Into the details of that life it is impossible to enter here; it must
suffice to indicate some of the ways in which as a writer he gained and
still holds a high place in Western Christendom, having had an influence
which can be paralleled, from among uninspired men, only by that of
Aristotle. He maintained the unity of the Church, and its true breadth,
against the Donatists; he argued, as he so well could argue, against the
irreligion of the Manichaeans; when the great Pelagian heresy arose, he
defended the truth of the doctrine of divine grace as no one could have
done who had not learned by experience its power in the regeneration and
conversion of his own soul; he brought out from the treasures of Holy
Scripture ample lessons of truth and duty, in simple exposition and
exhortation; and in full treatises he stated and enforced the great
doctrines of Christianity.

Augustine was not alone or chiefly the stern theologian whom men picture
to themselves when they are told that he was the Calvin of those early
days, or when they read from his voluminous and often illogical writings
quotations which have a hard sound. If he taught a stern doctrine of
predestinarianism, he taught also the great power of sacramental grace;
if he dwelt at times on the awfulness of the divine justice, he spoke
also from the depths of his experience of the power of the divine love;
and his influence on the ages has been rather that of the
'Confessions'--taking their key-note from the words of the first
chapter, "Thou, O Lord, hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is
unquiet until it find rest in Thee"--than that of the writings which
have earned for their author the foremost place among the Doctors of the
Western Church. But his greatest work, without any doubt, is the
treatise on the 'City of God.' The Roman empire, as Augustine's life
passed on, was hastening to its end. Moral and political declension had