue on prevenient grace if the subject were proposed to him, I think his virtual divinities were good practical schemes, accurate work, and the faithful completion of undertakings: his prince of darkness was a slack workman. In fact, he had a reverential soul with a strong practical intelligence.
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