Can Pagans Be Chaste Without Grace?

This explanation is so excellent that we cannot hastily disprove it. Yet there seems to be a difficulty in it: it tends to destroy free will. For we see that many pagans, to whom the help of God’s grace has certainly not been granted, stand out not only in the virtues of frugality and patience but, what is more remarkable, in chastity too. How, then, can we think that the freedom of their will is taken captive and that these virtues are given them as God’s gift? [a]

This is all the harder to believe since they followed the wisdom of this world and knew nothing at all, not only of God’s grace, but even of the existence of the true God, as we have come to know him through the course of our reading and the teaching of others. Yet they are said to have gained the most perfect purity of chastity by their own efforts and exertions.