mortal
writings,--some ten hundred and thirty distinct productions. He died in
the year 430, when his city was besieged by the Vandals, and in the arms
of his faithful Alypius, then a neighboring bishop, full of visions of
the ineffable beauty of that blissful state to which his renovated
spirit had been for forty years constantly soaring.

"Thus ceased to flow," said a contemporary, "that river of eloquence
which had watered the thirsty fields of the Church; thus passed away the
glory of preachers, the master of doctors, and the light of scholars;
thus fell the courageous combatant who with the sword of truth had given
heresy a mortal blow; thus set this glorious sun of Christian doctrine,
leaving a world in darkness and in tears."

His vacant see had no successor. "The African province, the cherished
jewel of the Roman Empire, sparkled for a while in the Vandal diadem.
The Greek supplanted the Vandal, and the Saracen supplanted the Greek,
and the home of Augustine was blotted out from the map of Christendom."
The light of the gospel was totally extinguished in Northern Africa. The
acts of Rome and the doctrines of Cyprian were equally forgotten by the
Mahommedan conquerors. Only in Bona, as Hippo is now called, has the
memory of the great bishop been cherished,--the one solitary flower
which escaped the successive desolations of Vandals and Saracens. And
when Algiers was conquered by the French in 1830, the sacred relics of
the saint were transferred from Pavia (where they had been deposited by
the order of Charlemagne), in a coffin of lead, enclosed in a coffin of
silver, and the whole secured in a sarcophagus of marble, and finally
committed to the earth near the scenes which had witnessed his
transcendent labors. I do not know whether any monument of marble and
granite was erected to his memory; but he needs no chiselled stone, no
storied urn, no marble bust, to perpetuate his fame. For nearly fifteen
hundred years he has reigned as the great oracle of the Church, Catholic
and Protestant, in matters of doctrine,--the precursor of Bernard, of
Leibnitz, of Calvin, of Bossuet, all of whom reproduced his ideas, and
acknowledged him as the fountain of their own greatness. "Whether," said
one of the late martyred archbishops of Paris, "he reveals to us the
foundations of an impure polytheism, so varied in its developments, yet
so uniform in its elemental principles; or whether he sports with the
most difficult problems