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It is not irreligious, then, nor curious, nor superfluous, but most of all useful and necessary to a Christian to know whether the will does anything, or nothing, in the matter of salvation. No, to say the truth, this is the very hinge of our disputation; the very question at issue turns upon it. We are occupied in discussing what the free will does, what the free will allows, and what its proportion is to the grace of God. If we are ignorant of these things, we know nothing at all about Christianity, and are worse than heathens. The man who does not understand this subject—let him acknowledge that he is no Christian. The man who censures or despises it—let him know that he is the worst enemy of Christians. For if I do not know what, how far, and how much I can, of my own natural powers, do and effect toward God, it will be alike uncertain and unknown to me what, how far, and how much God can and does effect in me—whereas God “works all in all!” (1 Cor. 12:6).
Again, if I do not know the works and power of God, I know not God himself; and if I know not God, I cannot worship, praise, give thanks to, or serve him, being ignorant of how much I ought to attribute to myself and how much to God. We ought, therefore, to distinguish, with the greatest clearness, between God’s power and our own power, between God’s work and our own work, if we would live piously.
You see, then, that this question is the one part of the whole sum of Christianity! Both the knowledge of ourselves and the knowledge and glory of God are dependent upon the hazard of its decision. It is insufferable in you, then, my Erasmus, to call the knowledge of this truth irreligious, curious, and vain. We owe much to you, but we owe all to piety. No, you think yourself that all good is to be ascribed to God, and you assert this in the description you have given to us of your own Christianity. And if you assert this, you unquestionably assert in the same words that the mercy of God does all, and that our will acts nothing, but rather is acted upon, or else all will not be attributed to God. But a little while after, you declare that the assertion, and even the knowledge of this truth, is neither religious, pious, nor salutary. However, the mind that is inconsistent with itself, and that is uncertain and unskilled in matters of piety, is obliged to speak so.
The other part of the sum of Christianity is to know whether God foreknows anything contingently, and whether we do everything necessarily. This part you also represent as irreligious, curious, and vain, as all other profane men do. No, the devils and the damned represent it as utterly odious and detestable, and you are very wise in withdrawing yourself from these questions, if you may be allowed to do so. But in the meantime, you are not much of a rhetorician or a theologian when you presume to speak and to teach about Freewill without these parts. I will be your whetstone, and though no rhetorician myself, I will remind an exquisite rhetorician of his duty. If Quintilian, proposing to write on oratory, were to say, “In my judgment those foolish and useless topics of invention, distribution, elocution, memory, and delivery should be omitted; suffice it to know that oratory is the art of speaking well,” would you not laugh at the artist? This is precisely your method. Professing to write about Freewill, you begin with driving away and casting off the whole body and all the members of this art that you propose to write about. For it is impossible that you can understand what Freewill is until you know what the human will has power to do and what God does, whether he foreknows or not.
Do not even your rhetoricians teach you that when a man is going to speak upon any matter, he must first speak to whether there is such a thing or not; then, what it is; what are its parts; what its contraries, its affinities, and its similitudes? But you strip poor Freewill, wretched as she is in herself, of all these appendages, and define none of the questions that appertain to her except the first: whether there is such a thing as Freewill. By what sort of arguments you do this we will see presently. A more foolish book on Freewill I never beheld, if eloquence of style is excepted. The Sophists, indeed, who know nothing of rhetoric, have here at least proved better logicians than you, for in their essays on Freewill they define all its questions, such as “whether it is,” “what it is,” “what it does,” “how it is,” etc. Still, even they do not complete what they attempt. I will therefore goad both you and all the Sophists in this treatise of mine until you define the powers and the performances of Freewill to me—yes, so goad you, with Christ’s help, that I hope I will make you repent of having published your Diatribe.
It is most necessary and most salutary, then, for a Christian to know this also: that God foreknows nothing contingently, but foresees, purposes, and accomplishes everything by an unchangeable, eternal, and infallible will. But by this thunderbolt, Freewill is struck to the earth and completely ground to powder. Those who would assert Freewill, therefore, must either deny or disguise or by some other means repel this thunderbolt from them. However, before I establish it by my own argumentation and the authority of Scripture, I will first of all engage you personally, with your own words.
Are not you that Erasmus who just now asserted that it is God’s nature to be just, that it is God’s nature to be most merciful? If this is true, does it not follow that he is unchangeably just and merciful, that because his nature does not change unto eternity, so neither does his justice or his mercy change? But what is said of his justice and mercy must also be said of his knowledge, wisdom, goodness, will, and other divine properties. If these things, then, are asserted religiously, piously, and profitably concerning God, as you write, what has happened to you, that in disagreement with yourself, you now assert it to be irreligious, curious, and vain to affirm that God foreknows necessarily? Is it that you think that “he either foreknows what he does not will, or wills what he does not foreknow”? If he wills what he foreknows, his will is eternal and immutable, for it is part of his nature; if he foreknows what he wills, his knowledge is eternal and immutable, for it is part of his nature.
Hence it irresistibly follows that all that we do and all that happens, although it seems to happen mutably and contingently, does in reality happen necessarily and unalterably, insofar as it respects the will of God. For the will of God is efficacious and cannot be thwarted, since the power of God is itself a part of his nature; it is also wise, so that it cannot be misled. And since his will is not thwarted, the work that he wills cannot be prevented, but must be produced in the very place, time, and measure that he himself both foresees and wills. If the will of God were to cease after he had made a work that remains the same, as is the case with man’s will when, after having built a house as he willed, his will concerning it ceases, as it does in death, then it might be truly said that some events are brought to pass contingently and mutably. But here, on the contrary, it is far from being the case that the work itself either comes into existence or continues in existence contingently, by being made and remaining in being when the will to have it so has ceased—that the work itself ceases, but the will remains. Now, if we would use words so as not to abuse them, a work is said in Latin to be done contingently, but is never said to be itself contingent. The meaning is that a work has been performed by a contingent and mutable will, such as is not in God. Besides, a work cannot be called a contingent one unless it is done by us contingently and, as it were, by accident, without any forethought on our part, being so called because our will or hand seizes hold of it as a thing thrown in our way by accident, and we have neither thought nor willed anything about it before.