Two Dissertations · §326 · John Davenant

Cap. III Sol. close: why not pardoned alike — beneplacitum; Augustine profundum; defer De Reprobatione

Add this: ask why the wretched man suffered death — rightly, Because he was robber and traitor. Ask why the king would not pardon him as he did the other in the same case, or heap the same honors on him — here to answer Because he was guilty of robbery and treason is inept (so was the other we imagined). The answer is: it seemed good to the king, of his own good pleasure, to pity the one and not the other. The reason of that discrimination lies in the king's breast, not in diverse merits. I seal it with Augustine (Epist. 190): why he frees this one rather than that, or does not free — let whoever can sound that great depth of his judgments, yet beware the precipice. When we reach our other thesis, On Reprobation, we will unpack this more clearly.

Latin

Porro, et illud adjiciam: Si quaeratur, Cur miser iste sententiam mortis subiit? recte respondetur, Quia latro et proditor erat. At si quaeratur, Cur noluit Rex perinde illi ignoscere atque alteri qui in eadem causa fuit? cur non iisdem honoribus afficere? Hic non possumus nisi inepte respondere, Quia latrocinii et laesae majestatis reus erat; sic enim et ille alter quem cogitatione informavimus. Sed respondendum est, Quia visum est Regi pro suo beneplacito alterius misereri, alterius non misereri. Hujus autem discriminis ratio latet in scrinio Regii pectoris, non fundatur in personarum diversis meritis. Obsigno hanc responsionem illo Augustini dicto, Cur istum potius quam illum liberet, an non liberet, scrutetur, qui potest, judiciorum ejus tam magnum profundum, veruntamen caveat praecipitium; Epist. 190. Sed cum ad alteram thesin nostram, De Reprobatione, ventum fuerit, haec explicabimus magis enucleate.

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John Davenant argues from Scripture that Christ's death is a remedy offered to every person, so that anyone who hears the Gospel may be called to believe, and then opens a second dissertation on predestination.

John Davenant (1572–1641) was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, bishop of Salisbury from 1621, and England's leading delegate to the Synod of Dort. A Reformed theologian of the moderate school, he defended universal atonement language within a Calvinist frame.

The Two Dissertations (1650) press two theses: that Christ died sufficiently for all, and that God sincerely calls all who hear the gospel — against the novel claim that Christ died only for the elect in every sense. They are Davenant's mature statement of the hypothetical-universalist position that divided English Calvinists.

This volume covers the opening of the first dissertation through the close of chapter 3, with the theses on the extent of Christ's death.

Date1572–1641 AD (Bishop of Salisbury; 1650 Cambridge imprint)

The 1683 reprint was not used as base text. No modern English was copied.

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