A discourse of the religion anciently professed

CHAP. II.

Of Predestination, Grace, Free-will, Faith, Works, Justification and Sanctification.

Of Predestination, Grace, Free-will, Faith, Workes, Iustification and Sanctification.

The Doctrine which our learned men observed out of the Scriptures & the writings of the most approved Fathers, was this▪ that God ^bby his immovable counsel (as Gallus speaketh in his Sermon preached at Constance) ordained some of his creatures to praise h•m, and to live blessedly from him and in him, & by him: namely, ^cby his eternal predestination, his free calling, and his grace which was due to none. that ^dhe hath mercy with great goodness, and hardeneth without any iniquity: so as neither he that is delivered can glory of his own merits, nor he that is condemned complain but ⟨p. 12⟩of his own merits. forasmuch as grace only maketh the distinction betwixt the redeemed and the lost; who by a cause drawn from their common original, were framed together into one mass of perdition. For ^eall mankind stood condemned in the apostatical root (of Adam) with so just and divine a judgement; that although none should be freed from thence, no man could rightly blame the justice of God: and such as were freed, must so have been freed, that by those many which were not freed, but left in their most just condemnation, it might be showed what the whole lump had deserved, that the due judgement of God should have condemned even those that are justified, unless mercy had relieved them from that which was due: that so all the mouths of them, which would glory of their merits, might be stopped; and he that glorieth, might glory in the Lord.