prayers which the church offers up either for the conversion of unbelievers and other sinners, or for the perseverance of believers, are poured forth in vain. The unrestricted capability of men’s own free will is amply sufficient for all these things, and therefore no necessity exists for asking of God those things which we are able of ourselves to obtain; the gifts of grace being only necessary to enable men to do that more easily and completely which yet they could do themselves though more slowly and with greater difficulty; and that they are perfectly free creatures,” in opposition to all the current notions of predestination and reprobation. These novel opinions were refuted by St. Augustine and St. Jerom, as well as by Orosius a Spanish presbyter, and they were condemned as heresies in the council of Carthage and in that of Milevum. The discussions which then arose have been warmly agitated in various subsequent periods of the Christian church, though little new light has been thrown upon them from that age to the present. In his eagerness to confute these opponents St. Augustine employed language so strong as made it susceptible of an interpretation wholly at variance with the accountability of man. This led to farther explanations and modifications of his sentiments, which were multiplied when the Semi-Pelagians arose, who thought that the truth lay between his doctrines and those of the Pelagians. Concerning original sin, he maintained that it was derived from our first parents; and he believed he had ascertained in what the original sin conveyed by Adam to his posterity consisted. In his sentiments, however, upon the latter point he was rather inconsistent, at one time asserting that the essence of original sin was concupiscence, and at another expressing doubts respecting his own position. This subject was bequeathed as a legacy to the schoolmen of a subsequent age, who exercised their subtle wits upon all its ramifications down to the period of the council of Trent. On the consequences of the fall of our first parents, St. Augustine taught that by it human nature was totally corrupted, and deprived of all inclination and ability to do good. Before the age in which he lived, the early fathers held what, in the language of systematic theology, is termed the synergestic system, or the needfulness of human coöperation in the works of holiness; but though the freedom of the will was not considered by them as excluding or rendering unnecessary the grace of God, yet much vagueness is perceptible in the manner in which they express themselves, because they had not examined the subject with the same attention as the theologians by whom they were succeeded. Those early divines generally used the language of Scripture, the fertile invention of controversial writers, not having as yet displayed itself, except on the divine nature of Jesus Christ, and subsidiary terms and learned distinctions not being then required by any great differences of