thought Thee silent, but I, the son of Thine handmaid, despised Thee in her." In his severe retrospect, he gently condemns both parents for their undue eagerness in pushing his intellect: his father, for utterly forgetting God in his plans; and his mother, "who, though she had left the centre of Babylon, yet seemed in this regard to linger in its outskirts," for keeping out of his mind the thought of a domestic settlement, in her anxiety to secure his unencumbered devotion to learning. "I conjecture that she regarded my successful studies as likely not to keep me from Thee, but rather to further my finding Thee." The good Monica was, doubtless, right. It was through much intellectual discipline that Augustine was to find his way to truth; and the Holy Spirit, who watched the course of this future defender of the faith, overruled his parents' plans. A midnight theft, concerted with his unblushing companions, seems to have haunted his memory through all the intervening years. He describes it in all its detail, and dwells upon it with pathetic aggravation. His object is to exhibit his own abasement in sin, and the shamelessness of vice encouraged by vice. But the account in the Confessions derives its chief interest to us from the beautiful dissertation upon the nature of all sin as the fearful perversion of some excellence. This leads him back to his never-failing theme-the supremacy of God as the "unsatiating satisfaction of the soul." "With Thee is perfect rest, and life unperturbed. Whoso enters into Thee enters into the joy of his Lord.”

The third Book begins with Veni Carthaginem. The second Carthage had grown to be one of the most beautiful, courtly, and voluptuous cities of the Roman empire. It opened to the young man a brilliant school for the cultivation of rhetoric, the art of his life; and he soon outstripped all competition. But it was defiled by the worship and traditions of Astarte, the Syrian Venus; and Augustine was only too much disposed to yield to the fascinations of "the woman who invited to the bread of secrecy, and the stolen waters." His Confessions at this point are full of lamentations over his unbridled sensuality. It is enough for us to say that he took to himself a concubine, to whom, as a strange compromise with his conscience, he remained always faithful. Their only child, by an equally strange perversion of his moral sense, he named Adeodatus, "Given of God." He was allowed to practise in the forum, where his ardent genius and warm imagination, disciplined and enriched by long study of poetry, and his strong determination to excel, soon won for him unbounded applause. He constantly visited the theatres, in which Carthage abounded, with the ostensible purpose of perfecting his elocution, but to the great injury of his morals and the confirmation of his bad habits.

A circumstance occurred in his nineteenth year, to which he always referred with deep interest as another critical turning-point of his life. He fell in with one of the best books which Heathenism had ever produced— the "Hortensius" of Cicero, a treatise (not now extant) in praise of philosophy. This book gave an entirely new direction to his thoughts. It swayed his whole being for a while toward the side of virtue, revived the

remembrance of early desires after a good higher than human, and for a season gave him a strong disgust for the miserable objects which then ruled his soul. "I longed with an incredible burning desire for an eternal wisdom; and here I began to arise in the far country to return to Thee." But Cicero awakened desires which he could not guide to their gratification. "The name of Jesus, which I had drunk in with my mother's milk, was not in the book; and therefore, however polished, and learned, and true, it took not entire hold upon me." The Divine Spirit, having thus used the finger of Cicero to point the way to the true light, turned his eye to the long-neglected Scriptures. "I resolved to bend my mind to the sacred books, that I might see of what kind they were. But I could not enter the recesses, because I would not stoop to enter as a little child. Their diction seemed to me unworthy to be compared with the grandeur of Tully." He turned from them with the distaste of a proud and darkened spirit. Another call had been heard in vain. A Heathen philosopher had all but undone the bad work of the Heathen poets. Human philosophy had performed its highest task-to excite the craving for a higher Teacher. And, had Augustine waited in humble prayer for the enlightenment of the Spirit, had he asked of God to teach him, he would have been spared the sad wanderings into error which fill the Confessions of the next nine years.

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The snare was already laid. He fell in with some Manichees at Carthage, men proudly raving, with truth upon their lips, but lies in their hearts," who caught him because their monstrous errors were limed with the syllables of Thy name, O God, and that of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the holy Paraclete our Comforter." They professed to give him certainty in exchange for all his doubts. They set aside no other authority than that which appealed to terror,-they would lead men by reason alone. They had the key of all mystery; demonstration accompanied all their teaching. Simple faith they denounced as weakness, the credulity of ignorance. They dexterously fed the disgust which the plainness of God's word had already engendered in him, by weakening the authority of the Old Testament, by exposing the immoralities which they found in the lives of the patriarchs, by confounding his reason with the mysteries of the tri-une relations of the Godhead, the origin of evil, and a thousand other things. His undisciplined mind was led captive, and he was a hearer in the outer court of the Manichæan system for more than nine years,— becoming familiar with abominable heresies, which, through the good providence of God, he was learning only that he might refute and abolish them at a later date.

This system was the concentration of all the errors of the age-the masterpiece of the father of the lie. The Manichæan heresy, if it deserves the name, was, toward the close of the third century, the final form impressed by a man of genius upon a system of error which had its origin in much earlier times. Manes was a Persian, at one time a Christian; and Satan employed him to undermine Christianity by compounding with

it Parsism. He gave himself out to be the Paraclete-not, however, the Holy Ghost-who should deliver Christianity from all Jewish appendages, and set upon it the seal of perfection by some secret doctrines of his own, taught only to the elect. As the system was presented to Augustine, tormented with doubt, it was based on the assumption of two equally eternal principles-the good, or God, in the region of light, the evil, Hyle, or the devil, in the darkness of matter. It professed, accordingly, to teach the origin of the world, and the origin of evil, by some incomprehensible theory of an intermingling of the two kingdoms of light and darkness. The Christ and the Holy Spirit of the New Testament were represented as two exalted radiations of the original Light, (the former dwelling in the sun, the latter in the air,) whose work is to liberate the light which is fettered in the darkness of matter, the demon and the evil spirits opposing them. The Old Testament was, of course, entirely given up; and, without any reference to the scriptural doctrine of the fall, every man was represented as having an evil soul within him, as well as a soul of light; his great business in life being to attract to himself as many elements of the light diffused in nature as he could, in order to a final return into the kingdom of light. This doctrine of man's original, and explanation of the existence of evil, did not come to Augustine in the perplexed and entangled form which it assumed in the teaching of Manes, but in such a manner as to fascinate a mind which had been deeply embarrassed with questions concerning the conditions of the Divine essence and the origin of sin.

The New-Testament doctrine of redemption was resolved into a descent of Christ from the sun in the form of a human body,-not in the reality of it, for flesh was of the devil,-that He might lead men from former false systems to the worship of the true God, and leave behind Him certain heavenly elements as a seed of vigour for the human race, to help it in its struggles toward the light. But He failed to make Himself understood, and promised a Paraclete to complete His teaching-Manes. -Whatever in the New Testament might be perverted to the use of this heresiarch, he retained; the rest he rejected. And this Manichæan theory of redemption was exhibited in such guise as to spare Augustine the shock which the orthodox doctrine of atonement inflicted upon his reasoning. The great winding up of the final mysteries of time was also presented in its most bewitching form. The utter destruction of all matter as essentially sinful, and the eternal emancipation of the spirit from the bondage of sinful flesh, was the end of all. There was, of course, no resurrection of the body; but a general conflagration of all things, in which every element of light in the universe would be disengaged for ever from all contact or possibility of evil. Meanwhile, there was an enticing doctrine of transmigration for the more immediate sequel of death. None but the truly good are then released at once from matter. Infidels and sinners of all classes expiate their offences in the bodies of animals, selected with reference to their peculiar sins; and after a series of purifying transmigrations, regulated by the obstinacy of their union with evil, they are conveyed

to the moon, thence to the sun, and finally into the region of defecated light for ever.

Whether the severities imposed upon the electi deterred him, or his secret instincts revolted, we know not; but he never went beyond the class of hearers. Among them, however, he was a very enthusiastic inquirer; daily discussing the most dread questions with men who had a ready solution of every mystery, and deluding himself with the supposition that he was finding in these fantasies a new world of truth. In after-years he was the most vigorous and successful antagonist of Manichæism in all its forms, and thus made some atonement for his infatuation. Not that he regarded it as any atonement; for, at the very time when he was demolishing this monstrous invention, he confesses in deep sorrow the blindness of his mind, and the sensual sins which had brought this blindness upon him, as if he could never forgive himself the wilful pride of reason which had led him step by step so low. There is a Manichæism of our own day; and many are the young men who, like Augustine, lend a willing ear to teachers who elevate reason and degrade faith, who will give them relief from the hard bondage of a positive revelation which requires submission in order to knowledge. Change the name and the circumstances, and the Manichæism of the third and fourth centuries is the Rationalism of our own. There is the same arrogant impatience of every yoke, even though imposed by God; the same premature demand to be led by sight; the same preference given to scientific over spiritual demonstration; the same appeal to the pride of human intellect, especially in young men ; and the same array of miserable results. The young Augustine was misled, as he acknowledges with sorrow, because carnal lusts had beclouded his understanding, and pride had taken from him the first condition of all true knowledge. He owns that the infatuation which could believe all the monstrous doctrines to which he was step by step led, was the due penalty of his pride. His nine years' experience was a heavy price to pay. The very best years of his life were wasted on fantasies. But it pleased God to restore his intellect to perfect soundness; and there is no lesson which he more perseveringly teaches in his later writings than this, that faith precedes knowledge, and humility faith.

He was nineteen years of age when he returned to his native town from Carthage, his mother finding it difficult to support him there any longer. He came back with a brilliant reputation, crowned with accomplishments, already celebrated as one of the foremost, if not the foremost, among young men of the age in Africa. But none of these things could charm away the desolation with which his poor mother received a Manichee, an infidel, into her house. She beheld this child of her prayers, for whose spiritual birth she had been travailing these eighteen years, so far gone from Christ as to be the flippant defender of the worst heresy of the times. This was a sorrow which darkened the day, for she could not sit at the same table with her son; and it troubled her at night, visiting her in all her dreams, In one of these, a shining one appeared to her, and told her that she should one

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day see her son standing by her side on such a wooden plank as she seemed to be then standing upon. He confesses to God, that, when his mother told him the dream next day, his wicked reply was, that "she should not despair of being one day what he was;" whereupon her reply, for the vision had greatly comforted her, was, that the words were not, "Where he is thou shalt be also ;" but, "Where thou art there shall he be." The sad widow carried her griefs to a certain Bishop, who had once been entangled in the same snare, and besought him to use his endeavours to argue her son out of his errors. The good man declined to dispute with a conceited and captious youth, but urged the mother to pray that God would bless his reading, and bring him to see his own way out of these delusions. "For," said he, "when I was a little one, my mother, seduced by the Manichees, gave me over to their hands: I read all their books, and copied out many of them. But God led me, without argument from any one, to see the monstrous errors of the system." The good Bishop seemed to have no hope for such a case but in the direct interposition of God in answer to prayer. Monica was of another mind, and urged him with many tears and entreaties to discourse with her son; when he, a little displeased with her importunity, said, "Go thy ways, and God bless thee; for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish." This last answer seemed to come from heaven, and she believed from that time that God would convert her son. Augustine approves the old man's principle, in its application to his own case; for he entertained, as well he might, a very lofty sense of the power of his mother's prayers. But this did not hinder him, when he himself was a Bishop, from employing, in the case of other young men similarly deluded, all the resources of argument. And who knows whether the affectionate efforts of the good Pastor, who had himself been versed in the ways of the heresy, might not have constituted a very powerful reinforcement of even Monica's prayers, and abridged the long term of Augustine's bondage?

The fourth Book of the Confessions gives us a hasty insight into the nine years which he spent in the toils of Manichæism. He became at once a teacher of rhetoric in Tagaste, “selling for lucre the art of overcoming by words," and gained his livelihood with great ease. He soon drew around himself a little circle of deeply-attached friends, who held him in high admiration, and loved him intensely. It may be supposed that the fascinating doctrine, of which he was the only hierophant in the little town, was not forgotten in their intercourse. Augustine could not but be zealous in every cause which he made his own; and he soon had a convert in one of his young friends, the dearest of them all. This young man, after twelve months' perversion, was seized with a dangerous illness. "Thou wast close on the steps of Thy fugitives, at once God of vengeance and Fountain of mercies, turning us to Thyself by wonderful means: Thou tookest from me him who had filled up one year of the sweetest friendship of my life." The young man's friends were Christians, and during his unconsciousness baptized him; Augustine not opposing, but