"Surely everyone would call him a cruel and unjust master, who should flog a slave to death because he was not beautiful enough or had a crooked nose or was otherwise deformed. Would not the slave be right in complaining to the master who was slaying him: 'Why should I be punished for what I cannot help?' And he would be still more justified in saying this if it were in the power of the master to remedy the defect of the slave, as it is in the power of God to change our wills or if the master had caused in the slave the very defect at which he now takes offence, as, for example, if he had cut off his nose or disfigured his face with scars, as God, according to some people, has wrought all the evil that is in us."[155] [155] ix., 1243-B. This is the familiar argument of all anti-Augustinianism from the beginning until now. So long as the discussion has to be carried on with the weapons of the ancient theology, it is hard to see how the issue can be stated otherwise. So long as both parties were acting on the theory of a universe with a God outside of it and assumed the existence of good and evil as absolute entities, they must necessarily part company in their definitions of this God and of his relation to good and evil. Each would fall back upon such human analogies as seemed to come nearest to his own divine ideal. The real issue was far beyond the comprehension of either party. Each was seeking a solution where no solution was possible. Erasmus said: "In my judgment free will might have been so defined as to avoid that confidence in our own merits and those other difficulties which Luther avoids and also the difficulties I have enumerated above, without losing those valuable things which Luther praises. This solution seems to me to be found in the opinion of those who ascribe entirely to grace the first impulse by which our minds are set in motion, and only in the course of this motion allow a something to the will of man which has not withdrawn itself from the grace of God. But since all things have three parts, beginning, progress, and completion, they ascribe the two extremes to grace and only in the progress admit that the free will does something;--but even this it does in such a way that in the same individual act two causes work together, the grace of God and the will of man, grace being the principal cause and the will the secondary cause, which of itself can do nothing, whereas the principal cause is sufficient to itself. Just as the native force of fire burns and yet the principal cause [of the burning] is God, who acts through the fire and would be sufficient alone, whereas the fire if this should withdraw itself could accomplish nothing without it."[156] [156] ix., 1244-A.