who is the beginning of our wisdom,
which is thy wisdom, born of thyself, equal unto thee and coeternal,
that is, in thy Son, createdst heaven and earth. Much now have we said
of the heaven of heavens, and of the earth invisible and without form,
and of the darksome deep, in reference to the wandering instability of
its spiritual deformity, unless it had been converted unto him, from
whom it had its then degree of life, and by his enlightening became a
beauteous life, and the heaven of that heaven, which was afterward
set between water and water. And under the name of God, I now held the
Father, who made these things; and under the name of the beginning, the
Son, in whom he made these things; and believing, as I did, my God as
the Trinity, I searched further in his holy words, and lo! thy Spirit
moved upon the waters. Behold the Trinity, my God!--Father, and Son, and
Holy Ghost Creator of all creation."

That I might convey to my reader a just impression of the character of
St. Augustine's philosophical writings, I have, in the two quotations
here given, substituted for my own translation that of the Rev. Dr.
Pusey, as contained in Vol. I. of the "Library of Fathers of the Holy
Catholic Church," published at Oxford, 1840.

Considering the eminent authority which has been attributed to the
writings of St. Augustine by the religious world for nearly fifteen
centuries, it is proper to speak of them with respect. And indeed it
is not necessary to do otherwise. The paragraphs here quoted criticise
themselves. No one did more than this Father to bring science and
religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible
from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the
perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious
tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of
followers; the works of the great Greek philosophers were stigmatized
as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of
Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism,
and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the
destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance.

A divine revelation of science admits of no improvement, no change, no
advance. It discourages as needless, and indeed as presumptuous, all new
discovery, considering it as an unlawful prying into things which it was
the intention of God to conceal.

What, then