Sin appeared very remote in that sunny lecture-room where to the sound
of cawing rooks the Principal held forth upon the strife between
Pelagius and Augustine, when prevenient Grace, operating Grace,
co-operating Grace and the _donum perseverantiae_ all seemed to depend
for their importance so much more upon a good memory than upon the
inscrutable favours of Almighty God. Even the Confessions of St.
Augustine, which might have shed their own fierce light of Africa upon
the dark problem of sin, were scarcely touched upon. Here in this
tranquil room St. Augustine lived in quotations from his controversial
works, or in discussions whether he had not wrongly translated [Greek]
in the Epistle to the Romans by _in quo omnes
peccaverunt_ instead of like the Pelagians by _propter quod omnes
peccaverunt_. The dim echoes of the strife between Semipelagian
Marseilles and Augustinian Carthage resounded faintly in Mark's brain;
but they only resounded at all, because he knew that without being able
to display some ability to convey the impression that he understood the
Thirty-Nine Articles he should never be ordained. Mark wondered what
Canon Havelock would have done or said if a woman taken in adultery had
been brought into the lecture-room by the beadle.
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