So began Archbishop of Cashel Richard Laurence's Sermon VII in his 1834 Bampton Lectures, addressing the teaching of Article 17. Laurence gave over this and his final sermon to the subject. The focus of Sermon VII is "Lutheran predestination", noting that Luther's views were "congenial also with the feelings and sentiments of Erasmus upon this point". This provides the context for interpreting Article 17 as Erasmus was "a peculiar favourite with the Reformers of our own country", while "our Reformers, as generally on other occasions, trod in the wary steps of the Lutherans". He quotes Erasmus regarding the need for such wary steps when considering predestination:
in the holy Scriptures there are certain secret recesses, which God is unwilling for us too minutely to explore, and which if we endeavour to explore, in proportion as we penetrate further and further, our minds become more and more oppressed with darkness and stupefaction, that thus we might acknowledge the inscrutable majesty of the divine wisdom, and the imbecility of the human mind.
Against this he sets the speculations of Calvin:
How differently Calvin felt upon the same subject, and with what little reserve, or rather with what bold temerity, he laboured to scrutinize the unrevealed Divinity, is too well known, to require anything beyond a bare allusion to the circumstance.
Laurence's description of the teaching of Luther and Melancthon on the matter clearly evokes what we might term an 'Anglican ethos', those "moderate principles" which he had mentioned at the outset of the sermon:
Both Luther and Melancthon ... kept one object constantly in view; to inculcate only what was plain and practical, and never to attempt philosophizing ... to what, it may be said, did the Lutherans object in the theory of their opponents, when they abandoned the tenet of necessity? Certainly not to the sobriety and moderation of that part of it, which vindicated the justice, and displayed the benevolence, of the Almighty; but generally to the principles upon which it proceeded; to its presumption, in overleaping the boundary, which Heaven has prescribed to our limited faculties, and which we cannot pass without plunging into darkness and error; and to its impiety, in disregarding, if not despising, the most important truths of Christianity.
This led to Laurence's definition of the "Lutheran predestination" which he saw as shaping Article 17, "including all in the universal promise of Christianity", for "he excludes none from that number by a partial adoption of favourites":
Maintaining, not a particular election of personal favourites, either by an absolute will, or by a conditional one, dependent upon the ratio of merit, but a general election of all, who by baptism in their infancy, or by faith and obedience in maturer years, become the adopted heirs of heaven; they conceived this to be the only election, to which the Gospel alludes, and consequently the only one, upon which we can speak with confidence, or reason without presumption ...
While restoring to the doctrine of predestination, perplexed and disfigured by the vanity of the Schools, scriptural simplicity, they studiously and anxiously preserved every trace of that universal benevolence, by which Christianity is peculiarly distinguished.
... they maintained the election of a general mass, as
Christians, on account of Christ alone; adding,
that we are admitted into that number, or discarded from it, in the eye of Heaven, proportion
ably as we embrace or reject the salvation offered
to all, embracing it with a faith inseparable from
genuine virtue, or rejecting it by incredulity and crime. For neither in this, nor in the instance of
justification, did they exclude repentance and a
true conversion of the heart and life, as necessary
requisites, but only as meritorious causes, from the contemplation of God's omniscient intellect.
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