the Te Deum.  His mother died at Ostia as they were setting out for Africa; and he returned to his native land, with the hope that he might there live a life of retirement and of simple Christian obedience.  But this might not be:  on the occasion of Augustine’s visit to Hippo in 391, the bishop of that city persuaded him to receive ordination to the priesthood and to remain with him as an adviser; and four years later he was consecrated as colleague or coadjutor in the episcopate.  Thus he entered on a busy public life of thirty-five years, which called for the exercise of all his powers as a Christian, a metaphysician, a man of letters, a theologian, an ecclesiastic, and an administrator.

Into the details of that life it is impossible to enter here; it must suffice to indicate some of the ways in which as a writer he gained and still holds a high place in Western Christendom, having had an influence which can be paralleled, from among uninspired men, only by that of Aristotle.  He maintained the unity of the Church, and its true breadth, against the Donatists; he argued, as he so well could argue, against the irreligion of the Manichaeans; when the great Pelagian heresy arose, he defended the truth of the doctrine of divine grace as no one could have done who had not learned by experience its power in the regeneration and conversion of his own soul; he brought out from the treasures of Holy Scripture ample lessons of truth and duty, in simple exposition and exhortation; and in full treatises he stated and enforced the great doctrines of Christianity.

Augustine was not alone or chiefly the stern theologian whom men picture to themselves when they are told that he was the Calvin of those early days, or when they read from his voluminous and often illogical writings quotations which have a hard sound.  If he taught a stern doctrine of predestinarianism, he taught also the great power of sacramental grace; if he dwelt at times on the awfulness of the divine justice, he spoke also from the depths of his experience of the power of the divine love; and his influence on the ages has been rather that of the ’Confessions’—­taking their key-note from the words of the first chapter, “Thou, O Lord, hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is unquiet until it find rest in Thee”—­than that of the writings which have earned for their author the foremost place among the Doctors of the Western Church.  But his greatest work, without any doubt, is the treatise on the ‘City of God.’  The Roman empire, as Augustine’s life passed on, was hastening to its end.  Moral and political declension had doubtless been arrested by the good influence which had been brought to bear upon it; but it was impossible to avert its fall.  “Men’s hearts,” as well among the heathen as among the Christians, were “failing them for fear and for looking after those things that were coming on the earth.”  And Christianity was called to meet the argument drawn from the fact that the