use, but by his unwillingness to submit to the
moral demands which Christianity made upon him. At last there came one
great struggle, described in a passage from the 'Confessions' which is
given below; and Monica's hopes and prayers were answered in the
conversion of her son to the faith and obedience of Jesus Christ. On
Easter Day, 387, in the thirty-third year of his life, he was baptized,
an unsubstantiated tradition assigning to this occasion the composition
and first use of 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 t