a) Our petitions for purely natural favors are inspired by the conviction that creation itself, and everything connected therewith, is a gratuitous gift of God. This conviction is well founded. God was under no necessity of creating anything: creation was an act of His free-will. Again, many of the favors to which human nature, as such, has a claim, are free gifts when conferred upon the individual. Good health, fortitude, talent, etc., are natural graces, for which we are allowed, nay obliged, to petition God. The Pelagians employed this truth to conceal a pernicious error when they unctuously descanted on the magnitude and necessity of grace as manifested in creation. It was by such trickery that their leader succeeded in persuading the bishops assembled at the Council of Diospolis or Lydda (A. D. 415) that his teaching was quite orthodox. St. Augustine and four other African bishops later reported to Pope Innocent I, that if these prelates had perceived that Pelagius meant to deny that grace by which we are Christians and sons of God, they would not have listened to him so patiently, and that, consequently, no blame attached to these judges because they simply took the term “grace” in its ecclesiastical sense.(9) b) Generally speaking, however, the term “grace” is reserved for what are commonly called the supernatural gifts of God, the merely preternatural as well as the strictly supernatural.(10) In this sense "grace" is as sharply opposed to purely natural favors as nature is opposed to the supernatural.