ther draw him'--a drawing which awakens a
hunger and thirst for Christ and God (1 John iv. 10, 19; John vi. 44;
iv. 14; vi. 35).

The Third Stage we can find in St. Augustine, who, born a North African
Roman (A.D. 354) and a convert from an impure life and Manichaeism, with
its spatially extended God (A.D. 386), wrote his _Confessions_ in 397,
lived to experience the capture and sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth,
410, composed his great work, _The City of God_, amidst the clear
dissolution of a mighty past and the dim presage of a problematical
future, and died at Hippo, his episcopal city, in 430, whilst the
Vandals were besieging it. St. Augustine is more largely a convert and a
rigorist even than St. Paul when St. Paul is most incisive. But here he
shall testify only to the natures of Eternity and of real time, a matter
in which he remains unequalled in the delicate vividness and balance of
his psychological analysis and religious perception. 'Thou, O God,
precedest all past times by the height of Thine ever-present Eternity;
and Thou exceedest all future times, since they _are_ future, and, once
they have come, will be past times. All thy years abide together,
because they abide; but these our years will all be, only when they all
will have ceased to be. Thy years are but One Day--not every day, but
To-Day. This Thy To-Day is Eternity'.[46] The human soul, even in this
life, has moments of a vivid apprehension of Eternity, as in the great
scene of Augustine and Monica at the window in Ostia.[47] And this our
sense of Eternity, Beatitude, God, proceeds at bottom from Himself,
immediately present in our lives; the succession, duration of man is
sustained by the Simultaneity, the Eternity of God: 'this day of ours
_does_ pass within Thee, since all these things' of our deeper
experience 'have no means of passing unless, somehow, Thou dost contain
them all'. 'Behold, Thou wast within, and I was without ... Thou wast
with me, but I was not with Thee.' 'Is not the blessed life precisely
_that_ life which all men desire? Even those who only hope to be blessed
would not, unless they in some manner already possessed the blessed
life, desire to be blessed, as, in reality, it is most certain that they
desire to be.'[48] Especially satisfactory is the insistence upon the
futility of the question as to what God was doing in Time before He
created. Time is only a quality inherent in all creatures; it never
existed of itself.[49]