their attendant results, are the
preparation for that mystical fact.

XIII

ST. AUGUSTINE AND THE CHURCH

The full force of the conflict which was enacted in the souls of
Christian believers during the transition from paganism to the new
religion is exhibited in the person of St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430).
The spiritual struggles of Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory
Nazianzen, Jerome, and others are full of mysterious interest when we
see them calmed and laid to rest in the mind of Augustine.

In Augustine's personality deep spiritual needs developed out of a
passionate nature. He passed through pagan and semi-Christian ideas.
He suffered deeply from the most appalling doubts of the land which
attack one who has felt the impotence of many varieties of thought in
the face of spiritual problems, and who has tasted the depressing
effect of the question: "Can man know anything whatever?"

At the beginning of his struggles, Augustine's thoughts clung to the
perishable things of sense. He could only picture the spiritual to
himself in material images. It is a deliverance for him when he rises
above this stage. He thus describes it in his _Confessions_: "When I
wished to think of God, I could only imagine immense masses of bodies
and believed that was the only kind of thing that could exist. This
was the chief and almost the only cause of the errors which I could
not avoid." He thus indicates the point at which a person must arrive
who is seeking the true life of the spirit. There are thinkers, not a
few, who maintain that it is impossible to arrive at pure thought,
free from any material admixture. These thinkers confuse what they
feel bound to say about their own inner life, with what is humanly
possible. The truth rather is that it is only possible to arrive at
higher knowledge when thought has been liberated from all material
things, when an inner life has been developed in which images of
reality do not cease when their demonstration in sense-impressions
comes to an end. Augustine relates how he attained to spiritual
vision. Everywhere he asked where the divine was to be found. "I asked
the earth and she said 'I am not it' and all that was upon the earth
said the same. I asked the ocean and the abysses and all that lives in
them, which said, 'We are not thy God, seek beyond us.' I asked the
winds, and the whole atmosphere and its inhabitants said, 'The
philosophers who sought for the essence of things in