the founder of the sect of the Pelagians, is supposed to have been a native of Britain, and first appears on the stage of history as a monk, residing at Rome, about the beginning of the fifth century. He was at that time a man of great moral earnestness. His adherence to the monkish rules was rigid, his efforts to reform both clergy and laity assiduous, and his sanctity well spoken of in all the churches. Yet it was this same deep regard for morality which was the occasion of Pelagius' lapse into error. Looking down from the height of his own self-righteousness, he was scandalized to see the majority of professing Christians grovelling carelessly and contentedly in every kind of sensuality. With all the intensity of his reforming zeal, he set himself to discover the cause and remedy of this moral disease. The cause, it occurred to him, was the trust which was placed throughout the church in the efficacy of the sacraments, and the sufficiency of faith. The remedy, he thought, would be a creed which should hold man's salvation to be dependent upon his own exertions. To develop such a creed into a regular and consistent form became his next endeavour. As the foundation of his system, he assumed that a just God could not visit the iniquities of one man upon the heads of others. On this was established the dogma, that the effects of Adam's first sin were confined to himself, and did not descend to his posterity. Accordingly death, and the other evils of life, were not the signs of a blighted spirit, but the necessary incidents of a body made of dust. Men therefore came into the world pure and innocent. Baptism, though needful to admit them into the kingdom of heaven, was not needful to cleanse them from moral pollution, or to insure their eternal blessedness. Nor was inward grace necessary to predispose them to love and obey the commandments of God. All the grace that they required was the privilege of exercising their natural faculties, of using the advantages of the gospel and the church, and of receiving forgiveness for any sins they might commit. With these aids alone they could confidently address themselves to the observance of the law. Their own free-will was able to choose the good, and their own strength was able to accomplish it. If they should step aside from the right path through ignorance or forgetfulness, they would not be culpable. Even if they should really become corrupt, they could convert themselves by their own exertions. Thus was a man's own righteousness, and not his faith, declared to be the means of his salvation.

This flagrant heresy being propagated in Palestine by Pelagius himself, and in Africa by his friend and disciple Coelestius, soon provoked opposition. Coelestius was excluded from the fellowship of the church by a synod held at Carthage in 412. Pelagius was arraigned before two ecclesiastical councils, held respectively at Jerusalem and Diospolis in 415. Although at both of these tribunals he succeeded in baffling his accusers, and deceiving his judges with sophistry and equivocation, yet he could not altogether lull the suspicions of the orthodox. The North African bishops, led on by Augustine, commenced a deadly attack with books, letters, and edicts. In 417 they induced Pope Innocent I. to anathematize the rising heresy; in 418 they issued a formal edict against it from an assembly held at Carthage; and not long afterwards they prevailed upon the emperor to promulgate several decrees threatening the new sect with confiscation and banishment. The result was, that Pope Zosimus was forced to condemn the obnoxious doctrine; several ecclesiastical councils throughout Europe approved the sentence; Pelagius retired into exile, and went off the arena of history; and Pelagianism was nipt. in the bud, and was deprived of all existence as a formal confession of faith.

Of the numerous works of Pelagius, the following alone have been authenticated:—Expositionum in Epistolas Pauli Libri XIV.; Epistola ad Demetriadem, and Libellus Fidei ad Innocentium Papum. They are all included in the best editions of Jerome. (For an account of Pelagius and Pelagianism, see Augustine's De Gestis Pelagi; G. J. Vossius' Historia Controversiarum Pelagianarum; the Church Histories of Neander, Milner, Gieseler, and Waddington; Hagenbach's History of Doctrines; Patouillet's Vie de Pélage, 1751; N. N. Leutzen's Dissertatio de Pelagianorum Doctrine Principis, Colon. Agr., 1833; and Wiggers' Pragmatische Darstellung des Augustinismus und Pelagianismus, 2 vols., Hamb., 1833. This last work has been translated into English by Professor Emerson, Svo., New York, 1840.)

PELAGIUS I., Pope, succeeded Virgilius in the Roman see in 555, and died in 560.

PELAGIUS II., Pope, succeeded Benedict I. in 578, and died in 590.