Note 226 — LETTER X.

Shocking as these principles are, it might be easy to show that they necessarily flow from the Romish doctrine, which substitutes the imperfect obedience of the sinner as the meritorious ground of justification, in the room of the all-perfect obedience and oblation of the Son of God, which renders it necessary to lower the divine standard of duty. The attempt of Father Daniel to escape from the serious charge in the text under a cloud of metaphysical distinctions about affective and effective love, is about as lame as the argument he draws from the merciful character of the Gospel, is dishonorable to the Saviour, who “came not to destroy the law and the prophets but to fulfil.” But this “confusion worse confounded” arises from putting love to God out of its proper place and representing it as the price of our pardon instead of the fruit of faith in pardoning mercy. Arnauld was as far wrong on this point as the Jesuits; and it is astonishing that he did not discover in their system the radical error of his own creed carried out to its proper consequences. (Reponse Gen. au Livre de M. Arnauld, par Elie Merlat, p. 30.)