The Episcopal Arminians, therefore, depend more on educating the young aright, and have little dependence on revivals, while the Methodist Arminians look less to education and more to revivals and other modes of securing religious excitement. But the foundation difficulty alike of the Calvinists, the Episcopal Arminians and the Methodist Arminians, is the assumption that _regeneration of a ruined nature_ is the thing to be sought, both by children and by adults, as the indispensable prerequisite to salvation, and that “the means of grace” are not for the training and development of a perfect nature, but to gain from God the cure of a ruined and helpless one. In contrast to this, the common‐sense system recognizes all that is practical in any of the three methods. It teaches that man’s _nature_ is perfect, and yet that he is utterly helpless without the _knowledge_, _training_ and _motives_, for which he is dependent alike on God and on man. It teaches that this nature can be trained to “a new life” by educational instrumentalities and by a slow and gradual process. At the same time it teaches, that when men have lived a worldly life there may be a _sudden_ change of character by _voluntarily_ commencing a life of love and obedience to God, in place of a life of unregulated self‐indulgence. Since the days of Pelagius and Augustine, there has never been any large body of Christians who have trained children on the common‐sense system dissevered from the Augustinian theory. This experiment is yet to be tried before its full and proper tendency can be truly developed. The Unitarian sect, who reject the Augustinian dogma, also reject some of the fundamental principles of the common‐sense system, especially that on which the whole system of moral and religious duty and motive rests, _the dangers of the race_ in the invisible world, and the _power of motive_ secured by “God manifest in the flesh” as the long‐suffering and self‐ denying Creator, coming to aid his creatures by his teaching, sympathy, example, and abounding love. CHAPTER XLV. THE PEOPLE REJECTING THE AUGUSTINIAN SYSTEM.—POSITION OF THEOLOGIANS. It is the object of what follows to present the evidence that _the people_ are rejecting the Augustinian system, while they are retaining the system of common sense, as that alone which is taught in the Bible. Preliminary to this, a brief statement of the prominent points of these systems, where their antagonism is most practical and apparent, will be allowed. The Augustinian system teaches that on account of Adam’s sin, man is born with a _nature_ so _totally depraved_, that he never performs any truly virtuous acts till this nature is regenerated; that the true church of God on earth consists only of those who are thus regenerated; and that a visible church consists of an organization of persons who profess to possess a nature that has been re‐created, so that they perform truly virtuous acts, as the unregenerated never do.