COROLLARY LXIII.
The merciful love of God and the redemption of Christ ought to be regarded as two fountains, as it were, of all the benefits by which the human race, freed from the necessity of perishing, is raised up, healed, transferred from the state of death unto life, and endowed with powers by which it can both recover the adoption of sons and obtain the paternal inheritance joined with it. But from this relation and mutual regard we plainly understand that the abundance and extension of benefits and graces necessarily correspond to the richness and amplitude of each fountain, so that, if those fountains are universal, the gifts of grace which flow from them must also be believed universal; but they must be believed circumscribed and particular if the fountains are contained within limits. Now behold what Quesnel judged ought to be affirmed1: “I. No graces are given except through faith. II. Faith is the first grace and the fountain of all the others. III. Outside the Church no grace is granted.” Nor do the things taught in the fifth of the propositions rejected by Alexander VIII differ from these even by a nail’s breadth: “Pagans, Jews, heretics, and others of this kind receive no influence at all from Jesus Christ; and therefore you rightly infer from this that in them there is a naked and unarmed will without any sufficient grace.” But whence did it enter the minds of the Jansenists to maintain that so great a multitude of men was destitute of the necessary safeguards of grace? Or what arguments did they have ready at hand to persuade themselves and others of this? Namely: 1) that they judged that the merciful love of God and the redemption of Christ could extend to the elect alone, or certainly to the faithful alone; 2) that they admitted no other aids of prevenient grace except those which would subject the human will to themselves and necessarily extort its consent; and 3) that they judged themselves free to determine from the fact whether grace had been offered or denied, so that they judged grace to have been offered if men believed and repented, but denied if they—
—persevered in impiety. But it is well that these principles or arguments are overthrown by the weight of the whole Christian tradition. For the certain and concordant doctrine of Tradition2 returns to this: a) that the merciful love of God and the restoration procured by the merits of Christ are distinguished chiefly by the token and mark of universality in every respect; b) that from each fountain the necessary aids of grace overflow unto absolutely all men; c) that the fivefold order—natural, preternatural, and supernatural, and likewise that of rewards and punishments—is so divinely tempered that all things conduce to the attainment of salvation; d) that the present state of mortality is for all a course of mercy and grace; e) that no one will be punished with eternal torments except he who has contemned the opportune aids for attaining salvation; and f) that innumerable graces are therefore bestowed which are deprived of their fruits through the wickedness of men.