dacio (395), against deception (not to be confounded with the similar work already mentioned Contra mendacium, against the fraud-theory of the Priscillianists, written in 420); De agone Christiano (396); De opere monachorum, against monastic idleness (400); De bono conjugali adv. Jovinianum (400); De virginitate (401); De fide et operibus (413); De adulterinis conjugiis, on 1 Cor. vii. 10 sqq. (419); De bono viduitatis (418); De patientia (418); De cura pro mortuis gerenda, to Paulinus of Nola (421); De utilitate jejunii; De diligendc Deo; Meditationes; etc.'

As we survey this enormous literary labor, augmented by many other treatises and letters now lost, and as we consider his episcopal labors, his many journeys, and his adjudications of controversies among the faithful, which often robbed him of whole days, we must be really astounded at the fidelity, exuberance, energy, and perseverance of this father of the church. Surely, such a life was worth the living.

§ 180. The Influence of Augustine upon Posterity and his Relation to Catholicism and Protestantism.

Before we take leave of this imposing character, and of the period of church history in which he shines as the brightest star, we must add some observations respecting the influence of Augustine on the world since his time, and his position with reference to the great antagonism of Catholicism and Protestantism. All the church fathers are, indeed, the common inheritance of both parties; but no other of them has produced so permanent effects on both, and no other stands in so high regard with both, as Augustine. Upon the Greek church alone has he exercised little or no influence; for this church

Most of them in tom. vi. ed. Bened. On the scripta deperdita, dubia et spuria of Augustine, see the index by SCHÖNEMANN, 1. c. p. 50 sqq., and in the supplemental volume of Migne's edition, pp. 84-40. The so-called Meditations of Augustine (German translation by AUGUST KROHNE, Stuttgart, 1854) are a later compilation by the abbot of Fescamp in France, at the close of the twelfth century, from the writ ings of Augustine, Gregory the Great, Anselm, and others.

stopped with the undeveloped synergistic anthropology of the previous age.'

1. Augustine, in the first place, contributed much to the development of the doctrinal basis which Catholicism and Protestantism hold in common against such radical heresies of antiquity as Manichæism, Arianism, and Pelagianism. In all these great intellectual conflicts he was in general the champion of the cause of Christian truth against dangerous errors. Through his influence the canon of Holy Scripture (including, indeed, the Old Testament Apocrypha) was fixed in its present form by the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397). He conquered the Manichæan dualism, hylozoism, and fatalism, and saved the biblical idea of God and of creation, and the biblical doctrine of the nature of sin and its origin in the free will of man. He developed the Nicene dogma of the Trinity, completed it by the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Ghost, and gave it the form in which it has ever since prevailed in the West, and in which it received classical expression from his school in the Athanasian Creed. In

'It betrays a very contracted, slavish, and mechanical view of history, when Roman Catholic divines claim the fathers as their exclusive property; forgetting that they taught a great many things which are as inconsistent with the papal as with the Protestant Creed, and knew nothing of certain dogmas (such as the infallibility of the pope, the seven sacraments, transubstantiation, purgatory, indulgences, auricular confession, the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, etc.), which are essential to Romanism. "I recollect well," says Dr. NEWMAN, the former intellectual leader of Oxford Tractarianism (in his Letter to Dr. Pusey on his Eirenicon, 1866, p. 5), "what an outcast I seemed to myself, when I took down from the shelves of my library the volumes of St. Athanasius or St. Basil, and set myself to study them; and how, on the contrary, when at length I was brought into Catholic communion, I kissed them with delight, with a feeling that in them I had more than all that I had lost, and, as though I were directly addressing the glorious saints, who be. queathed them to the Church, I said to the inanimate pages, 'You are now mine, and I am yours, beyond any mistake."" With the same right the Jews might lay exclusive claim to the writings of Moses and the prophets. The fathers were living men, representing the onward progress and conflicts of Christianity in their time, unfolding and defending great truths, but not unmixed with many errors and imper. fections which subsequent times have corrected. Those are the true children of the fathers who, standing on the foundation of Christ and the apostles, and, kissing the New Testament rather than any human writings, follow them only as far as they followed Christ, and who carry forward their work in the onward march of true evangelical catholic Christianity.

Christology, on the contrary, he added nothing, and he died shortly before the great Christological conflicts opened, which reached their ecumenical settlement at the council of Chalcedon, twenty years after his death. Yet he anticipated Leo in giving currency in the West to the important formula: “Two natures in one person.'

2. Augustine is also the principal theological creator of the Latin-Catholic system as distinct from the Greek Catholicism on the one hand, and from evangelical Protestantism on the other. He ruled the entire theology of the middle age, and became the father of scholasticism in virtue of his dialectic mind, and the father of mysticism in virtue of his devout heart, without being responsible for the excesses of either system. For scholasticism thought to comprehend the divine with the understanding, and lost itself at last in empty dialectics; and mysticism endeavored to grasp the divine with feeling, and easily strayed into misty sentimentalism; Augustine sought to apprehend the divine with the united power of mind and heart, of bold thought and humble faith. Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura, are his nearest of kin in this respect. Even now, since the Catholic church has become a Roman church, he enjoys greater consideration in it than Ambrose, Hilary, Jerome, or Gregory the Great. All this cannot possibly be explained without an interior affinity."

'He was summoned to the council of Ephesus, which condemned Nestorianism in 481, but died a year before it met. He prevailed upon the Gallic monk, Leporius, to retract Nestorianism. His Christology is in many points defective and ob scure. Comp. DORNER'S History of Christology, ii. pp. 90-98. Jerome did still less for this department of doctrine.

• WIGGERS (Pragmat. Darstellung des Augustinismus und Pelagianismus, i. p. 27) finds the most peculiar and remarkable point of Augustine's character in bis singular union of intellect and imagination, scholasticism and mysticism, in which neither can be said to predominate. So also HUBER, 1. c. p. 313.

• Nourrisson, the able expounder of the philosophy of Augustine, says (Le tom. i. p. iv): "Je ne crois pas, qu'excepté saint Paul, aucun homme ait contribué davantage, par sa parole comme par ses écrits, à organiser, à interpréter, à répandre le christianisme; et, après saint Paul, nul apparemment, non pas même le glorieux, l'invincible Athanase, n'a travaillé d'une manière aussi prissante à fonder l'unité catholique."

His very conversion, in which, besides the Scriptures, the personal intercourse of the hierarchical Ambrose and the life of the ascetic Anthony had great influence, was a transition not from heathenism to Christianity (for he was already a Manichæan Christian), but from heresy to the historical, episcopally organized church, as, for the time, the sole authorized vehicle of the apostolic Christianity in conflict with those sects and parties which more or less assailed the foundations of the gospel.' It was, indeed, a full and unconditional surrender of his mind and heart to God, but it was at the same time a submission of his private judgment to the authority of the church which led him to the faith of the gospel. In the same spirit he embraced the ascetic life, without which, according to the Catholic principle, no high religion is possible. He did not indeed enter a cloister, like Luther, whose conversion in Erfurt was likewise essentially catholic, but he lived in his house in the simplicity of a monk, and made and kept the vow of voluntary poverty and celibacy.'

He adopted Cyprian's doctrine of the church, and completed it in the conflict with Donatism by transferring the predicates of unity, holiness, universality, exclusiveness, and maternity, directly to the actual church of the time, which,

On the catholic and ascetic character of his conversion and his religion, see the observations in my work on Augustine, ch. viii., in the German edition.

"We recall his famous anti-Manichæan dictum: "Ego evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicæ ecclesiæ commoveret auctoritas." The Protestant would reverse this maxim, and ground his faith in the church on his faith in Christ and in the gospel. So with the well-known maxim of Irenæus: "Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritus Dei, et ubi Spiritus Dei, ibi ecclesia." According to the spirit of Protestantism it would be said conversely: "Where the Spirit of God is, there is the church, and where the church is, there is the Spirit of God."

According to genuine Christian principles it would have been far more noble, if he had married the African woman with whom he had lived in illicit intercourse for thirteen years, who was always faithful to him, as he was to her, and had borne him his beloved and highly gifted Adeodatus; instead of casting her off, and, as he for a while intended, choosing another for the partner of his life, whose excellences were more numerous. The superiority of the evangelical Protestant morality over the Catholic asceticism is here palpable. But with the prevailing spirit of his age he would hardly have enjoyed so great regard, nor accomplished so much good, if he had been married. Celibacy was the bridge from the heathen degradation of mar riage to the evangelical Christian exaltation and sanctification of the family life.

with a firm episcopal organization, an unbroken succession and the Apostles' Creed, triumphantly withstood the eighty or the hundred opposing sects in the heretical catalogue of the day, and had its visible centre in Rome. In this church he had found rescue from the shipwreck of his life, the home of true Christianity, firm ground for his thinking, satisfaction for his heart, and a commensurate field for the wide range of his powers. The predicate of infallibility alone he does not plainly bring forward; he assumes a progressive correction of earlier councils by later; and in the Pelagian controversy he asserts the same independence towards pope Zosimus, which Cyprian before him had shown towards pope Stephen in the controversy on heretical baptism, with the advantage of having the right on his side, so that Zosimus found himself compelled to yield to the African church.'

He was the first to give a clear and fixed definition of the sacrament, as a visible sign of invisible grace, resting on divine appointment; but he knows nothing of the number seven; this was a much later enactment. In the doctrine of baptism he is entirely Catholic,' though in logical contradiction with his dogma of predestination; but in the doctrine of the holy communion he stands, like his predecessors, Tertullian and Cyprian, nearer to the Calvinistic theory of a spiritual presence and fruition of Christ's body and blood. He also contributed to promote, at least in his later writings, the Catholic faith of miracles,

1 On Augustine's doctrine of the church, see § 71, above, and especially the thorough account by R. ROTHE: Anfänge der christl. Kirche und ihrer Verfassung, vol. i. (1887), pp. 679-711. "Augustine," says he, "decidedly adopted Cyprian's conception [of the church] in all essential points. And once adopting it, he pene trated it in its whole depth with his wonderfully powerful and exuberant soul, and, by means of his own clear, logical mind, gave it the perfect and rigorous system which perhaps it still lacked” (p. 679 f.). "Augustine's conception of the doctrine of the church was about standard for succeeding times" (p. 685).

• Respecting Augustine's doctrine of baptism, see the thorough discussion in W. WALL'S History of Infant Baptism, vol. i. p. 173 ff. (Oxford ed. of 1862). His view of the slight condemnation of all unbaptized children contains the germ of the scholastic fancy of the limbus infantum and the pœna damni, as distinct from the lower regions of hell and the pœna sensus.

In his former writings he expressed a truly philosophical view concerning miracles (De vera relig. c. 25, § 47; c. 50, § 98; De utilit. credendi, c. 16, §84· De peccat, meritis et remiss. 1. ii. c. 32, §52, and De civit. Dei, xxii. c. 8); but ir