t
have satisfied his desire. "For where was that Charity that buildeth
upon the foundation of Humility, which is Christ Jesus? . . . These
pages" (of the Platonists) "carried not in them this countenance of
piety--the tears of confession, and that sacrifice of Thine which is an
afflicted spirit, a contrite and humbled heart, the salvation of Thy
people, the Spouse, the City, the pledge of Thy Holy Spirit, the Cup of
our Redemption. No man doth there thus express himself. Shall not my
soul be subject to God, for of Him is my salvation? For He is my God,
and my salvation, my protectour; I shall never be moved. No man doth
there once call and say to him: 'Come unto me all you that labour.'"

The heathen doctors had not the grace which Saint Augustine instinctively
knew he lacked--the grace of Humility, nor the Comfort that is not from
within but from without. To these he aspired; let us follow him on the
path by which he came within their influence; but let us not forget that
the guide on the way to the City was kind, clever, wordy, vain old Marcus
Tullius Cicero. It is to the City that all our faces should be set, if
we knew what belongs to our peace; thither we cast fond, hopeless,
backward glances, even if we be of those whom Tertullian calls "Saint
Satan's Penitents." Here, in Augustine, we meet a man who found the
path--one of the few who have found it, of the few who have won that Love
which is our only rest. It may be worth while to follow him to the
journey's end.

The treatise of Cicero, then, inflamed Augustine "to the loving and
seeking and finding and holding and inseparably embracing of wisdom
itself, wheresoever it was." Yet, when he looked for wisdom in the
Christian Scriptures, all the literary man, the rhetorician in him, was
repelled by the simplicity of the style. Without going further than Mr.
Pater's book, "Marius, the Epicurean," and his account of Apuleius, an
English reader may learn what kind of style a learned African of that
date found not too simple. But Cicero, rather than Apuleius, was
Augustine's ideal; that verbose and sonorous eloquence captivated him, as
it did the early scholars when learning revived. Augustine had dallied a
little with the sect of the Manichees, which appears to have grieved his
mother more than his wild life.

But she was comforted by a vision, when she found herself in a wood, and
met "a glorious young man," who informed her that "where she was there
sh