ner with whom he lived for years, and by whom he had a son, was not his by lawful wedlock. The age of manhood came to Augustine without definite indications of religious awakening, except of an abnormal and fruitless kind. From his nineteenth to his twenty-eighth year he adhered to the sect of the Manichæans, not passing, however, beyond the rank of a hearer. "Nearly nine years passed," he says, "in which I wallowed in the slime of that deep pit and the darkness of falsehood, striving often to rise, but being all the more heavily dashed down." Meanwhile, the power of a mother's prayers, and the cravings of a nature robbed of its proper food, were drawing him toward the true spiritual goal. An inner discontent proved the truthfulness of the maxim which he afterwards placed upon the opening page of his Confessions: "Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee." As he came to Milan, as teacher of rhetoric, a deeper feeling than mere discontent finally took hold of his heart. The agony of poignant conviction was felt. "Thou didst set me," he writes, "face to face with myself, that I might behold how foul I was, and how crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous. And I beheld, and loathed myself." While thus cast down with a sense of personal degradation and longing for deliverance, the voice of a child, which seemed to come from a neighboring house, directed him to the Scriptures. He opened and read, "Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof." No sooner was the sentence finished, than "all the gloom of doubt vanished away." Augustine 66 was now a new man. The chains of sinful delights had been snapped asunder. "How sweet," he exclaims, "did it suddenly become to me to be without the delights of trifles! And what at one time I feared to lose, it was now a joy to me to put away. For Thou didst cast them away from me, Thou true and highest sweetness, and instead of them didst enter in Thyself, ... sweeter than all pleasure, brighter than all light. . . . He loves Thee too little who loves aught with Thee, which he loves not for Thee, O love, who ever burnest, and art never quenched!" A joy in God rising to the verge of ecstasy, but at the same time chastened by a feeling of personal unworthiness, was henceforth a principal factor in the inner life of the son of Monica. Augustine was converted in 386. In 395 he became bishop of the Numidian city Hippo, a position retained till his death, in 430. He died as the shadow of the invasion by the Vandals was upon his country. But we may well believe that his faith rose above the outward shadow, and that his departure was lighted by visions of that supernal beauty, toward which his desire had ardently reached, as his own words testify: "O, how wonderful, how beautiful and lovely are the dwellings of Thy house, Almighty God! I burn with longing to behold Thy beauty in Thy bridal chamber." CHAPTER VI. PRODUCTS OF THE ARTISTIC SPIRIT IN THE EARLY CHURCH. I. HYMNS AND LITURGIES. 1. INTRODUCTORY. - Among the outgrowths of the Christian religion the hymn occupies a place of unique interest and significance. Combining in its idea both music and poetry, it is the congenial medium for expressing the emotional and aesthetic elements which enter into all deep religious experience. It at once satisfies and reveals inward piety. While it has the worth which pertains to artistic products in general, it serves at the same time to mirror the mind from which it issued, and is often an index of the age in which it received its birth. Speaking of the hymns of the early Church, Dorner says: "As in the Psalms of the Old Testament we have the most instructive monuments of ancient Hebrew piety, and thereby ascertain what passed over from the ancient revelation. into joy and life, what filled the heart and burst forth from it in song, so may we regard the old Christian hymnology."1 The interpreter, it is true, must take due account of the truth that the highest piety of one Christian age 1 History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ. in its more essential phases is very closely akin to the highest piety of any other Christian age. He may expect, therefore, to find the nobler hymns of different eras exhibiting something of a family likeness. He may properly take it as a sign of great dearth, either in poetic talent or in religious life, where such traits as lowly reverence before the majesty of God, deep repentance in view of sin, intense joy and gratitude over the amazing facts of redemption, have not received illustration in at least a few worthy specimens of sacred song. Nevertheless, taken in a body the hymns. of an age bear its seal and superscription. They show the type of Christian civilization from which they emanated. Greek, mediæ val Latin, and Protestant hymnology have each distinguishing characteristics. Greater rhetorical luxuriance belongs on the whole to the first than to the second. Both mix with their pure gold the alloy of saint-worship. Both do less justice to the interior life than does the Protestant hymnology, are less rich in hymns which fitly celebrate the divine indwelling, the transforming power of grace, the agony and unrest of conscious guilt, the rapture of communion with God. 2. GREEK HYMNS. It seems probable that such Greek hymns as came into use in the apostolic age, and the time immediately following, were in measured prose. Further on there was an attempt to utilize the measures of the classical poets. Gregory Nazianzen, the first of the Greek fathers to win poetical distinction, used these measures. Sophronius, who wrote in the seventh century, selected among classical models 1 J. M. Neale, Hymns of the Eastern Church. Anacreontics, a somewhat surprising choice for the serious themes of the Christian religion. In general, this borrowing was not successful. The Greek language was no longer the Greek of the classic era. Many new terms had been brought in to meet the new conditions. To follow the classic measures involved too great a bondage. It was necessary, therefore, to strike out a new path, or else to return toward the most primitive model of the Christian hymn. The latter alternative was the one adopted. The expedient of rhyme to which the Latins resorted was not introduced into the Greek hymns. After the beginning of the eighth century, verse proper was for the most part discarded in the Eastern Church, and the hymns were written in measured prose. The troparia, as the stanzas were called, were divided for chanting by commas disposed irrespective of the sense. The following may serve as an example. "Israel in ancient times passing on foot with, unbedewed steps the Red Gulf, of the sea, turned to flight by, the cross-typefying arms, of Moses the might of Amelek, in the wilderness." The initial stanza which supplied the model was called the hirmos. A number of troparia (from three to upwards of twenty) constituted an ode, and the complete Greek hymn or canon was understood to contain nine odes. In reality, however, eight odes made a canon.1 1 Neale says: The reason for the number nine is this: that there are nine Scriptural canticles employed at Lauds, on the model of which those in every canon are formed. The first, that of Moses after the passage of the Red Sea; the second, that of Moses in Deuteronomy (xxxiii.); the third, that of Hannah; the fourth, that of Habakkuk ; the fifth, that of Isaiah (xxvi. 9-20); the sixth, that of Jonah; the |