526 THE WORLD AS WILL. BK. IV.
recognise in the doctrine referred to above the truth completely agreeing with the result of our own investigations. We see that true virtue and holiness of disposition have their origin not in deliberate choice (works), but in knowledge (faith); just as we have in like manner developed it from our leading thought. If it were works, which spring from motives and deliberate intention, that led to salvation, then, however one may turn it, virtue would always be a prudent, methodical, far-seeing egoism. But the faith to which the Christian Church promises salvation is this: that as through the fall of the first man we are all partakers of sin and subject to death and perdition, through the divine substitute, through grace and the taking upon himself of our fearful guilt, we are all saved, without any merit of our own (of the person); since that which can proceed from the intentional (determined by motives) action of the person, works, can never justify us, from its very nature, just because it is intentional, action induced by motives, opus operatum. Thus in this faith there is implied, first of all,
theology in the books "De Civitate Dei" (especially in the Fourteenth Book), he experiences something analogous to the feeling of one who tries to make a body stand whose centre of gravity falls outside it; however he may turn it and place it, it always tumbles over again. So here, in spite of all the efforts and sophisms of Augustine, the guilt and misery of the world always falls back on God, who made everything and everything that is in everything, and also knew how all things would go. That Augustine himself was conscious of the difficulty, and puzzled by it, I have already shown in my prize-essay on the Freedom of the Will (ch. iv. pp. 66-68 of the first and second editions). In the same way, the contradiction between the goodness of God and the misery of the world, and also between the freedom of the will and the foreknowledge of God, is the inexhaustible theme of a controversy which lasted nearly a hundred years between the Cartesians, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Bayle, Clarke, Arnauld, and many others. The only dogma which was regarded as fixed by all parties was the existence and attributes of God, and they all unceasingly move in a circle, because they seek to bring these things into harmony, i.e., to solve a sum that will not come right, but always shows a remainder at some new place whenever we have concealed it elsewhere. But it does not occur to any one to seek for the source of the difficulty in the fundamental assumption, although it palpably obtrudes itself. Bayle alone shows that he saw this.
