world, on the eve of the great cataclysm which was going to carry away an
entire civilization--a tragic turning-point of history, a time troubled and
often very grievous, which was hard to live in for all, and to even the
most determined minds must have appeared desperate. The peace of the Church
was not yet settled; consciences were divided. People hesitated between the
belief of yesterday and the belief of to-morrow. Augustin was among those
who had the courage to choose, and who, having once chosen their faith,
proclaimed it without weakening. The belief of a thousand years was dying
out, quenched by a young belief to which was promised an eternal duration.
How many delicate souls must have suffered from this division, which cut
them off from their traditions and obliged them, as they thought, to be
false to their dead along with the religion of their ancestors! All the
irritations which the fanatics of to-day inflict upon believing souls, many
must have had to suffer then. The sceptics were infused by the intolerance
of the others. But the worst (even as it is to-day) was to watch the
torrent of foolishness which, under cover of religion, philosophy, or
miracle-working, pretended to the conquest of mind and will. Amid this mass
of wildest doctrines and heresies, in this orgy of vapid intellectualism,
they had indeed solid heads who were able to resist the general
intoxication. And among all these people talking nonsense, Augustin appears
admirable with his good sense.

This "intellectual," this mystic, was not only a man of prayer and
meditation. The prudence of the man of action and the administrator
balanced his outbursts of dialectical subtility, often carried too far. He
had that sense of realities such as we flatter ourselves that we have; he
had a knowledge of life and passion. Compared to the experience of, say,
Bossuet, how much wider was Augustin's! And with all that, a quivering
sensitiveness which is again like our own--the sensitiveness of times of
intense culture, wherein the abuse of thought has multiplied the ways of