. It was not, however, the Fathers, but Cicero, to
whom the good change was due; the writings of that great orator won him
over to a love of wisdom, weaning him from the pleasures of the theatre,
the follies of divination and superstition. From his Manichaean errors,
he was snatched by Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, who baptized him,
together with his illegitimate son Adeodatus. In his writings we may,
without difficulty, recognize the vestiges of Magianism, not as regards
the duality of God, but as respects the division of mankind--the elect
and lost; the kingdoms of grace and perdition, of God and the devil;
answering to the Oriental ideas of the rule of light and darkness. From
Ambrose, St. Augustine learned those high Trinitarian doctrines which
were soon enforced in the West.

In his philosophical disquisitions on Time, Matter, Memory, this
far-famed writer is, however, always unsatisfactory, often trivial. His
doctrine that Scripture, as the word of God, is capable of a manifold
meaning, led him into many delusions, and exercised, in subsequent ages,
a most baneful influence on true science. Thus he finds in the Mosaic
account of the creation proofs of the Trinity; that the firmament spoken
of therein is the type of God's word; and that there is a correspondence
between creation itself and the Church. His numerous books have often
been translated, especially his Confessions, a work that has delighted
and edified fifty generations, but which must, after all, yield the
palm, as a literary production, to the writings of Bunyan, who, like
Augustine, gave himself up to all the agony of unsparing personal
examination and relentless self-condemnation, anatomizing his very soul,
and dragging forth every sin into the face of day.

The ecclesiastical influence of St. Augustine has so completely eclipsed
his political biography, that but little attention has been given to his
conduct in the interesting time in which he lived. Sismondi recalls to
his disadvantage that he was the friend of Count Boniface, who invited
Genseric and his Vandals into Africa; the bloody consequences of that
conspiracy cannot be exaggerated. It was through him that the count's
name has been transmitted to posterity without infamy. Boniface was with
him when he died, at Hippo, August 28th, A.D. 440.

[Sidenote: Propitious effect of Alaric's siege.]

When Rome thus fell before Alaric, so far from the provincial Christians
bewailing her misfortune, t