and contemplate the
subject from his point of view, so as to possess ourselves of his great
truths, and also to correct the errors of his observation. Having finished
these processes, it will not be found difficult to combine the truths of
these two conflicting schemes in a complete and harmonious system, which
shall exhibit both the human and the divine elements of religion in their
true proportions and just relations to each other.

Section II.

The Pelagian platform, or view of the relation between the divine and the
human power.

The doctrine of Pelagius was developed from his own personal experience,
and moulded, in a great measure, by his opposition to the scheme of
Augustine. According to the historian, Neander, as well as to the
testimony of Augustine himself, the life of Pelagius was, from beginning
to end, one "earnest moral effort." As his character was gradually formed
by his own continued and unremitted exertions, without any sudden or
violent revolution in his views or feelings, so the great fact of human
agency presented itself to his individual consciousness with unclouded
lustre. This fact was the great central position from which his whole
scheme developed itself. And, as the history of his opinion shows, he was
led to give a still greater predominance to this fact, in consequence of
his opposition to the system of Augustine, by which it seemed to him to be
subverted, and the interests of morality threatened.

The great fact of free-will, of whose existence he was so well assured by
his own consciousness, was so imperfectly interpreted by him, that he was
led to exclude other great facts from his system, which might have been
perfectly harmonized with his central position. Thus, as Neander well
says, he denied the operation of the divine power in the renovation of the
soul,(135) because he could not reconcile its influence with the
free-agency of man. This was the weak point in the philosophy of Pelagius,
as it has been in the system of thousands who have lived since his time.
To reject the one of two facts, both of which rest upon clear and
unequivocal evidence, is an error which has been condemned by Butler and
Burlamaqui, as well as by many other celebrated philosophers. But this
error, so far as we know, has been by no one more finely reproved than by
Professor Hodge, of Princeton. "If the evidence of the constant revolution
of the earth round its axis," sa