SECT. 20. Deu. 30.19 considered.
Your third passage is from Moses, “I have set before your face the way of life and of death; choose that which is good,’ etc. ‘What could be said more plainly,’ asks Diatribe? ‘He leaves freedom of choice to man.’
I answer, what can be plainer than that you are blind here? I ask you, where does he have freedom of choice? In saying, ‘choose?’ So then, as soon as Moses says ‘choose,’ it comes to pass that they do choose! Again, therefore, the Spirit is not necessary. And since you so often repeat and hammer in 333 the same things, let me also be allowed to say the same thing many times over.
If there is freeness of choice 334 in the soul, then why has your approvable opinion said that the free will cannot will good? Can it choose without willing, or against its will? — But let us hear your simile.
It would be ridiculous to say to a man standing in a street where two ways meet, ‘you see two ways; enter whichever you please,’ when only one is open.
This is just what I said before about the arguments of carnal reason. She thinks that man is mocked by an impossible precept; whereas we say, he is admonished and excited by it, to see his own impotency. Truly then, we are in this sort of street; but only one way is open to us; or rather, no way is open. 335 But it is shown to us by the law, how impossible it is for us to choose the one — leading to good, I mean — unless God gives us his Holy Spirit. How broad and easy the other way is, if God allows us to walk in it. Without mockery, then, and with all necessary gravity, it should be said to a man standing in the street, ‘enter whichever of the two you please,’ if either he has a mind to appear strong in his own eyes (being infirm), or if he maintains that neither of these ways is shut against him.
The words of the law, then, are spoken not to affirm the power of the will, but to enlighten blind reason, so that she may see what a nothing her light is, and what a nothing the power of the will is.
“By the law is the knowledge of sin,” says Paul; he does not say the ‘abolition,’ or the ‘avoidance,’ of it. The principle 336 and power of the law has for its essence the affording of knowledge, and that is only of sin — not the displaying or conferring of any power.
For this 337 knowledge neither is power, nor confers power, but it instructs and shows that there is no power in that quarter, and it shows how great is the infirmity in that quarter. For what else can the knowledge of sin be, but the knowledge of our infirmity and of our wickedness? Nor does he say, ‘by the law comes the knowledge of virtue, or good;’ but all the law does, according to Paul, is to cause sin to be known.
This is that passage from which I drew my answer, ‘that by the words of the law man is admonished and instructed what he ought to do, not what he can do;’ that is, to know his sin, and not to believe that he has some power. So that, as often as you throw the words of the law in my face, I will answer you, my Erasmus, with this saying of Paul: “By the law is the knowledge of sin,” not power in the will. Now, gather your larger Concordances, and heap together all the imperative verbs into one chaotic pile (so they are not words of promise, but words of exaction and law), and I will quickly show you that these always intimate not what men do, or can do, but what they ought to do.
Your grammar-masters, and boys in the streets, know this; that by verbs of the imperative mood nothing else is expressed but what ought to be done. What is done, or may be done, must be declared by indicative verbs.
How does it happen then, that you theologians, as if you had fallen into a state of second childhood, no sooner get hold of a single imperative verb, than you are foolish enough to infer an indicative; as if an act were no sooner commanded, than of necessity it becomes straightway, a thing done, or at least practicable. For how many things happen between the cup and the lip, 338 to prevent what you have ordered, and what was moreover quite practicable, from taking place? Such a distance is there between imperative and indicative verbs in common and most easy transactions. But, 339 when the things enjoined, instead of being as near to us as the lip is to the cup, are more distant than heaven from earth —and, moreover, impracticable — you suddenly make indicatives for us out of imperatives. So that, you would have the things to have been kept, done, chosen, and fulfilled, or about to be so, as soon as the word of command has been given, we indeed ‘do, keep, and choose,’ by our own power. 340
SECT. 21. Passages from Deu. 30, etc. considered.
In the fourth place, you adduce many like verbs of choosing, refusing, and keeping; such as, ‘if you will keep,’ ‘if you will turn aside,’ ‘if you will choose,’ etc. from the third 341 and from the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy. ‘All these expressions,’ you say, ‘would be unseasonable,342 if man’s will were not free to do good.’
I answer, you also are very unseasonable, my Diatribe, in deriving Freewill from these verbs! For you professed to prove only desire and endeavour in your Freewill, and you adduced no passage which proves such endeavour, but instead, a string of passages which, if your consequence were valid, would assign ‘a whole’ to Freewill. 343 Let us here, then, again distinguish between the words adduced from Scripture, and the consequence which Diatribe has appended to them. The words adduced are imperative, and only express what ought to be done. For Moses does not say, you have strength or power to choose, but only says ‘choose, keep, do.’ He delivers commands to do, but he does not describe man’s power of doing. Yet the consequence added by this unschooled Diatribe, 344 infers that man can therefore do these things; otherwise they would be enjoined in vain. To which the answer is, ‘Madam Diatribe, you draw a bad inference, and you do not prove your consequence. It is because you are blind and lazy that you think this consequence follows, and has been proved.’ These injunctions, however, are not delivered unseasonably, or in vain, but are so many lessons by which a vain and proud man may learn his own diseased state of impotency, if he tries to do what is commanded. So again, your simile is to no purpose, where you say;
‘Otherwise it would be just as if you were to say to a man who is so tied and bound, that he can only stretch out his arm to the left. See! you have a cup of most excellent wine at your right hand, and a cup of poison at your left: stretch out your hand to whichever side you please.’
I have a notion that you are mightily tickled with these similes. But all the while you do not perceive that, if your similes stand good, they prove much more than you have undertaken to prove; no, they prove what you deny and would have disapproved: namely, that Freewill can do everything. For, throughout your whole treatise, forgetting that you have said ‘Freewill can do nothing without grace,’ you prove that ‘Freewill can do everything without grace,’ Yes, this is what you do, in the end, by your consequences and similes. You make out that either Free will, left to herself, can do the things which are said and enjoined, or else they are idly, ridiculously, and unseasonably enjoined. However, these are but the old songs of the Pelagians, which even the Sophists have exploded,345 and you yourself have condemned. Meanwhile, you show by this forgetfulness and bad memory of yours, how you are both entirely ignorant of the cause, and indifferent to it. For what is more disgraceful to a rhetorician, than to continually discuss and prove things that are foreign to the point at issue; indeed, to continually harangue against both his cause and himself? 346
SECT. 22. His Scriptures prove nothing; his additions to Scripture are too much.
I therefore affirm again, that the words of Scripture adduced by you are imperative words, and neither prove anything, nor determine anything, on the subject of human power; they only prescribe certain things to be done, and to be left undone. While your consequences (or additions) and similes prove this (if they prove anything): that Freewill can do everything without grace.
This proposition, however, is not one which you have undertaken to
