He was therefore compelled, if he wished to meet the pressure of the Roman party by some open service, to turn to the more speculative side of the reform. He there found a topic naturally adapted to draw out his hostility, the topic of the freedom of the human will. It was a subject especially suited to the Erasmian method. Its problem involved the riddle of the ages: To what degree is the action of man determined by his own will and to what degree by some power--Fate, God, Devil, call it what we may--outside himself? That man had a will of his very own had never been totally denied. The question was, how far was this will free to act? Within the history of Christianity this problem had early found its expression in the great Augustinian-Pelagian controversy of the fifth century. Both of these parties had admitted that man's will was somehow affected by the divine will. The difference, the hopeless and perpetual difference, had been on the question of the possibility of _good_ action through the human impulse alone. This possibility the Pelagian party had maintained, adding, however, that such original good impulse of the human will was immediately aided by the divine grace. The party of Augustine had denied the possibility of any _good_ action without a _previous_ impulse of the divine grace. The Church, sane and clever always in the long run, had steered its course carefully between the two extremes. It had condemned Pelagius as a heretic and reverenced Augustine as a saint; but it had never gone to those lengths of opinion which might be discovered in Augustine's writings by one who wished to find them there. In other words, the Church had instinctively recognised that the problem is insoluble. As the practical administrator of a system of morals, it had concerned itself only with providing a machinery whereby the consequences of evil action could be averted from its faithful members. It had never said to them, "You are compelled to these sins by a power you cannot resist," but it had said, "You will infallibly sin and you will suffer for your sins, unless you remove them by the means we offer." So far that had worked. The world had accepted the situation and gone merrily on, knowing when it sinned, but knowing also that a kind and indulgent Church would see to it that its sins were taken care of at a very reasonable charge. Only from time to time men like Savonarola and groups of men like the Waldensians had raised their cry of protest and called men back again to the sense of direct responsibility to, and direct dependence on, God alone.