AUGUSTINE ON UNITY QUOTES FREE

'Nature is common to all, but not grace.' 'Grace alone brings about every good work in us.' 'God bids us do what we cannot, that we may know what we ought to seek from him.' 'To will is of nature, but to will aright is of grace.' This is the grace of God making us good this is His mercy going before us. Are you asleep? Can’t you hear Him saying, ‘I will cause you to walk, I will make you to observe,’ lastly, ‘I will make you to do’? Really, are you still puffing yourselves up? We walk, true enough, and we observe, and we do but it is God Who He makes us to walk, to observe, to do. The true meaning of grace, however, is the love that God breathes into us, which enables us with a holy delight to carry out the duty that we know.Ĭan you say, ‘We will first walk in His righteousness, and will observe His judgments, and will act in a worthy way, so that He will give His grace to us’? But what good would you evil people do? And how would you do those good things, unless you were yourselves good? But Who causes people to be good? Only He Who said, ‘And I will visit them to make them good,’ and, ‘I will put my Spirit within you, and will cause you to walk in my righteousness, and to observe my judgments, and do them’ (Ezek.36:27).

For just as no-one can bring goodness to perfection without the Lord, so no one can begin it without the Lord.'įor them, grace means the knowledge with which the Lord God helps us, by which we can know what our duty is. So, therefore, we should think of God's grace as working from the beginning of a person's changing towards goodness, even to the end of its completion, so that he who glories may glory in the Lord.

AUGUSTINE ON UNITY QUOTES FREE

Indeed, a person does not even begin to be changed from evil to good by the first stirrings of faith, unless the free and gratuitous mercy of God produces this in him…. 'Since these things are so, everything that is commanded to human beings by the Lord in the holy Scriptures, for the sake of testing human free will, is either something we begin to obey by God's goodness, or is demanded in order to show us our need of grace to do it. 'Can we possibly, without utter absurdity, maintain that there first existed in anyone the good virtue of a good will, to entitle him to the removal of his heart of stone? How can we say this, when all the time this heart of stone itself signifies precisely a will of the hardest kind, a will that is absolutely inflexible against God? For if a good will comes first, there is obviously no longer a heart of stone.'

'Indeed, God requires faith itself of us yet he does not find something to require unless he has given something to find.' But what God promises we ourselves do not do through choice or nature but he himself does through grace.'. But elsewherre he testifies that it is given by him. 'In some places God requires newness of heart. But having obtained that grace by faith, you will be just by faith-”for the just lives by faith.” But if, as is true, you were evil but believed on him who justifies the ungodly (What is, “who justifies the ungodly”? the ungodly is made righteous), consider what by right hung over you by the law and you have obtained by grace. But if it was really due, then you were good. If it was due, wages would be given, but grace would not be bestowed. What is grace? That which is freely given. Now, in order that such a course may engage our affections, Gods love is shed abroad in our hearts, not through the free will which arises from ourselves, but through the Holy Spirit, who is given to us. And even after he begins to know his duty and proper aim, unless he also takes delight in and feels a love for it, he neither does his duty, nor sets about it, nor lives rightly. A mans free will, indeed, does not help at all except to sin, if he does not know the way of truth. By this gift to him of the down payment, as it were, of the free gift, he conceives a burning desire to cleave to his Maker.

The human will is so divinely helped in the pursuit of righteousness, that he receives the Holy Spirit, by whom there is formed in his mind a delight in, and a love of, that supreme and unchangeable good, which is God.

Augustine on unity quotes