Cap. VI Arg. 3: Hague reply — foresight faith not cause; Davenant — word-catching and merit
The Hague Colloquy speakers answer first: they never call foresighted faith the cause of election, so they do not fight Scripture naming εὐδοκία — good pleasure alone — as cause. They even say outright that why God elects any one person to salvation is not that person's faith, but only good pleasure, grace, mere grace. Word-catching, all of it. Whoever makes persevering faith the condition God requires — at whose sight he always elects, and for whose absence he always passes by — gives faith causal force, even meritorious force, in Augustine's anti-Pelagian sense of merit. So Augustine: who would say that one who has already begun to believe merits nothing from him in whom he believed?
Latin
Sed respondentes Colloquutores Hagienses; Primo, se nunquam ponere praevisam fidem esse causam electionis, ac proinde non contravenire Scripturis, quae statuunt Dei εὐδοκίαν, vel solum beneplacitum esse ejus causam. Imo totidem verbis profitentur, causam, cur Deus singularem aliquam personam elegerit ad salutem, non esse fidem ejus, sed solum beneplacitum, gratiam, imo meram gratiam Dei. Sed haec omnia sunt mera verborum aucupia. Nam qui ponunt actum fidei perseverantis esse conditionem a Deo requisitam, ad cujus intuitum semper eligit, et ob cujus absentiam semper praeterit, ii vim causalem fidei adscribunt, imo meritoriam, eo sensu quo meriti vocabulum ab Augustino reliquisque Theologis in disceptationibus contra Pelagianos usurpatur. Sic Augustinus, Quis dicat illum qui jam coepit credere, ab illo in quem credidit nihil mereri?