Who, therefore, can doubt whether the principal will of God and his spontaneous love toward men is efficacious and manifests itself in a manifold variety of effects? No one at all from whose mind the things which we have brought forward, confirmed by the suffrages of so many and such great witnesses, have not utterly fallen away.
For in these it is a) expressly contained that all are divinely drawn, all illuminated; that opportunity and power to aspire to salvation are given to each; that the aids of the journey are denied to no one; and that God is at hand to cherish men invisibly, to open their eyes, to knock, and to insinuate himself into human thoughts.
It is contained b) that this work is especially proposed to God: that he aid men and advance their salvation by paternal cares; and that therefore the threefold order—natural, preternatural, and supernatural—is so tempered and directed by him that it conduces to the attainment of so great a good. Indeed, the penal order itself is so administered by him that, so long as men breathe and live, they are called to penance and salvation no less by other means than by the very punishments inflicted.
The Alexandrian doctors repeatedly declare this c), both affirmatively and negatively. For to this pertains what they teach: that men are visited mediately by the voices of nature, of miracles, of the prophets, of Christ, and of the apostles. To this pertains what they teach: that the same men are visited immediately by the interior light of reason, conscience, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. To this pertains what they teach concerning the ministry of angels divinely established1, that they might bring their aid to men. And to this pertains what they teach: that no one dwells in darkness unless he has repelled the light, and no one goes astray unless he has voluntarily turned his eyes away from the path divinely shown beforehand.
But d), that they may represent this most inclined will to do good and the effects proceeding from it by certain images, as it were, they set forth and exhibit God as the sun which shines upon all; as the fountain which flows down for all; as the earth which is barren for no one; as the sower who spreads his seed everywhere; as the friend who knocks at the door of the heart and utters an inviting voice; as the physician who omits no kind of medicine for overcoming illness and procuring health; and as the father who wholly devotes himself to this, that he may save his son and make him most like himself.
Footnotes
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These things recall to my mind what Bernard Désirant has in book III against the third condemned proposition of Quesnel. For at the beginning, after transcribing the words of Augustine from On the Gift of Perseverance, chap. XX—“we have learned that each and every heresy introduced into the Church its own questions, against which divine Scripture was defended more diligently than if no such necessity compelled it”—he adds in chap. IV:
Formerly it sufficed for the Fathers, against those who denied the general calling and the universal will of Christ intending the salvation of all, to allege the common cause and to say from the apostolic sense: In Adam all died, with no one at all excepted; and to add: But Christ died for all who died in Adam; and finally to conclude: Therefore Christ died for all, with no one at all excepted.
↩It was a syllogism to which the adversaries did not then reply; and it remains a syllogism to which they will not reply now either. The Fathers confessed that the salutary effect is hindered by men, but that these hindrances ought not to be attributed to Christ. The Angelic Doctor embraced all things in a few words when he said in III, q. XLIX, a. II, ad 3: “But if some neglect to use this remedy, nothing is lost from the efficacy of Christ’s Passion.” This sufficed.
The questions of the present day, however, press upon us; and the adversaries, not content with such things, call all these general propositions vague, and say that vague propositions are empty; and they press more strongly that those things through which nothing is lost from the efficacy of Christ’s Passion be specified and designated individually. They place the force upon the word efficacy. The name does not suffice; they demand the thing signified. We shall give it.
There are, therefore, if they do not know it, six effects of the Lord’s Passion, whose efficacy, not in word alone but in very deed, reaches all and each who in any way are born from Adam, and which suffice for each one to attain salvation, if no one should neglect to use them.
The first effect is the guardianship of the angels, concerning which St. Jerome writes in book II of his commentary on Matthew XVIII—and it is the received opinion: “Great is the dignity of souls, that each one should have from the beginning of birth an angel guardian appointed for its guardianship.” And St. Thomas gives the reason in I, q. CXIII, a. I: “It was necessary that angels be appointed for the guardianship of men, by whom they might be regulated and moved toward the good.” Human nature would have lacked this benefit if its mass had remained condemned and had not been admitted to return. Behold, therefore, the first efficacy of Christ’s Passion.
The second effect is the true and properly so-called capacity to receive baptism, by which the sins of individuals are remitted.
The third effect is that each person is born a suitable minister who can validly confer baptism upon another. Therefore, what by established law was not granted to angels has been given not only to Christians but also to Jews and pagans, so that, if they do what must be done, Christ baptizes through their hands, and they themselves, although unworthy, are nevertheless then called and are ministers of Christ in this respect.
The fourth effect is that each person, when he comes to the use of reason, becomes capable of a precept and receives the interior command and aid to turn himself to God, so that he may believe that he exists and is the rewarder of those who seek him; and that he is to be aided further if through personal sin he has not despised the gifts of God.
The fifth effect is that all and each, infants as well as adults, shall rise from the dead on the last day. This assuredly would have happened neither to fallen Adam nor to anyone born from Adam unless the Savior of all had ordained the resurrection of all.
The sixth effect is that all shall stand on the last day before the tribunal of Christ, both Savior and Judge.