standing which now we sighed after; were not this, Enter into the joy of thy Lord"?*

A few days after this conversation St. Monica sickens of a fever and dies: she dies full of hope, with one request: "Lay this body anywhere: let not the care for that any way disquiet you: this only I request, that you would remember me at the Lord's altar, wherever you be." And when she was asked whether she was not afraid to leave her body so far from her own city, she replied, "Nothing is far to God: nor is it to be feared lest, at the end of the world, He should not recognise whence He has to raise me up." You will not forget how bent Cicero was on building a temple to his daughter Tullia after her death, and how Sulpicius tried to soothe him by remarking that if there be any sense even in the dead, his daughter would not wish him to grieve over her. Augustine too had tears for the dead, and has recorded his prayers that her sins might be forgiven: "And I believe," he says (he was writing thirteen years after her death), "Thou hast already done what I ask; but accept, O Lord, the freewill offerings of my mouth. For she, the day of her dissolution now at hand, took no thought to have her body sumptuously wound up, nor desired she a choice monument, or to be buried in her own land. These things she enjoined us not; but desired only to have her name commemorated at Thy altar, which

* Conf. ix, 23, 25.

she had served without intermission of one day, whence she knew that holy Victim to be dispensed by which the handwriting that was against us is blotted out. May she rest then in peace, with the husband before and after whom she had never any, whom she obeyed, with patience bringing forth fruit unto Thee, that she might win him also unto Thee. And inspire, O Lord my God, inspire Thy servants my brethren, thy sons my masters, whom with voice and heart and pen I serve, that so many as shall read these Confessions may at Thy altar remember Monica thy handmaid, with Patricius her sometime husband, by whose bodies Thou broughtest me into this life, how I know not. May they with devout affection remember my parents in this transitory light, my brethren under Thee our Father in our Catholic mother, and my fellowcitizens in that eternal Jerusalem which Thy pilgrim people sigheth after from their exodus unto their return. That so my mother's last request of me, through my Confessions more than through my prayers, be, through the prayers of many, more abundantly fulfilled to her."*

The conversion of Augustine was followed by forty-four years of almost unexampled mental activity. His life was based henceforth on the denial of those three concupiscences under the dominion of which he had groaned for fifteen years. He found it no longer impossible to carry out, together

*Conf. ix. 36, 37.

with friends minded like himself, a course of life made up of study, retirement, and meditation, which he had tried in vain with the same friends before. For the presence of women in their company then broke up this design.* With these friends, having given up his only property, a few paternal fields, he led a sort of cœnobitic life. In a short time he was made a priest, and a few years later bishop. By far the greatest number of his works were produced during this episcopate, which lasted five-and-thirty years, while he became more and more eminent for a sanctity which increased as his genius unfolded itself. We have many thousand pages on a vast variety of subjects from his hand, of which I will only say that it is perhaps not possible to find one in which the writer does not show that he has steadily before him two objects his own soul, and the immutable truth on which that soul rests and lives, the personal being of God. Exactly the two ideas which never occurred to Cicero make up Augustine's conscious

ness.

And here I cannot but admit the advantage which Augustine possessed over Cicero in natural genius as distinct from the gifts of divine grace. The contrast which he himself marks between Cicero and Varro, that they who loved words found their

* Conf. vi. 24. “Sed posteaquam cœpit (Romanianus) cogitari utrum hoc mulierculæ sinerent, quas et alii nostrum jam habebant, et nos habere volebamus, totum illud placitum quod bene formabamus, dissiluit in manibus, atque confractum et abjectum est."

pleasure in the former, while they who loved things found instruction in the latter,* might serve to express the difference between the genius of the Roman rhetorician and the Christian thinker. Augustine's mind is every way deeper and larger than the mind of Cicero, more acute, and more accurate; and, what is marvellous, he works greater wonders with his old, refuse, worn-out Latin of the fifth century than the master and maker of Roman style did with the virgin ore of Latium, which he fused in the laboratory of his mind, and poured out tempered and wrought to express Grecian thought. For Augustine took up these half-defaced lumps of metal, which had served to express the images of common things, and made them express metaphysical truths which never were disclosed to Cicero's eye. Cicero, indeed, philosophises; but Augustine is the parent of mental philosophy; in him our own ages seem to live and breathe, gazing inwards with intense introspection. Cicero is acquainted with outward society, is a man of wit, learning, and letters, but he never seems to break through the crust of human nature into the man; whereas it may be doubted whether any human eye saw deeper than St. Augustine into the soul's secrets, or exposed them more lucidly to view. Cicero's letters give us a faithful picture of a great man's

* De Civ. Dei, vi. 2. "Varro tametsi minus est suavis eloquio, doctrina tamen atque sententiis ita refertus est, ut in omni eruditione, quam nos sæcularem, illi autem liberalem vocant, studiosum rerum tantum iste doceat, quantum studiosum verborum Cicero delectat."

petty weaknesses, vanity, and dissimulation, of all the falsehood and corruption which saddened Roman society at the time. Thanking Cæsar publicly in the Senate for the pardon of Marcellus, he cries: "Such gentleness, a clemency so unwonted and unheard of, so universal a moderation united with absolute power, wisdom so incredible and almost divine, it is impossible for me to pass over in silence." This tyrant, who will not leave us even our thoughts free, he whispers to Atticus. But St. Augustine's letters and confessions, while they expose his natural weakness with a scalpel which uncovers the most secret fibres of our being, show the same man corrected and exalted, until he became a fountain-head of knowledge to every inquirer, an instructor in virtue to every wrestler with his own heart. There is scarcely a question of human or divine government of which he does not treat; and where he does not solve, because solution is impossible to man in his state of trial, he diffuses peace now in the reader's heart, as of old he did in the listener's, by the sublime unfaltering resignation of a great intellect, and a still more loving heart resting upon God. Take as an instance of what I mean the following. What is the practical value in human conduct of the probability that there is a providence? Cicero the Academician thought it more probable that a divine mind ruled the affairs of the world than that things went by chance.

* Pro Marcello, 1.