The Christian reply.

nation was justly punished for its abandonment of the gods
of its forefathers, the gods who had given victory and empire.
It became necessary for the Church to meet this accusation,
which, while it was openly urged by thousands, was doubtless
believed to be true by silent, and timid, and panic-stricken
millions. With the intention of defending Christianity, St.
Augustine, one of the ablest of the Fathers, solemnly devoted
thirteen years of his life to the composition of his great work,
entitled 'The City of God.' It is interesting for us to remark
the tone of some of these replies of the Christians to their Pa-
gan
adversaries.

"For the manifest deterioration of Roman manners, and for
the impending dissolution of the state, paganism itself is re-
sponsible. Our political power is only of yesterday; it is in
no manner concerned with the gradual developement of luxury
and wickedness, which has been going on for the last thousand
years. Your ancestors made war a trade; they laid under
tribute and enslaved the adjacent nations; but were not pro-
fusion, extravagance, dissipation, the necessary consequences
of conquest? was not Roman idleness the inevitable result
of the filling of Italy with slaves? Every hour rendered wi-
der that bottomless gulf which separates immense riches from
abject poverty. Did not the middle class, in which reside
the virtue and strength of a nation, disappear, and aristocra-
tic families remain in Rome, whose estates in Syria or Spain,
Gaul or Africa, equalled, nay, even exceeded in extent and
revenue illustrious kingdoms, provinces for the annexation of
which the republic of old had decreed triumphs? Was there
not in the streets a profligate rabble living in total idleness,
fed and amused at the expense of the state? We are not an-
swerable for the grinding oppression perpetrated on the rural
populations until they have been driven to despair, their num-
bers so diminishing as to warn us that there is danger of their
being extinguished. We did not suggest to the Emperor Tra-
jan to abandon Dacia, and neglect that policy which fixed the
boundaries of the empire at strong military posts. We did not
suggest to Caracalla to admit all sorts of people to Roman
citizenship, nor dislocate the population by a wild pursuit of

civil offices or the discharge of military duties. We did not crowd Italy with slaves, nor make those miserable men more degraded than the beasts of the field, compelling them to labours which are the business of the brutes. We have taught and practised a very different doctrine from that. We did not nightly put into irons the population of provinces and cities reduced to bondage. We are not responsible for the inevitable insurrections, poisonings, assassinations, vengeance. We did not bring on that state of things in which a man having a patrimony found it his best interest to abandon it without compensation and flee. We did not demoralize the populace by providing them food, games, races, theatres; we have been persecuted because we would not set our feet in a theatre. We did not ruin the senate and aristocracy by sacrificing everything, even ourselves, for the Julian family. We did not neutralize the legions by setting them to fight against one another. We were not the first to degrade Rome; Diocletian, who persecuted us, gave the example by establishing his residence at Nicomedia. As to the sentiment of patriotism, of which you vaunt, was it not destroyed by your own emperors? When they had made Roman citizens of Gauls and Egyptians, Africans and Huns, Spaniards and Syrians, how could they expect that such a motley crew would remain true to the interests of an Italian town, and that town their hatred oppressor? Patriotism depends on concentration; it cannot bear diffusion. Something more than such a worldly tie was wanted to bind the diverse nations together; they have found it in Christianity. A common language imparts community of thought and feeling; but what was to be expected when Greek is the language of one half of the ruling classes, and Latin of the other? we say nothing of the thousand unintelligible forms of speech in use throughout the Roman world. The fall of the senate preceded, by a few years, the origin of Christianity; you will not surely say that we were the inciters of the usurpations of the Cæsars? What have we had to do with the army, that engine of violence, which in ninety-two years gave you thirty-two emperors and twenty-seven pretenders to the throne? We did not suggest to the Prætorian Guards to put up pire at auction.

the em

St. Augustine's City

"Can you really wonder that all this should come to an end? We do not wonder; on the contrary, we thank God for it. It is time that the human race had rest. The sighing of the prisoner, the prayer of the captive, are heard at last. Yet the judgment has been tempered with mercy. Had the pagan Rhadogast taken Rome, not a life would have been spared, no stone left on another. The Christian Alaric, though a Goth, respects his Christian brethren, and for their sakes you are saved. As to the gods, those demons in whom you trust, did they always save you from calamity? How long did Hannibal insult them? Was it a goose or a god that saved the Capitol from Brennus? Where were the gods in all the defeats, some of them but recent, of the pagan emperors? It is well that the purple Babylon has fallen, the harlot who was drunk with the blood of nations.

"In the place of this earthly city, this vaunted mistress of the world, whose fall closes a long career of superstition and sin, there shall arise the City of God.' The purifying fire of the barbarian shall remove her heathenish defilements, and make her fit for the kingdom of Christ. Instead of a thousand years of that night of crime, to which in your despair you look back, there is before her the day of the millennium, predicted by the prophets of old. In her regenerated walls there shall be no taint of sin, but righteousness and peace; no stain of the vanities of the world, no conflicts of ambition, no sordid hunger for gold, no lust after glory, no desire for domination, but holiness to the Lord."

6

Of those who in such sentiments defended the cause of the of God.' new religion, St. Augustine was the chief. In his great work, The City of God,' which may be regarded as the ablest specimen of the early Christian literature, he pursues this theme, if not in the language, at least in the spirit here presented, and through a copious detail of many books. On the later Christianity of the Western churches he has exerted more influence than any other of the Fathers. To him is due much of the precision of our views on original sin, total depravity, grace, predestination, election.

In his early years St. Augustine had led a frivolous and evil

writings of

tine.

life, plunging into all the dissipations of the gay city of Car- Life and thage. Through the devious paths of Manichæism, astrology, St. Augusand scepticism, he at last arrived at the truth. It was not, however, to the Fathers, but Cicero, to whom the good change was due; the writings of that great orator won him over to a love of wisdom, weaning him from the pleasures of the theatre, and the follies of divination and superstition. From his Manichæan errors, however, he was snatched by Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, who baptized him, together with his illegitimate son Adeodatus. In his writings we may, without difficulty, recognize the vestiges of Magianism, not as regards the duality of God, but as respects the division of mankind—the elect and lost; the kingdoms of grace and perdition, of God and the Devil; answering to the Oriental ideas of the rule of light and darkness. From Ambrose, St. Augustine learned those high Trinitarian doctrines which were soon enforced in the West.

In his philosophical disquisitions on Time, Matter, Memory, this far-famed writer is however always unsatisfactory, often trivial. His doctrine that Scripture, as the Word of God, is capable of a manifold meaning, led him into many delusions, and exercised, in subsequent ages, a most baneful influence on true science. Thus he finds in the Mosaic account of the creation proofs of the Trinity; that the firmament spoken of therein is the type of God's word; and that there is a correspondence between creation itself and the Church. His numerous books have often been translated, especially his Confessions, a work that has delighted and edified fifty generations, but which must, after all, yield the palm, as a literary production, to the writings of Bunyan, who, like Augustine, gave himself up to all the agony of unsparing personal examination and relentless self-condemnation, anatomizing his very soul, and dragging forth every sin into the face of day.

The ecclesiastical influence of St. Augustine has so completely eclipsed his political biography, that but little attention has been given to his conduct in the interesting time in which he lived. Sismondi recalls to his disadvantage that he was the friend of Count Boniface, who invited Genseric and his

Propitious effect of Alaric's siege.

Vandals into Africa; the bloody consequences of that conspiracy cannot be exaggerated. It was through him that the Count's name has been transmitted to posterity without infamy. Boniface was with him when he died, at Hippo, August 28th, A.D. 430.

When Rome thus fell before Alaric, so far from the provincial Christians bewailing her misfortune, they actually gloried in it. They critically distinguished between the downfall of the purple pagan harlot and the untouched city of God. The vengeance of the Goth had fallen on the temples, but the churches had been spared. Though in subsequent and not very distant calamities of the city these triumphant distinctions could scarcely be maintained, there can be no doubt that that catastrophe singularly developed Papal power. The abasement of the ancient aristocracy brought into relief the bishop. It has been truly said that, as Rome rose from her ruins, the bishop was discerned to be her most conspicuous man. Most opportunely, at this period Jerome had completed his Latin translation of the Bible. The Vulgate henceforth became the ecclesiastical authority of the West. The influence of the heathen classics, which that austere anchoret had in early life admired, but had vainly attempted to free himself from by unremitting nocturnal flagellations, appears in this great version. It came at a critical moment for the West. In the politic non-committalism of Rome, it was not expedient that a Pope should be an author. The Vulgate was all that the times required. Henceforth the East might occupy herself in the harmless fabrication of creeds and of heresies; the West could develope her practical talent in the much more important organization of ecclesiastical power.

Doubtless not without interest will the reader of these pages remark how closely the process of ecclesiastical events resembles that of civil. In both there is an irresistible tendency to the concentration of power. As in Roman history we have seen a few families, and, indeed, at last, one man grasp the influence which in earlier times was disseminated among the people, so in the Church the congregations are quickly found in subordination to their bishops, and these, in their turn,