hurch.

Now had it not been for Augustine,--a profound thinker, a man of
boundless influence and authority,--it is not unlikely that Pelagianism
would have taken so deep a root in the mind of Christendom, especially
in the hearts of princes and nobles, that it would have become the creed
of the Church. Even as it was, it was never fully eradicated in the
schools and in the courts and among worldly people of culture
and fashion.

But the fame of Augustine does not rest on his controversies with
heretics and schismatics alone. He wrote treatises on almost all
subjects of vital interest to the Church. His essay on the Trinity was
worthy of Athanasius, and has never been surpassed in lucidity and
power. His soliloquies on a blissful life, and the order of the
universe, and the immortality of the soul are pregnant with the richest
thought, equal to the best treatises of Cicero or Boethius. His
commentary on the Psalms is sparkling with tender effusions, in which
every thought is a sentiment and every sentiment is a blazing flame of
piety and love. Perhaps his greatest work was the amusement of his
leisure hours for thirteen years,--a philosophical treatise called "The
City of God," in which he raises and replies to all the great questions
of his day; a sort of Christian poem upon our origin and end, and a
final answer to Pagan theogonies,--a final sentence on all the gods of
antiquity. In that marvellous book he soars above his ordinary
excellence, and develops the designs of God in the history of States and
empires, furnishing for Bossuet the groundwork of his universal history.
Its great excellence, however, is its triumphant defence of Christianity
over all other religions,--the last of the great apologies which, while
settling the faith of the Christian world, demolished forever the last
stronghold of a defeated Paganism. As "ancient Egypt pronounced
judgments on her departed kings before proceeding to their burial, so
Augustine interrogates the gods of antiquity, shows their impotence to
sustain the people who worshipped them, triumphantly sings their
departed greatness, and seals with his powerful hand the sepulchre into
which they were consigned forever."

Besides all the treatises of Augustine,--exegetical, apologetical,
dogmatical, polemical, ascetic, and autobiographical,--three hundred and
sixty-three of his sermons have come down to us, and numerous letters to
the great men and women of his time. Perhaps he wr