Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/375

 believe in Christ, he deprives himself of the universal benefit.’ St. Augustine: ‘God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved (John iii. 17). And then as to the physician: he came to cure a patient; and he who does not wish to keep the commands of the physician achieves his own ruin. The Saviour came into the world,—why is he called the Saviour if not because it is his aim to save the world, and not to condemn it? Do you not wish to be cured by him? You will be your own judge.’” (p. 280.)

Before this it was said in the councils that he who asserts that for our purification from sins God expects our consent, and that we can choose the good, is not right, but here it suddenly turns out that a man must choose by all means. Then follows Art. 192, which is to prove that there is a predetermination, and that there is no predetermination.

“3. St. Paul teaches distinctly that divine predetermination is based on prescience, saying: For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called; and whom he called, them he also justified (Rom. viii. 29, 30). He did not simply predestinate, says the apostle, but he predestinated, because he foreknew; whose deserts he foresaw, those he preordained, or, as St. Jerome expresses himself: ‘Of whom God knew that they would be conformed to the image to his Son in their lives, those he preordained to be conformed to him in the glory itself.’”

This whole article about predestination bears upon itself the distinctive character partly of the Byzantine but more especially of the Russian theology. Here is repeated what we find in all debatable passages of the Theology. Some theologians say that the whole matter is in works, while others say that the whole matter is