Saint Augustin

Can it surprise, then, if men so ignorant of high morality, and so deeply embedded in matter, were also plunged in the grossest superstitions? Materialism in morals always ends...

This Boniface, a rather ambiguous personage, was a fine type of the swashbuckler and official of the Lower-Empire. Thracian by origin, he joined the trickery of the Oriental to...

Here again, how human all that is, and wise--yes, and modest too. Augustin has no whit of the fanatic about him. No straighter conscience than his, or even more persistent in up...

Two years earlier, Gratian had had the statue and altar of _Victory_ removed from the _Curia_, declaring that this pagan emblem and its accompaniments no longer served any purpo...

There was no attempt at ornamental gardens at Cassicium. The surroundings must have been kitchen-garden, grazing-land, or ploughed fields, as in a farm. A meadow--not in the lea...

In this spirit let us look at the cradle of Augustin. Let us look at it with the eyes of Augustin himself, and also, perchance, of Monnica. Bending over the frail body of the li...

In the course of the summer the caravan started and crossed the Apennines to set sail at Ostia. The date of this exodus has never been made quite clear. Perhaps Augustin and his...

One peculiar mark of the youth, and even of the whole life of Augustin, is the ease with which he unlearns and breaks off his habits--the sentimental as well as the intellectual...

The life of that particular period, if it was endurable for quiet folk who were careful to have nothing to do with politics--this life of the Empire near its end, could be nothi...

The bishop was disinterested; his people were covetous. The people of those times wished the Church to grow rich, because they were the first to profit by its riches. Now these...

Days and months went by, and Augustin, with nothing to do, joined in with easily-made friends and gave himself up to the pleasures of his time of life, like all the young townsm...

"Why," he cries--"Oh, why do you hesitate to give yourselves lest you should lose yourselves? It is rather by not giving yourselves that you lose yourselves. Charity herself spe...

To begin with, it is very natural that she should have suffered in her maternal dignity, as well as in her conscience as a Christian, by having to put up with the company of a s...

The fugitive was forced to put a trick on Monnica so as to carry out his plan. She would not leave him a moment, folded him in her arms, implored him with tears not to go. The n...

Such acts cried out for vengeance. Augustin, who up till this time had recoiled from asking the public authorities to prosecute, who, as an observer of the apostolic tradition,...

During Lent, the subject fitting in naturally with the season, he spoke against these pagan orgies; and this gave rise to a good deal of discontent, outside. Easter went by with...

'The new professor had managed to secure a certain number of pupils whom he gathered together in his rooms. He could make enough to live at Rome by himself, if he could not supp...

The child was called Adeodatus. There is a kind of irony in this name, which was then usual, of Adeodatus--"Gift of God." This son of his sin, as Augustin calls him, this son wh...

His father, Patricius, affords us a good enough type of the Romanized African. He belonged to the order of _Decuriones_, to the "very brilliant urban council of Thagaste" (_sple...

He loved as he indeed was able to love, with all the impetuosity of his nature and all the fire of his temperament, with all his heart and all his senses. "I plunged headlong in...

The quotations from Saint Augustin's _Confessions_ are taken from Canon Bigg's scholarly version, which seems to me the best in English. But there are places where M. Bertrand's...

At first the look of the country is rather like the neighbourhood of Thagaste. The wooded and mountainous landscape still spreads out its little breast-shaped hills and its shee...

Quicker than any one else, the military governor of Africa, Count Heraclianus, was on the spot to pick the pockets of the Italian immigrants. No sooner were they off the boat th...

At Carthage he understood the Roman grandeur as he could not at Madaura and the Numidian towns. Here, as elsewhere, the Romans made a point of impressing the minds of conquered...

One day (this was soon after he became bishop) Augustin went to visit a Catholic farmer in the suburbs of Hippo, whose daughter had been lessoned by the Donatists, and had just...

And so Augustin forgot his sufferings and his human disappointments in the thought that, in spite of all, the Church is eternal. The City of God gathered in the wreckage of the...