other against every seduction of worldliness, when they could not participate in political power, and when that power was wielded despotically either by friendly or unfriendly hands: but Cicero can only cry, "When the Senate has been extinguished, and the tribunals swept away, what is there for us to do worthy of ourselves in the senate-house or the forum?" So he retired to his country-houses, and sketched the camps of contending Stoics and Epicureans from his small academical watch-box, which he could shift as occasion served to all points of the compass. Yet this man did not want physical courage: once more he returned to Rome; he tried to breathe life and unity into those whose selfishness was too great for freedom; and when this failed, and his name was the first on the list of the proscribed, he looked his murderer in the face, and died without swerving. What he needed was, belief in a personal God, in whom he was to live, and for whom he was to die, and a will which would have rested secure upon that immutable truth.

Cicero lived in the agony of the Roman republic: let us pass on four hundred and fifty years, until we come to one who lived in the agony of the Roman empire. The Senate's successor was the stern military monarchy of the Cæsars; the Cæsars' successors were the barbarians of the north. If the change from the first

* De Officiis, ii. 1.

to the second was a great crisis in the world's affairs, assuredly the change from the second to the third was a greater still. The former change will be for ever one of the most instructive points in ancient history; from the latter, all Europe, and we ourselves as a portion of it, are sprung. We have seen how a great heathen Roman met the former change: what resources he found in society, in letters, in his own heart: how far, when a blight passed over his outward world, he was able to find a new world within. Now let us consider a great Christian Roman at the time of the latter change: let us see what were his hopes and fears; what view he took of society and man, of the world and government; above all what was his own inward life, the core and marrow of the man.

Augustine was born in the year 354 at Thagaste, a town of Africa, in which his father was a burgess of very moderate fortune. He completes his education at Carthage, and becomes a teacher of rhetoric, that is, one who made literature his profession, first at Thagaste, from his twenty-first to his twenty-fourth year; next at Carthage, from his twenty-fourth to his twenty-ninth year; thirdly at Rome for a short time, whence, in his thirtieth year, he moves to Milan, where for two years he holds a public professorship, and is, as he says himself, a "seller of words." A catechumen from his birth, through his mother's piety, and brought up in the Catholic faith, he fell at nineteen into the

Manichean heresy, and remained in it during nine years. He has given us a picture of himself drawn to the life during these two years at Milan, listening with pleasure to St. Ambrose, first attracted by his eloquence, and gradually won over to the truth which he set forth. With infinite labour he disengages himself from one prejudice after another which the Manichean heresy had instilled into him against the Catholic faith. And now, indeed, he was no longer a Manichean, but he had fallen into Cicero's state of doubt, and could see truth and certainty nowhere: and he was bound as with an iron chain by the three concupiscences of the world. "I longed," he says, "after honours, wealth, and wedlock; and Thou," addressing God, "didst mock me. I suffered under these desires the bitterest difficulties, in which Thou wast the kinder by not permitting any thing to become sweet to me which was not Thyself. See my heart, O Lord, whose will it was that I should remember this and confess it to Thee. Now let my soul lay firm hold of Thee, the soul which Thou didst extricate from the tenacious grasp of death. How wretched it was! and Thou didst prick my wound in order that, deserting every thing, it might be converted to Thee, who art over all, without whom all else is nothing; might be converted and be healed."* And his friends Alypius and Nebridius were living with him: he

*St. Aug. Conf. vi. 6.

calls himself and them "three hungry mouths gasping out to each other their wants, and waiting upon Thee to give them food in due season. And in all the bitterness which, through Thy mercy, followed our acts of worldliness, when we considered the end for which we were suffering this, dark phantoms met us, and we turned away groaning and saying, How long shall this last? And this we said very often, but did not desert the objects we were pursuing, because nothing distinct shone out before us which we could lay hold upon after relinquishing the other."* He was astonished at himself to think that for eleven years he had been in passionate pursuit of wisdom; and still for two years more he remained struggling to be free from every fetter of the world, " yet bound," he says, "by the closest chain of desire for female love, and the servitude of secular business." For it must be added that, when only seventeen, he had attached himself, not in marriage, to a person with whom he had now lived thirteen years; that a marriage had been arranged for him, for which, however, on account of the bride's youth, it was requisite to wait two years. With a view to this he had discarded his mistress, who left him to return into Africa, and led evermore a single life; while he, unable, as he says, to imitate her, took another in the interval before his intended marriage. Thus † Id. viii. 15.

* Conf. vi, 18.

fell

torn asunder between the desire of truth, certainty, and peace, on the one side, and the tyranny of worldly passions on the other, he was approaching the end of his thirty-second year. A friend, by name Pontitianus, called upon him, and the conversation upon the Egyptian monks and the fathers of the desert. The subject was new to Augustine and Alypius: "We listened," he says, "in intense silence. He told us, then, how one afternoon at Treves, when the emperor was taken up with the circensian games, he and three others, his companions, went out to walk in gardens near the city walls; and there, as they happened to walk in pairs, one went apart with him, and the other two wandered by themselves; and these in their wanderings lighted upon a certain cottage inhabited by servants of Thine, poor in spirit, of whom is the kingdom of heaven, and there they found a little book containing the life of Antony. This one of them began to read, admire, and kindle at it; and as he read to meditate on taking up such a life, and giving over his secular service to serve Thee. And these two were of those whom they style agents for the public affairs. Then suddenly filled with a holy love and a sober shame, in anger with himself he cast his eyes upon his friend, saying, 'Tell me, I pray thee, what seek we to attain by all these labours of ours? What aim we at? What serve we for? Can our hopes in court rise higher than to be the emperor's favourites? And in this what is there