Judas, therefore, in his unfaithful exercise of the apostleship, might be worse than a devil; but of those whom Christ has once united to his body, he will never suffer one to perish; for in securing their salvation, he will perform what he has promised, by exerting the power of God, who is greater than all. What he says in another place, “Those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition,” is a mode of expression, called _catachresis_, but the sense is sufficiently plain. The conclusion is, that God creates whom he chooses to be his children by gratuitous adoption; that the cause of this is wholly in himself; because he exclusively regards his own secret determination. VIII. But, it will be said, Ambrose, Origen, and Jerome believed that God dispenses his grace among men, according to his foreknowledge of the good use which every individual will make of it. Augustine also was once of the same sentiment; but when he had made a greater proficiency in scriptural knowledge, he not only retracted, but powerfully confuted it. And after his retractation, rebuking the Pelagians for persisting in this error, he says, “Who but must wonder that this most ingenious sense should escape the apostle? For after proposing what was calculated to excite astonishment respecting those children yet unborn, he started to himself, by way of objection, the following question: What, then, is there unrighteousness with God? It was the place for him to answer, that God foresaw the merits of each of them; yet he says nothing of this, but resorts to the decrees and mercy of God.” And in another place, after having discarded all merits antecedent to election, he says, “Here undoubtedly falls to the ground the vain reasoning of those who defend the foreknowledge of God in opposition to his grace, and affirm that we were elected before the foundation of the world, because God foreknew that we would be good, not that he himself would make us good. This is not the language of him who says, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.’[483] For if he elected us because he foreknew our future good, he must also have foreknown our choice of him;” and more to the like purpose. This testimony should have weight with those who readily acquiesce in the authority of the fathers. Though Augustine will not allow himself to be disunited from the rest, but shows by clear testimonies the falsehood of that discordance, with the odium of which he was loaded by the Pelagians, he makes the following quotations from Ambrose’s book on predestination: “Whom Christ has mercy on, him he calls. Those who were indevout he could, if he would, have made devout. But God calls whom he pleases, and makes whom he will religious.” If I were inclined to compile a whole volume from Augustine, I could easily show my readers, that I need no words but his; but I am unwilling to burden them with prolixity. But come, let us suppose them to be silent;