Now the Church had always regarded Augustine as one of its greatest ornaments. He was one of the "four Fathers" upon whom, as upon four pillars, rested its majestic structure. Yet in practice, the Church had never lived up to the doctrine of the enslaved will. When, in the ninth century, the Saxon Gottschalk, spiritual progenitor of the Saxon Luther, had turned his unpractised logic upon this subject and had worked out to a conclusion the doctrine of a double predestination, the Church, through its ablest representative, Hincmar of Rheims, had promptly flogged him and shut him up for life where he would do no harm. So far as the Church had ever formulated its views on the matter, it had been "Semi-Pelagian." It recognised in human justification both the grace of God and the will of man, but did not draw with absolute clearness a conclusion as to the preponderance of one over the other. In fact the Church had done something better than to speculate. It had acted. It had evolved a marvellous system of justifying agencies, administered by itself, and had said to its members, in practice if not in theory, "Do these things and you shall be saved." While this excellent machinery worked, there was obviously no occasion for any good Christian to worry about the conditions of justification, and in fact, from the ninth to the fifteenth century, the Augustinian doctrines are not once brought prominently before the world for discussion. It was only when men began once more to doubt whether the church method of doing specific things and getting certificates for them was, after all, the only way, or even the best way, to find one's adjustment with God, that this whole group of subjects began, once more, to demand their attention. The doctrine of the enslaved will, narrow and revolting though it may seem to the larger thought of our time, was the opening gate through which a way might be found into that very same largeness of view. The world learns slowly and the dim vision of to-day becomes the flooding glory of a newly risen to-morrow.