Nor is it admissible to read into the Apostle’s thought even a _negative_ reprobation of certain men. For the primary intention of the Epistle to the Romans is to insist on the gratuity of man’s vocation to Christianity and to reject the presumption that the Mosaic law and their bodily descent from Abraham gave the Jews preference over the heathens. The Epistle to the Romans has no bearing whatever on the speculative question whether or not the free vocation of grace is a necessary result of eternal predestination to glory.(612) b) Among the Fathers the only one to whom the advocates of absolute predestinationism can appeal with some show of justice is St. Augustine, who, with the possible exception of Prosper and Fulgentius, was the most rigorous among early ecclesiastical writers,—so rigorous, in fact, that Oswald does not hesitate to call him “the head and front of all rigorists in the Church.”(613) However, this is saying too much. Augustine’s genuine teaching is still in dispute among our ablest theologians. Some(614) deny that he broke with the almost unanimous teaching of his predecessors, while others think that in the treatises _De Dono Perseverantiae_ and _De Praedestinatione Sanctorum_, and in several of his letters, the Saint frankly taught absolute predestinationism. The latter group of writers is split into two classes. A number of Thomists and Cardinal Bellarmine not only assert that Augustine taught absolute predestination, but boldly adopt his supposed teaching. Petavius, Maldonatus, Cercià, Oswald, and others censure this view. Franzelin(615) undoubtedly strikes the right note when he says: “If there were a manifest discrepancy between Augustine’s teaching and that of the other Fathers, I should not hesitate to follow Pighius, Catharinus, Osorius, Camerarius, Maldonatus,(616) Toletus,(617) and Petavius(618) in reverently departing from his doctrine, because in that case we should be dealing merely with a private opinion.”(619) Under these circumstances the Patristic argument for the theory of absolute predestination evidently lacks convincingness.(620) c) It was probably because they felt its weakness that some of the later champions of the theory attempted to prove absolute predestination _ante praevisa merita_ by philosophical arguments. Gonet reasons as follows: “He who proceeds in an orderly way, wills the end before he wills the means necessary to attain it. But God proceeds in an orderly way. Therefore he wills the end before the means. Now, glory is an end, and merits are means to attain that end. Consequently, God wills glory before He wills merits, and a man’s preëlection to glory cannot be based on foreknowledge of his merits.”(621) This argument, if it proved anything, would prove the logical impossibility of conditional predestination. But it overshoots the mark and consequently proves nothing at all. _Qui nimium probat, nihil probat._