challenges the slight difficulty that it appears
to be telling God what God knew already. But that is the difficulty
which every prayer also challenges. To those we love, are we not fond of
telling many things about ourselves which they know already? A prayer,
such confessions as these, are addressed to God by one of those
subterfuges by which it is necessary to approach the unseen and
infinite, under at least a disguise of mortality. And the whole book, as
no other such book has ever been, is lyrical. This prose, so simple, so
familiar, has in it the exaltation of poetry. It can pass, without a
change of tone, from the boy's stealing of pears: 'If aught of those
pears came within my mouth, what sweetened it was the sin'; to a tender
human affection: 'And now he lives in Abraham's bosom: whatever that be
which is signified by that bosom, there lives my Nebridius, my sweet
friend'; and from that to the saint's rare, last ecstasy: 'And sometimes
Thou admittedst me to an affection, very unusual, in my inmost soul,
rising to a strange sweetness, which if it were perfected in me, I know
not what in it would not belong to the life to come.' And even
self-analysis, of which there is so much, becoming at times a kind of
mathematics, even those metaphysical subtleties which seem, to sharpen
thought upon thought to an almost invisible fineness of edge, become
also lyrical, inter-penetrated as they are with this sense of the
divine.

To St. Augustine all life is seen only in its relation to the divine;
looked at from any other side, it has no meaning, and, looked at even
with this light upon it, is but for the most part seen as a blundering
in the dark, a wandering from the right path. In so far as it is
natural, it is evil. In so far as it is corrected by divine grace, it
leaves the human actors in it without merit; since all virtue is God's,
though all vice is man's.

This conception of life is certainly valuable in giving harmony to the
book, presenting as it does a sort of background. It brings with it a
very impressive kind of symbolism into its record of actual facts, to
all of which it gives a value, not in themselves, if you please to put
it so, or, perhaps more properly, their essential value. When nothing
which happens, happens except under God's direct responsibility, when
nothing is said which is not one of your 'lines' in the drama which is
being played, not so much by as through you, there can be no
exteriorities,