the great archbishop who was so instrumental in his
conversion, and was admitted into the ranks of the visible
Church, and prepared to return to Africa. But before
he could embark, his beloved mother died at Ostia, feel-
ing, with Simeon, that she could now depart in peace,
having seen the salvation of the Lord, but to the immo-
derate grief of Augustine who made no effort to dry his
tears. It was not till the following year that he sailed
for Carthage, not long tarrying there, but retiring to



296 SAINT AUGUSTINE.

Tagaste, to his paternal estate, where he spent three years
more in study and meditation, giving away all he pos-
sessed to religion and charity, living with his friends in a
complete community of goods. It was there that some of
his best works were composed. In the year 391, on a visit
to Hippo, a Numidian seaport, he was forced into more
active duties. Entering the church, the people clamored
for his ordination; and such was liis power as a pulpit
orator, and so universally was he revered, that in two
years after he became coadjutor bishop, and his great
career began.

As a bishop he won universal admiration. Councils
could do nothing without his presence. Emperors con-
descended to sue for his advice. He wrote letters to all
parts of Christendom. He was alike saint, oracle,
prelate, and preacher. He labored day and night, living
simply, but without monkish austerity. At table, read-
ing and literary conferences were preferred to secular
conversation. His person was accessible. He interested
himself in everybody's troubles, and visited the forlorn
and miserable, lie was indefatigable in reclaiming those
who had strayed from the fold. He won every heart by
charity, and captivated every mind with his eloquence;
so that Hippo, a little African town, was no longer
" least among the cities of Judah," since her prelate was
consulted from the extremities of the earth, and his
influence went forth throughout the crumbling Empire,



CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 297

to heal division and establish the faith of the wavering,
a Father of the Church universal.

Yet it is not as bishop, but as doctor, that he is immor-
tal. It was his mission to head off the dissensions and
heresies of his age, and to establish the faith of Paul
even among the Germanic barbarians. He is the great
theologian of the Church, and his system of divinity not
only was the creed of the Middle Ages, but is still an
authority in the schools, both Catholic and Protestant.

Let us, then, turn to his services as theologian and
philosopher. He wrote over a thousand treatises, and
on almost every subject that has interested the human
mind ; but his labors were chiefly confined to the prevail-
ing and more subtle and dangerous errors of his day.
Nor was it by dry dialectics that he refuted these here-
sies, although the most logical and acute of men, but by
his profound insight into the cardinal principles of
Christianity, which he discoursed upon with the most
extraordinary affluence of thought and language, dis-
daining all sophistries and speculations. He went to
the very core, a realist of the most exalted type,
permeated with the spirit of Plato, yet bowing down
to Paul.

We first find him combating the opinions which had
originally enthralled him, and which he understood bet-
ter than any theologian who ever lived.

But I need not repeat what I have already said of the



298 SA INT AUGUSTINE.

Manicheans, those arrogant and shallow philosophers
who made such high pretension to superior wisdom ; men
who adored the divinity of mind, and the inherent evil of
matter ; men who sought to emancipate the soul, which
in their view needed no regeneration from all the influ-
ences of the body. That this soul, purified by asceticism,
might be reunited to the great spirit of the universe from
which it had originally emanated, was the hopeless aim
and dream of these theosophists, not the control of
passions and appetites, which God commands, but their
eradication ; not the worship of a Creator who made
the heaven and the earth, but a vague worship of the
creation itself. They little dreamed that it is not the
body (neither good nor evil in itself) which is sinful, but
the perverted mind and soul, the wicked imagination of
the heart, out of which proceeds that which defileth a
man, and which can only be controlled and purified by
Divine assistance. Augustine showed that purity was
an inward virtue, not the crucifixion of the body ; that
its passions and appetites are made to be subservient to
reason and duty ; that the law of temperance is self-
restraint ; that the soul was not an emanation or evolu-
tion from eternal light, but a distinct creation of Almighty
God, which lie lias the power to destroy, as well as the
body itself ; that nothing in the universe can live with-
out His pleasure ; that His intervention is a logical
sequence of His moral government. But his most



CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 299

withering denunciation of the Manicheans was directed
against their pride of reason, against their darkened un-
derstanding, which led them not only to believe a lie,
but to glory in it, the utter perverseness of the mind
when in rebellion to divine authority, in view of which
it is almost vain to argue, since truth will neither be
admitted nor accepted.

There was another class of Christians who provoked
the controversial genius of Augustine, and these were
the Donatists. These men were not heretics, but bigots.
They made the rite of baptism to depend on the charac-
ter of the officiating priest ; and hence they insisted on
rebaptism, if the priest who had baptized proved un-
worthy. They seemed to forget that no clergyman ever
baptized from his own authority or worthiness, but only
in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy
Ghost. Nobody knows who baptized Paul, and he felt
under certain circumstances even that he was sent not
to baptize, but to preach the gospel. Lay baptism has
always been held valid. Hence, such reformers as Cal-
vin and Knox did not deem it necessary to rebaptize
those who had been converted from the Koman Catholic
faith ; and, if I do not mistake, even Roman Catholics
do not insist on rebaptizing Protestants. But the Don-
atists so magnified, not the rite, but the form of it, that
they lost the spirit of it, and became seceders, and created
a mournful division iu the Church, a schism which



300 SAINT AUGUSTINE.

gave rise to bitter animosities. The churches of Africa
were rent by their implacable feuds, and on so small a mat-
ter, even as the ranks of the reformers under Luther
were so soon divided by the Anabaptists. In propor-
tion to the unimportance of the shibboleth was tenacity
to it, a mark which has ever characterized narrow and
illiberal minds. It is not because a man accepts a shib-
boleth that he is narrow and small, but because he fights
for it. As a minute critic would cast out from the fra-
ternity of scholars him who cannot tell the difference
between ac and et, so the Donatist would expel from the
true fold of Christ those who accepted baptism from
an unworthy priest. Augustine at first showed great
moderation and patience and gentleness in dealing with
these narrow-minded and fierce sectarians, who carried
their animosity so far as to forbid bread to be baked for
the use of the Catholics in Carthage, when they had
the ascendency ; but at last he became indignant, and
implored the aid of secular magistrates.

Augustine's controversy with the Donatists led to
two remarkable tracts, oue on the evil of suppressing
heresy by the sword, and the other on the unity of the
Church.

In the first he showed a spirit of toleration beyond
his age ; and this is more remarkable because his temper
was naturally ardent and fiery. But lie protested in his
writings, and before councils, against violence in forcing



CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 3Q1

religious convictions, and advocated a liberality worthy
of John Locke.

In the second tract he advocated a principle which
had a prodigious influence on the minds of his genera-
tion, and greatly contributed to establish the polity of
the Eoman Catholic Church. He argued the necessity
of unity in government as well as unity in faith, like
Cyprian before him ; and this has endeared him to the
Roman Catholic Church, I apprehend, even more than
his glorious defence of the Pauline theology. There are
some who think that all governments arise out of the
circumstances and the necessities of the times, and that
there are no rules laid down in the Bible for any par-
ticular form or polity, since a government which may
be adapted to one age or people may not be fitted for an-
other ; even as a monarchy would not succeed in New
England any more than a democracy in China. But the
most powerful sects among Protestants, as well as among
the Catholics themselves, insist on the divine author-
ity for their several forms of government, and all would
have insisted, at different periods, on producing confor-
mity with their notions. The high-church Episcopalian
and the high-church Presbyterian equally insist on the
divine authority for their respective institutions. The
Catholics simply do the same, when they make Saint
Peter the rock on which the supremacy of their Church
is based. In the time of Augustine there was only



302 SAINT AUGUSTINE.

one form of the visible Church, there were no Pro-
testants; and he naturally wished, like any bishop,
to strengthen and establish its unity, a government
of bishops, of which the bishop of Eome was the ac-
knowledged head. But he did not anticipate and I
believe he would not have indorsed their future en-
croachments and their ambitious schemes for enthrall-
ing the mind of the world, to say nothing of personal
aggrandizement and the usurpation of temporal author-
ity. And yet the central power they established on
the banks of the Tiber was, with all its corruptions,
fitted to conserve the interests of Christendom in rude
ages of barbarism and ignorance ; and possibly Augus-
tine, with his profound intuitions, and in view of the
approaching desolations of the Christian world, wished
to give to the clergy and to their head all the moral
power and prestige possible, to awe and control the
barbaric chieftains, for in his day the Empire was
crumbling to pieces, and the old civilization was being
trampled under foot. If there was a man in the whole
Empire capable of taking comprehensive views of the
necessities of society, that man was the Bishop of
Hippo ; so that if we do not agree with his views of
church government, let us bear in mind the age in
which he lived, and its peculiar dangers and necessi-
ties. And let us also remember that his idea of the
unity of the Church has a spiritual as well as a tern-



CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 303

poral meaning, and in that sublime and lofty sense can
never be controverted so long as One Lord, One Faith,
One Baptism remain the common creed of Christians
in all parts of the world. It was to preserve this unity
that he entered so zealously into all the great con-
troversies of the age, and fought heretics as well as
schismatics.

The great work which pre-eminently called out his
genius, and for which he would seem to have been raised
up, was to combat the Pelagian heresy, and establish the
doctrine of the necessity of Divine Grace, even as it
was the mission of Athanasius to defend the doctrine of
the Trinity, and that of Luther to establish Justification
by Faith. In all ages there are certain heresies, or errors,
which have spread so dangerously, and been embraced so
generally by the leading and fashionable classes, that they
seem to require some extraordinary genius to arise in
order to combat them successfully, and rescue the Church
from the snares of a false philosophy. Thus Bernard
was raised up to refute the rationalism and nominalism
of Abelard, whose brilliant and subtile inquiries had a
tendency to extinguish faith in the world, and bring
all mysteries to the test of reason. The enthusiastic
and inquiring young men who nocked to his lectures
from all parts of Europe carried back to their homes
and convents and schools insidious errors, all the more
dangerous because they were mixed with truths which



304 SAINT AUGUSTINE.

were universally recognized. It required such a man
as Bernard to expose these sophistries and destroy their
power, not so much by dialectical weapons as by appeal-
ing to those lofty truths, those profound convictions,
those essential and immutable principles which con-
sciousness reveals and divine authority confirms. It
took a greater than Abc'lard to show the tendency of his
speculations, from the logical sequence of which even he
himself would have fled, and which he did reject when
misfortunes had broken his heart, and disease had brought
him to face the realities of the future life. So God
raised up Pascal to expose the sophistries of the Jesuits
and unravel that subtle casuistry which was under-
mining the morality of the age, and destroying the
authority of Saint Augustine on some of the most vital
principles which entered into the creed of the Catholic
Church. Thus Jonathan Edwards, the ablest theolo-
gian which this country has seen, controverted the
fashionable Arminianism of his day. Thus some great
intellectual giant will certainly and in due time appear
to demolish with scathing irony the theories and specu-
lations of some of the progressive schools of our day,
and present their absurdities and boastings and preten-
sions in such a ridiculous light that no man with any in-
tellectual dignity will dare to belong to their fraternity,
unless he impiously accepts sometimes with ribald
mockeries the logical sequence of their doctrines.



CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 305

Now it was not the Manicheans or Donatists who
were the most dangerous people in the time of Augus-
tine, nor were their doctrines likely to be embraced
by the Christian schools, especially in the West ; but it
was the Pelagians who in high places were assailing the
Pauline theology. And they advocated principles which
lay at the root of most of the subsequent controversies
of the Church. They were intellectual men, generally
good men, who could not be put down, and who would
thrive under any opposition. Augustine did not attack
the character of these men, but rendered a great service
to the Church by pointing out, clearly and luminously,
the antichristian character of their theories, when rigor-
ously pushed out, by a remorseless logic, to their neces-
sary sequence.

Whatever value may be attached to that science
which is based on deductions drawn from the truths
of revelation, certain it is that it was theology which
most interested Christians in the time of Augustine,
as in the time of Athanasius ; and his controversy with
the Pelagians made then a mighty stir, and is at the
root of half the theological discussions from that age to
ours. If we would understand the changes of human
thought in the Middle Ages, if we would seek to know
what is most vital in Church history, that celebrated
Pelagian controversy claims our special attention.

It was at a great crisis in the Church when a British
20



306 SAINT AUGUSTINE.

monk of extraordinary talents, persuasive eloquence, and
great attainments, a man accustomed to the use of
dialectical weapons and experienced by extensive travels,
ambitious, ardent, plausible, adroit, appeared among
the churches and advanced a new philosophy. His
name was Pelagius ; and he was accompanied by a man
of still greater logical power than he himself possessed,
though not so eloquent or accomplished or pleasing
in manner, who was called Celestius, two doctors of
whom the schools were justly proud, and who were
admired and honored by enthusiastic young men, as
Abelard was in after times.

Nothing disagreeable marked these apostles of the
new philosophy, nor could the malignant voice of theo-
logical hatred and envy bring upon their lives either
scandal or reproach. They had none of the infirmities
which so often have dimmed the lustre of great bene-
factors. They were not dogmatic like Luther, nor
severe like Calvin, nor intolerant like Knox. Pelagius,
especially, was a most interesting man, though more of
a philosopher than a Christian. Like Zeno, he exalted
the human will ; like Aristotle, he subjected all truth
to the test of logical formularies ; like Abdlard, he
would believe nothing which he could not explain or
comprehend. Self-confident, like Servetus, he disdained
the Cross. The central principle of his teachings \vas
man's ability to practise any virtue, independently of



CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 307

divine grace. He made perfection a thing easy to be
attained. There was no need, in his eyes, as his adver-
saries maintained, of supernatural aid in the work of
salvation. Hence a Saviour was needless. By faith,
he is represented to mean mere intellectual convictions,
to be reached through the reason alone. Prayer was
useful simply to stimulate a man's own will. He was
further represented as repudiating miracles as contrary
to reason, of abhorring divine sovereignty as fatal to
the exercise of the will, of denying special providences
as opposing the operation of natural laws, as reject-
ing native depravity and maintaining that the natural
tendency of society was to rise in both virtue and knowl-
edge, and of course rejecting the idea of a Devil tempt-
ing man to sin. "His doctrines," says one of his
biographers, " were pleasing to pride, by flattering its
pretension ; to nature, by exaggerating its power ; and
to reason, by extolling its capacity." He asserted that
death was not the penalty of Adam's transgression ; he
denied the consequences of his sin ; and he denied the
spiritual resurrection of man by the death of Christ,
thus rejecting him as a divine Eedeemer. Why should
there be a divine redemption if man could save himself?
He blotted out Christ from the book of life by repre-
senting him merely as a martyr suffering for the declara-
tion of truths which were not appreciated, like Soc-
rates at Athens, or Savonarola at Florence. In support



308 SAINT AUGUSTINE.

of all these doctrines, so different from those of Paul,
he appealed, not to the apostle's authority, but to hu-
man reason, and sought the aid of Pagan philosophy,
rather than the Scriptures, to arrive at truth.

Thus was Pelagius represented by his opponents, who
may have exaggerated his heresies, and have pushed his
doctrines to a logical sequence which he would not accept
but would even repel, in the same manner as the Pela-
gians drew deductions from the teachings of Augustine
which were exceedingly unfair, making God the author
of sin, and election to salvation to depend on the foreseen
conduct of men in regard to an obedience which they
had no power to perform.

But whether Pelagius did or did not hold all the doc-
trines of which he was accused, it is certain that the spirit
of them was antagonistic to the teachings of Paul, as un-
derstood by Augustine, who felt that the very founda-
tions of Christianity were assailed, as Athanasius
regarded the doctrines of Arius. So he came to the
rescue, not of the Catholic Church, for Pelagius belonged
to it as well as he, but to the rescue of Christian theology.
The doctrines of Pelagius were becoming fashionable
and prevalent in many parts of the Empire, Even the
Pope at one time favored them. They might spread
until they should be embraced by the whole Catholic
world, for Augustine believed in the vitality of error as
well as in the vitality of truth, of the natural and in-



CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 309

evitable tendency of society towards Paganism, without
the especial and restraining grace of God. He armed
himself for the great conflict with the infidelity of his
day, not with David's sling, but Goliath's sword. He
used the same weapons as his antagonist, even the
arms of reason and knowledge, and constructed an
argument which was overwhelming, if Paul's Epistles
were to be the accepted premises of his irresistible logic.
Great as was Pelagius, Augustine was a far greater
man, broader, deeper, more learned, more logical, more
eloquent, more intense. He was raised up to demol-
ish, with the very reason he professed to disdain, the
sophistries and dogmas of one of the most dangerous
enemies which the Church had ever known, to leave
to posterity his logic and his conclusions when similar
enemies of his faith should rise up in future ages. He
furnished a thesaurus not merely to Bernard and Thomas
Aquinas, but even to Calvin and Bossuet and Pascal. And
it will be the marvellous lucidity of the Bishop of Hippo
which shall bring back to the true faith, if it is ever
brought back, that part of the Koman Catholic Church
which accepts the verdict of the Council of Trent, when
that famous council indorsed the opinions of Pelagius
while upholding the authority of Augustine as the great-
est doctor of the Church.

To a man like Augustine, with his deep experiences,
a man rescued from a seductive philosophy and a cor-



310 SAINT AUGUSTINE.

rupt life, as he thought, by the special grace of God and
in answer to his mother's prayers, the views of Pelagius
were both false and dangerous. He could find no words
sufficiently intense whereby to express his gratitude for
his deliverance from both sin and error. To him this
Deliverer is so personal, so loving, that he pours out his
confession to Him as if He were both friend and father.
And he felt that all that is vital in theology must radiate
from the recognition of His sovereign power in the reno-
vation and salvation of the world. All his experiences
and observations of life confirmed the authority of Scrip-
ture, that the world, as a matter of fact, was sunk in
a state of sin and misery, and could be rescued only by
that divine power which converted Paul. His views of
predestination, grace, and Providence all radiate from
the central principle of the majesty of God and the
littleness of man. All his ideas of the servitude of
the will are confirmed by his personal experience of the
awful fetters which sin imposes, and the impossibility of
breaking away from them without direct aid from the
God who ruleth the world in love. And he had an in-
finitely greater and deeper conviction of the reality of
this divine love, which had rescued him, than Pelagius
had, who felt that his salvation was the result of his
own merits. The views of Augustine were infinitely
more cheerful than those of his adversary respecting
salvation, since they gave more hope to the miserable



CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY. 311

population of the Empire who could not claim the virtues
of Pelagius, and were impotent of themselves to break
away from the bondage which degraded them. There is
nothing in the writings of Augustine, not in this con-
troversy, or any other controversy, to show that God
delights in the miseries or the penalty which are indis-
solubly connected with sin ; on the contrary, he blesses
and adores the divine hand which releases men from the
constraints which sin imposes. This divine interposi-
tion is wholly based on a divine and infinite love. It
is the helping hand of Omnipotence to the weak will of
man, the weak will even of Paul, when he exclaimed,
" The evil that I would not, that I do." It is the un-
loosing, by His loving assistance, of the wings by which
the emancipated soul would rise to the lofty regions of
peace and contemplation.

I know very well that the doctrines which Augus-
tine systematized from Paul involve questions which
we cannot answer ; for why should not an infinite and
omnipotent God give to all men the saving grace that he
gave to Augustine? Why should not this loving and
compassionate Father break all the fetters of sin every-
where, and restore the primeval Paradise in this wicked
world where Satan seems to reign ? Is He not more
powerful than devils ? Alas ! the prevalence of evil
is more mysterious than the origin of evil. But this is
something, and it is well for the critic and opponent



312 SAINT AUGUSTINE.

of the Augustinian theology to bear this in mind,
that Augustine was an earnest seeker after truth, even
when enslaved by the fornications of Carthage ; and his
own free-will in persistently seeking truth, through all
the mazes of Manichean and Grecian speculation, is as
manifest as the divine grace which came to his assist-
ance. God Almighty does not break fetters until there
is some desire in men to have them broken. If men
will hug sins, they must not complain of their bondage.