Page:Book of the Riviera.djvu/254

200 clumps of pines and whose battered tower hardly attract the attention of the tourists, played a considerable part, through long centuries, in the history of intellectual and religious growth in Europe. In 375 S. Honoratus founded there his religious community, and grouped about him a little family of earnest and intellectual men. In a few years it grew in power, not the power of the sword, but of brain and earnestness of purpose; and this island saved Western Christendom from a grave disaster. The Mussulman has a legend of Creation. According to that, when God was creating man, He took a pellet of clay in His left hand, moulded it into human shape, cast it aside to the left, and said, "This goes to hell, and what care I?" In like manner He worked another ball of clay with His right hand, flung that aside, and said, "And this goes to heaven, and what care I?" Now the master mind of Western Christendom, Augustine of Hippo, had devised the same theory of caprice in the Most High, predestinating to good or ill without reason, and that before Mohammed was born. Divine Grace, he held, was paramount and irresistible, carrying man to happiness or damnation without man being able to determine his course one way or the other. Man, according to Augustine, was a mere "Lump" of sin, damnable, utterly damnable. But God, in His inscrutable providence, indistinguishable from wantonness, chose to elect some to weal, and leave the rest to woe. This was a doctrine that did away with the necessity of man making the smallest endeavour after righteousness, from exercising the least self-control; of man feeling the slightest compunction after committing the grossest sins. Augustine sent his treatise to Abbot