cal. They were well versed in the great literature of Rome, but
most of them, and especially the African school (which carried Roman
tendencies to an extreme), knew comparatively little of Greek. St.
Augustine, for example, could not bring himself to work at Greek with
ardour, nor could he explain why this was so.[965] Of Augustine, as the
type of the literature of Latin Christianity, Bishop Westcott wrote with
something of an exaggerated criticism, lamenting that he had not the
Greek which had so large a place in the Bishop's own training. "He
looked" (more particularly in the _de Civitate Dei_) "at everything from
the side of law and not of freedom: from the side of God, as an
irresponsible sovereign, and not of man, as a loving servant. In spite
of his admiration for Plato, he was driven by a passion for system" (how
this reminds us of the old Roman religious lawyers!) "to fix, to
externalise, to freeze every idea into a rigid shape. In spite of his
genius he could not shake off the influence of a legal and rhetorical
training, which controversy called into active exercise."[966] The
lecture from which I am quoting is an interesting one, on the work and
character of Origen, the great Alexandrian of the third century A.D.,
with whom Augustine is contrasted, as in an earlier age we might
contrast Seneca with Philo; the Latin writers rhetorical, practical,
realistic; the Greek authors idealistic and fervent, apt to see deep
moral significance in all human life. And this is really the manner and
mental attitude of all the famous Latin fathers: of Lactantius, the
clear, precise Ciceronian, whose every page shows the perennial value of
the Latin tongue; of Tertullian, the subtle and acute rhetorician, more
gifted with imagination than his fellows; of Arnobius, another Roman
African, the reputed teacher of Lactantius.

One of the characteristics of these Latin fathers is their fondness for
using the famous words of the old Roman religion, but in new senses.
They inherit that Roman love for a strong technical word of pregnant
meaning which has left us so many imperishable legacies in terminology.
_Municipium_, _colonia_, _imperium_, _collegium_, rise in one's mind the
moment the subject is mentioned; and a few minutes' thought will reveal
another score of words which in various forms pervade all our modern
European terminology. So, too, with the language of religion. These
Latin advocates of Christian doctrine took the old wo