Introduction

As we wrote at the beginning (I, 25), we are sanctified by a twofold way, that is, by the use of the sacraments and by our cooperation with the grace of God. Volume II is assigned to explaining this cooperation.

Moreover, there has already been occasion more than once to admonish this. Although the state of grace is the condition and principle, and the habit of charity is the root of our merits, nevertheless we shall properly be judged according to our acts, not according to our habits: through acts, not through habits, we merit and demerit; in acts consists our cooperation with the grace of God. Nevertheless, the habitual dignity of the agent contributes to the quantity of merit; and the habits themselves, as fountains of acts, are something principal in the spiritual life. Therefore moral theologians are accustomed to entitle their treatises On the Virtues, unless they prefer to distribute their arguments according to the various precepts of the Decalogue. That its own honor might remain to the virtues, and yet that we might vindicate for moral theology its own proper object in this volume, we have called it On the Exercise of the Virtues: the exercise of virtues at once denotes acts, and expresses the relation of acts to the various virtues.

Moreover, we gave the necessary notions concerning the virtues in volume I, nn. 493-497.

Division of the volume. The volume will conveniently be divided into two books. The one will treat of the theological virtues, the other will be assigned to the moral virtues.