They taught election on the basis of foreseen faith, a universal atonement, resistible grace, and the possibility of lapse from grace.

Like more orthodox Christians, the alchemists maintained that mankind had suffered a fall; but this lapse from grace was not seen merely as a matter of original sin.

This, however, she had done and whilst the lesser officers of Scotland Yard were interrogating pawnbrokers, the men higher up were genuinely worried by the lady's own lapses from grace.

All explanations, all excuses were crude and deadly, and she could not bring herself to make them, but she could not sit there either, contemplating her own slow lapse from grace.

Silver-haired and portly, his sonorous voice edged with a pomposity that betrays his insecurities, Mr. McKenna makes the doctor a relative of all those Graham Greene heroes who drink to forget a long-ago lapse from grace.