When I reflected within my mind upon the long-standing and entangled questions concerning the salvific will of God, concerning the reparation accomplished by the merits of Christ, concerning the amplitude of grace, concerning election to glory, and concerning the everlasting reprobation of many men, I could not but diligently inquire within myself how it had come about that, with so many and such great studies applied and labors expended, truth seemed to have been obscured rather than illuminated. Nor did the reflection come to nothing; for I seemed to myself to have found three principal causes which until now had prevented limpid truth from shining forth after the darkness had been driven away. And in very truth, let those works which down to our own age have appeared concerning these most weighty heads of doctrine, and which have been disputed no less by Catholics than by Protestants and Jansenists, be compared with one another as diligently as can be done; this will at once appear: nearly all of them are polemical, separated from universal ideas and notions, and adjusted and expressed according to some one part rather than according to the integral sum of the Scriptures and Tradition. But no one can fail to know that a manner of treatment of this sort is by its very nature so constituted that you would promise yourself the attainment of truth from it without warrant. For this is the fruit not of combat and contentions, but of tranquility and peace; and it is the fruit of an investigation not disjointed and imperfect, but complete and fitly and skillfully deduced from its own principles.
We have therefore taken pains that, with quarrels and disputes set aside, while omitting nothing of those things which Christian Tradition and the divine writings comprise, we should at the same time press forward in mind and spirit toward those things which ought to stand before the eyes in the manner of a norm and rule. Whether these things have succeeded for us according to our desire, let the judgment rest with those who do not utterly disdain what is ours, and who are mindful of those words with which Theodoret concludes the prologue to the Discourses on the Cure of the Greek Affections, saying: “But whoever may come upon the lucubrations of others, I would ask them that, if indeed all the things written are sound, they praise God who gave the faculty of writing well, and moreover wish well to the writers themselves; but if some things appear to be lacking, they should not on account of these condemn the whole, but rather procure benefit for themselves from those things which they have recognized as rightly written.”