t
logical and acute of men, but by his profound insight into the cardinal
principles of Christianity, which he discoursed upon with the most
extraordinary affluence of thought and language, disdaining all
sophistries and speculations. He went to the very core,--a realist of
the most exalted type, permeated with the spirit of Plato, yet bowing
down to Paul.

We first find him combating the opinions which had originally enthralled
him, and which he understood better than any theologian who ever lived.

But I need not repeat what I have already said of the
Manicheans,--those arrogant and shallow philosophers who made such high
pretension to superior wisdom; men who adored the divinity of mind, and
the inherent evil of matter; men who sought to emancipate the soul,
which in their view needed no regeneration from all the influences of
the body. That this soul, purified by asceticism, might be reunited to
the great spirit of the universe from which it had originally emanated,
was the hopeless aim and dream of these theosophists,--not the control
of passions and appetites, which God commands, but their eradication;
not the worship of a Creator who made the heaven and the earth, but a
vague worship of the creation itself. They little dreamed that it is not
the body (neither good nor evil in itself) which is sinful, but the
perverted mind and soul, the wicked imagination of the heart, out of
which proceeds that which defileth a man, and which can only be
controlled and purified by Divine assistance. Augustine showed that
purity was an inward virtue, not the crucifixion of the body; that its
passions and appetites are made to be subservient to reason and duty;
that the law of temperance is self-restraint; that the soul was not an
emanation or evolution from eternal light, but a distinct creation of
Almighty God, which He has the power to destroy, as well as the body
itself; that nothing in the universe can live without His pleasure; that
His intervention is a logical sequence of His moral government. But his
most withering denunciation of the Manicheans was directed against
their pride of reason, against their darkened understanding, which led
them not only to believe a lie, but to glory in it,--the utter
perverseness of the mind when in rebellion to divine authority, in view
of which it is almost vain to argue, since truth will neither be
admitted nor accepted.

There was another class of Christians who provoked the controver