-stone to salvation. Scarcely had it been born out of
rhetoric when it was smothered in authority. Yet even in that precarious
and episodic form it acquired a wonderful sweep, depth, and technical
elaboration. He stands at the watershed of history, looking over either
land; his invectives teach us almost as much of paganism and heresy as
his exhortations do of Catholicism. To Greek subtlety he joins Hebrew
fervour and monkish intolerance; he has a Latin amplitude and (it must
be confessed) coarseness of feeling; but above all he is the illumined,
enraptured, forgiven saint. In him theology, however speculative,
remains a vehicle for living piety; and while he has, perhaps, done more
than any other man to materialise Christianity, no one was ever more
truly filled with its spirit.

[Sidenote: He achieves Platonism.]

Saint Augustine was a thorough Platonist, but to reach that position he
had to pass in his youth through severe mental struggles. The difficult
triumph over the sensuous imagination by which he attained the
conception of intelligible objects was won only after long discipline
and much reading of Platonising philosophers. Every reality seemed to
him at first an object of sense: God, if he existed, must be
perceptible, for to Saint Augustine's mind also, at this early and
sensuous stage of its development, _esse_ was _percipi_. He might never
have worked himself loose from these limitations, with which his vivid
fancy and not too delicate eloquence might easily have been satisfied,
had it not been for his preoccupation with theology. God must somehow be
conceived; for no one in that age of religious need and of theological
passion felt both more intensely than Saint Augustine. If sensible
objects alone were real, God must be somewhere discoverable in space; he
must either have a body like the human, or be the body of the universe,
or some subtler body permeating and moving all the rest.

These conceptions all offered serious dialectical difficulties, and,
what was more to the point, they did not satisfy the religious and
idealistic instinct which the whole movement of Saint Augustine's mind
obeyed. So he pressed his inquiries farther. At length meditation, and
more, perhaps, that experience of the flux and vanity of natural things
on which Plato himself had built his heaven of ideas, persuaded him that
reality and substantiality, in any eulogistic sense, must belong rather
to the imperceptible and eternal. O