suffering in exasperating the desire for pleasure. "The soul of antiquity
was rude and vain." It was, above all, limited. The soul of Augustin is
tender and serious, eager for certainties and those enjoyments which do
not betray. It is vast and sonorous; let it be stirred ever so little, and
from it go forth deep vibrations which render the sound of the infinite.
Augustin, before his conversion, had the apprehensions of our Romantics,
the causeless melancholy and sadness, the immense yearnings for "anywhere
but here," which overwhelmed our fathers. He is really very close to us.

He has broadened our Latin souls by reconciling us with the Barbarian. The
Latin, like the Greek, only understood himself. The Barbarian had not the
right to express himself in the language of the Empire. The world was split
into two parts which endeavoured to ignore each other, Augustin has made us
conscious of the nameless regions, the vague countries of the soul, which
hitherto had lain shrouded in the darkness of barbarism. By him the union
of the Semitic and the Occidental genius is consummated. He has acted as
our interpreter for the Bible. The harsh Hebraic words become soft to our
ears by their passage through the cultivated mouth of the rhetorician. He
has subjugated us with the word of God. He is a Latin who speaks to us of
Jehovah.

Others, no doubt, had done it before him. But none had found a similar
emotion, a note of tenderness so moving. The gentle violence of his charity
wins the adherence of hearts. He breathes only charity. After St. John, it
is he who is the Apostle of Love.

His tireless voice dominated the whole of the West. The Middle Ages still
heard it. For centuries his sermons and treatises were copied over and
over again; they were repeated in cathedrals, commented in abstracts of
theology. People came to accept even his theory of the fine arts. All that