f his soul, glowing and molten.
His Confessions reveal to us more clearly than any other record we have
Paganism becoming Christian. In the travail of his spirit we see
something vaster than his own conversion, we see the formulation of new
spiritual experiences, the birth of new spiritual relationships, the
growth of new moral orders and consecrations. He bridges for us the
passages between Paganism and Christianity. He reveals what rebirth
meant for men to whom it was no convention but an agonizing recasting of
both the inner and outer life. He shows us what it meant to put aside
the inheritances and relationships of an immemorial order and to stand
as a little child untaught, undisciplined and unperfect in the presence
of the new. The spiritual attitude which Augustine attained was to be
for long the dominant spiritual attitude of Europe, was to govern
medieval conceptions, inspire medieval actions, colour with its flame
the mystic brooding of the medieval mind.

In the end the sovereignty of God became for Augustine supreme and over
against this he set with strong finality man's hopeless fallen state. He
was doubtless in debt to St. Paul for these governing conceptions but
they took new character as they passed through the alembic of his own
experience. "The one pervading thought of the Greek fathers concerning
the redemptive work of Christ is that men are thereby brought into unity
with God. They do not hesitate to designate this unity to be as a
deification ... they dwell on the idea that we become partakers of the
Divine nature."[3] The emphasis here is not so much upon sin to be
atoned for or punishment to be avoided, as reconciliation to be
achieved.

[Footnote 3: Fisher, "History of Christian Doctrine," p. 162.]

After Augustine the interpretations of the Cross take a new direction.
Now men are thereby not so much to be made partakers of the divine
nature as to be saved from hell. The explanations of the way in which
this salvation is really achieved change with the changing centuries but
through shifting theologies there is one constant. All men are lost and
foredoomed to an eternal punishment from which they are saved only in
that Christ suffered for them and they, through their faith and
obedience, have availed themselves of His vicarious death. The varying
theological interpretations are themselves greatly significant as if
here were something whose meanings no single explanation could exalt,
something