may we be taught how to sanctify things common, by first sanctifying the vessel, wherein they are received, our own hearts; which, as it has been for fourteen centuries the fruit of this work of St. Augustine in our Western Church, so may it, by His mercy, again in this our portion of it. Oxford, Feast of St. Bartholomew, 1838. E. B. P. d CONTENTS. THE FIRST BOOK. Confessions of the greatness and unsearchableness of God, of God's mercies in infancy and boyhood, and human wilfulness; of his own sins of idleness, abuse of his studies, and of God's gifts up to his fifteenth year. page 1 THE SECOND BOOK. Object of these Confessions. Further ills of idleness developed in his sixteenth year. Evils of ill society, which betrayed him into theft. 19 THE THIRD BOOK. His residence at Carthage from his seventeenth to his nineteenth year. Source of his disorders. Love of shows. Advance in studies, and love of wisdom. Distaste for Scripture. Led astray to the Manichæans. Refutation of some of their tenets. Grief of his mother Monnica at his heresy, and prayers for his conversion. Her vision from God, and answer through a Bishop. 29 THE FOURTH BOOK. Aug.'s life from nineteen to eight and twenty; himself a Manichæan, and seducing others to the same heresy; partial obedience amidst vanity and sin; consulting astrologers, only partially shaken herein; loss of an early friend, who is converted by being baptized when in a swoon; reflections on grief, on real and unreal friendship, and love of fame; writes on "the fair and fit," yet cannot rightly, though God had given him great talents, since he entertained wrong notions of God; and so even his knowledge he applied ill. d 45 S. Aug.'s twenty-ninth year. Faustus, a snare of Satan to many, made an instrument of deliverance to S. Aug., by shewing the ignorance of the Manichees on those things, wherein they professed to have divine knowledge. Aug. gives up all thought of going further among the Manichees is guided to Rome and Milan, where he hears S. Ambrose, leaves the Manichees, and becomes again a Catechumen in the Church Arrival of Monnica at Milan; her obedience to S. Ambrose, and his value for her; S. Ambrose's habits; Aug.'s gradual abandonment of error; finds that he has blamed the Church Catholic wrongly; desire of absolute certainty, but struck with the contrary analogy of God's natural Providence; how shaken in his worldly pursuits; God's guidance of his friend Alypius; Aug. debates with himself and his friends about their mode of life; his inveterate sins, and dread of Aug.'s thirty-first year; gradually extricated from his errors, but still with material conceptions of God; much aided by an argument of Nebridius; sees that the cause of sin lies in free-will, rejects the Mani- chæan heresy, but cannot altogether embrace the doctrine of the Church; recovered from the belief in Astrology, but miserably per- plexed about the origin of evil; is led to find in the Platonists the seeds of the doctrine of the Divinity of the WORD, but not of His humiliation; hence he obtains clearer notions of God's majesty, but, not knowing Christ to be the Mediator, remains estranged from Him; all his doubts removed by the study of Holy Scripture, especially Aug.'s thirty-second year. He consults Simplicianus; from him hears the history of the conversion of Victorinus, and longs to devote himself entirely to God, but is mastered by his old habits; is still further roused by the history of S. Antony, and of the conversion of two courtiers; during a severe struggle, hears a voice from heaven, opens Scripture, and is converted, with his friend Alypius. His Aug. determines to devote his life to God, and to abandon his profession of Rhetoric, quietly however; retires to the country to prepare himself to receive the grace of Baptism, and is baptized with Alypius, and his son Adeodatus. At Ostia, in his way to Africa, his mother Monnica dies, in her fifty-sixth year, the thirty-third of Augustine. Her life and character. 155 THE TENTH BOOK. Having in the former books spoken of himself before his receiving the grace of Baptism, in this Aug. confesses what he then was. But first, he enquires by what faculty we can know God at all; whence he enlarges on the mysterious character of the memory, wherein God, being made known, dwells, but which could not discover Him. Then he examines his own trials under the triple division of temptation, "lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride;" what Christian continency prescribes as to each. On Christ the Only Mediator, who heals and will heal all infirmities. 182 THE ELEVENTH BOOK. Aug. breaks off the history of the mode whereby God led him to holy Orders, in order to "confess" God's mercies in opening to him the Scripture. Moses is not to be understood, but in Christ, not even the first words In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Answer to cavillers who asked, "what did God before He created the heaven and the earth, and whence willed He at length to make them, whereas He did not make them before?" Inquiry into the nature of Time. 225 THE TWELFTH BOOK. Aug. proceeds to comment on Gen. 1, 1. and explains the "heaven" to mean that spiritual and incorporeal creation, which cleaves to God unintermittingly, always beholding His countenance; "earth," the . formless matter whereof the corporeal creation was afterwards formed. He does not reject, however, other interpretations, which he adduces, but rather confesses that such is the depth of Holy Scripture, that manifold senses may and ought to be extracted from it, and that whatever truth can be obtained from his words, does, in fact, lie concealed in them. 249 |