Leaving his Irish-Scottish homeland and arriving about the year 400 in Rome, where on account of the unusual purity of his being he soon came to be held in the highest esteem, Pelagius found himself obliged to come out publicly against Augustine, for he felt that Augustine's teachings denied all free will to man. In the purely passive surrender of man to the will of God, as Augustine taught it, he could not but see danger for the future development of Christian humanity. How radically he diverged from Augustine in his view of man we may see from such of his leading thoughts as follow: 'Each man begins his life in the same condition as Adam.' 'All good or evil for which in life we are deserving of praise or blame is done by ourselves and is not born with us.' 'Before the personal will of man comes into action there is nothing in him but what God has placed there.' 'It is therefore left to the free will of man whether he falls into sin, as also whether through following Christ he raises himself out of it again.' Pelagius could think in this way because he came from a part of Europe where the older form of human memory, already at that time almost extinct in the South, was in some degree still active. For him it was therefore a matter of direct experience that the development of man from childhood onwards was connected with a diminution of certain original capacities of the soul. Yet he was so far a child of his age as to be no longer capable of seeing whence these capacities originated. To provide the necessary corrective to Augustine's doctrine of inheritance, Pelagius would have had to be able to see in the first years of life both a beginning of the earthly and a termination of the pre-earthly existence of the soul. The imperfections of his picture of man, however, led him to underestimate, even to deny, the significance of heredity and so of original sin in human life. For an age which no longer had any direct experience of the soul's pre-natal life, the doctrines of Augustine were undoubtedly more appropriate than those of Pelagius; Augustine was in fact the more modern of the two.