When grace is such that the will chooses the good with joy and
love, without hesitation and without recall, it is styled
EFFICACIOUS. Every one has witnessed those transports of soul
which suddenly decide a vocation, an act of heroism. Liberty
does not perish therein; but from its predeterminations it may be
said that it was inevitable that it should so decide. And the
Pelagians, Lutherans, and others have been mistaken in saying
that grace compromised free choice and killed the creative force
of the will; since all determinations of the will come
necessarily either from society which sustains it, or from nature
which opens its career and points out its destiny.
But, on the other hand, the Augustinians, the Thomists, the
congruists, Jansen, Thomassin, Molina, etc., were strangely
mistaken when, sustaining at once free will and grace, they
failed to see that between these two terms the same relation
exists as between substance and form, and that they have
confessed an opposition which does not exist. Liberty, like
intelligence, like all substance and all force, is necessarily
determined,--that is, it has its forms and its attributes.
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