Page:King Alfred's Old English version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies - Hargrove - 1902.djvu/31

Rh Aurelius Augustinus was born on the 13th of November in the year 354, and died August 28th, 430, as Bishop of Hippo Regius. His father was a heathen, but his mother was a Christian, who brought up her son in her own faith. He subsequently espoused the belief of the Manichaeans, and prepared himself by classical studies for the office of a teacher of rhetoric. After a skeptical transition period, when Platonic and Neo-Platonic speculations had prepare him for the change, he was won over by Ambrose to Catholic Christianity, in the service of which he thenceforth labored as a defender and constructor of doctrines, and also practically as a priest and bishop.

In his consecrated learning and passionate devotion to God, Augustine again reminds one of St. Paul. Truly could he say: ‘The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up’; and so was often pictured with upturned eye, with a pen in his left hand, and a burning heart in his right. He was a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeeding centuries. He had a mind uncommonly fertile and deep, bold and soaring; and with it, what is better, a heart full of Christian love and humility. He stands of right by the side of the greatest philosophers of antiquity and of modern times. We meet him alike on the broad highways and the narrow footpaths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him have trod. As a theologian he is facile princeps, at least surpassed by no church father, scholastic, or reformer. With royal munificence he scattered ideas in passing, which have set in mighty motion other lands and later times. He combined the creative power of Tertullian with the churchly spirit of Cyprian, the speculative intellect of the Greek church with the practical tact of the Latin. He was a Christian philosopher and a philosophical theologian to the