James Thompson

“Where Augustine struggled to bring an awareness of the action of grace into the humdrum life of his parishioners, Pelagius and his followers attacked the hypocrisy of a society which had officially adopted Christianity but which remained saturated with traditional pagan beliefs and practices – a society in which ‘giving’ often became a vehicle for the pride of the rich, in which the cult of the family and the paterfamilias remained powerful, and in which slavery and torture were still publicly unchallenged.”
― Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism