troops. Almost everywhere the struggle between Donatists and Catholics
still went on below the surface. There cannot be the least doubt that
Thagaste took its share in these quarrels. To those who urged him to be
baptized, the father of Augustin might well answer with ironic politeness:
"I am only waiting till you agree among yourselves, to see where the truth
lies." In his heart this rather lukewarm pagan had no inveterate dislike to
Christianity.

What proves it at once is that he married a Christian.

How did Monnica become the wife of Patricius? How did these two beings, so
little alike, between whom there was such a great difference of age, not to
mention all the rest, come to join their fate? Those are questions which
it would never have occurred to the people of Thagaste to ask. Patricius
married to be like everybody else--and also because he was well over forty,
and his mother an old woman who would soon be no longer able to run his
house.

Monnica also had her mother. The two old women had a meeting, with many
politenesses and ceremonious bowings, and because the thing appeared to
them reasonable and most suitable, they settled the marriage. Had Patricius
ever seen the girl that he was going to take, according to custom, so as to
have a child-bearer and housewife? It is quite likely he had not. Was she
pretty, rich, or poor? He considered such matters as secondary, since the
marriage was not a love-match but a traditional duty to fulfil. If the
union was respectable, that was quite enough. But however the matter fell
out, what is certain is that Monnica was very young. She was twenty-two
when Augustin was born, and he was probably not her first child. We know
that she was hardly marriageable when she was handed over, as Arab parents
do to-day with their adolescent or little girls, to the man who was going