Augustina

“ Why, he has made it all! And he loves his work. Of course I see that—now—he thinks it a sin—what happened last year—your engagement. But all the same, he can't tear his heart away from you. I can't understand it. It seems to me almost terrible—to love as he loves you."
"Dear Augustina, don't—don't say such things." The girl fell on her knees beside her stepmother. Her pride was broken; her face convulsed. "Why, you don't know, dear! He has lost all love for me. He says hard things to me even. He judges me like—like a stranger." She looked at Augustina imploringly through her tears. ”

“ We must believe for ourselves the Church is the only way. But God is so merciful! But you—it is offered to you, Laura. And Alan's love with it. Just so little on your part—the Church is so tender, so indulgent! She does not expect a perfect faith all at once. One must just make the step blindly—obey—throw oneself into her arms. Father Leadham said so to me one day—-not minding what one thinks and believes—not looking at oneself—just obeying—and it will all come!"
But Laura could not speak. Little Augustina, full of a pleading, an apostolic strength, looked at her tenderly. ”

“ In his consecrated learning and passionate devotion to God, Augustine again reminds one of St. Paul. Truly could he say: ‘The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up’; and so was often pictured with upturned eye, with a pen in his left hand, and a burning heart in his right. He was a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeeding centuries. He had a mind uncommonly fertile and deep, bold and soaring; and with it, what is better, a heart full of Christian love and humility. ”

“ Augustine speaks truly when he says, 'the eyes every day cast us into all sin and crime; what has been created that is more subtle than the eye?' My heart was pure, it harboured no thought but of God; but these eyes, subtle to betray me, have cast me into temptation, they have destroyed the peace of my soul, for even now they still bring the sinful image before my mind again and again. They paint it on the blue sky, on the pillars of the church, on my prayer-book--nay, on the altar-cloth. ”

“ This is the grace which we beg of the Holy Ghost, through the hands of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the holy angels, and also through the humility of the wonderfully humble St. Augustine.
To prove the great esteem and honor in which Augustine was held by the world I need not seek long; the gospel of to-day furnishes me with a sufficient basis for it: " A city seated on a mountain cannot be hid. An unusually brilliant light cannot fail to be remarked unless every one is stone-blind. ”

“ In God’s searching presence, Augustine undertakes to plumb the depths of his memory to trace the mysterious pilgrimage of grace which his life has been--and to praise God for his constant and omnipotent grace. In a mood of sustained prayer, he recalls what he can of his infancy, his learning to speak, and his childhood experiences in school. He concludes with a paean of grateful praise to God.
Chapter I 1. “Great art thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is thy power, and infinite is thy wisdom.” ”

“ It would be a vain and useless labor for me to undertake to day to prove that Augustine is a great saint; there is nothing better known in the world, both among the learned and the ignorant; it is proclaimed by the dumb books in libraries, written by pens in the universities, spoken of by tongues in the pulpits; whenever the name of Augustine is mentioned you hear the great Augustine spoken of. So that one who has even a little knowledge of the Saint must, whenever he thinks of him, look on him as a great saint. ”

“ Despite its awkward form, however, the Enchiridion is one of the most important of all of Augustine’s writings, for it is a conscious effort of the theological magistrate of the Western Church to stand on final ground of testimony to the Christian truth.
For his framework, Augustine chooses the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. The treatise begins, naturally enough, with a discussion of God’s work in creation. Augustine makes a firm distinction between the comparatively unimportant knowledge of nature and the supremely important acknowledgment of the Creator of nature. ”

“ On the other side of the hill, near the Circus, Saint Augustine taught rhetoric for a living, though he knew no Greek and was perhaps no great Latin scholar either—still an unbeliever then, an astrologer and a follower after strange doctrines, one whom no man could have taken for a future bishop and Father of the Church, who was to be author of two hundred and thirty-two theological treatises, as well as of an exposition of the Psalms and the Gospels. ”

“ There is a manifest eagerness to have him share in his own flashes of insight and his sudden glimpses of God’s glory. Augustine’s style is deeply personal; it is therefore idiomatic, and often colloquial. Even in his knottiest arguments, or in the labyrinthine mazes of his allegorizing (e.g., Confessions, Bk. XIII, or Enchiridion, XVIII) , he seeks to maintain contact with his reader in genuine respect and openness. He is never content to seek and find the truth in solitude. ”

“ Bishop Jansen of Ypres in Belgium had devoted his life to the study of Saint Augustine and to the elucidation of the doctrines of that great father of the church. Saint Augustine is the spiritual forefather of those who in religious thought are believers in determinism, in religious fatalism, with all the consequences which it involves, such as predestination and the doctrine of primitive sin which man is apparently endeavoring in vain to expiate. ”

“ Mademoiselle Augustine, who was but just eighteen, was not like either her father or her mother. She was one of those daughters whose total absence of any physical affinity with their parents makes one believe in the adage: “God gives children.” Augustine was little, or, to describe her more truly, delicately made. Full of gracious candor, a man of the world could have found no fault in the charming girl beyond a certain meanness of gesture or vulgarity of attitude, and sometimes a want of ease. ”

“ Tolerance was shown respecting heathen fanes and sacrificial feastings; the fanes should be reconsecrated as Christian churches; the feasts should be continued in honour of the true God. [8]
Besides zeal and knowledge and authority, miracles advanced Augustine's enterprise. To eliminate by any sweeping negation the miraculous element from the causes of success of such a mission is to close the eyes to the situation. All men expected miracles; Gregory who sent Augustine was infatuated with them. Augustine performed them, or believed he did, and others believed it too. ”

“ The views of Augustine were infinitely more cheerful than those of his adversary respecting salvation, since they gave more hope to the miserable population of the Empire who could not claim the virtues of Pelagius, and were impotent of themselves to break away from the bondage which degraded them. There is nothing in the writings of Augustine,--not in this controversy, or any other controversy,--to show that God delights in the miseries or the penalty which are indissolubly connected with sin ”

“ But Christ himself is the rock, not a mortal man. "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ,"--a truth reiterated even by Saint Augustine, the great and acknowledged theologian of the Catholic Church, although Augustine's views of sin and depravity are no more relished by the Roman Catholics of our day than the doctrines of Luther himself, who drew his theological system, like Calvin, from Augustine more than from any other man, except Saint Paul. ”

“ Taken together, the Confessions and the Enchiridion give us two very important vantage points from which to view the Augustinian perspective as a whole, since they represent both his early and his mature formulation. From them, we can gain a competent--though by no means complete--introduction to the heart and mind of this great Christian saint and sage. There are important differences between the two works, and these ought to be noted by the careful reader. But all the main themes of Augustinian Christianity appear in them, and through them we can penetrate to its inner dynamic core. ”

“ Of the four great Fathers of the Church he was admittedly the greatest—more profound than Ambrose, his spiritual father, more original and systematic than Jerome, his correspondent, and intellectually far more distinguished than Gregory the Great, his pupil on the papal throne. The theological position and influence of Augustine may be said to be unrivalled. No single name has ever exercised such power over the Christian Church, and no one mind ever made so deep an impression upon Christian thought. ”

“ The holy Saint Monica thus saw the blessed Augustine standing clothed in white among the angels while he was yet a worldling and unbeliever, and thereby received the grace to continue her prayers for thirty years, till she saw him a holy bishop. This is a sure sign that this young man, whoever he may be, shall attain Paradise through your prayers. ”

“ The book closes with a moving prayer for the souls of Monica, Patricius, and all his fellow citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem.
Chapter I 1. “O Lord, I am thy servant; I am thy servant and the son of thy handmaid. Thou hast loosed my bonds. I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving.” [1] Let my heart and my tongue praise thee, and let all my bones say, “Lord, who is like unto thee?” Let them say so, and answer thou me and say unto my soul, “I am your salvation.”
Who am I, and what is my nature? What evil is there not in me and my deeds ”

“ Here he found the admonition to seek for truth outside the material world, and from created things he learnt to recognize the invisible God; he attained the certainty that this God is, and is eternal, always the same, subject to change neither in his parts nor in his motions. And while thus Augustine’s metaphysical convictions were being slowly remodelled, he met, in Ambrose, bishop of Milan, a man in whom complete worldly culture and the nobility of a ripe Christian personality were wonderfully united. ”

“ Augustine by a supernatural voice. Whatsoever is in the scriptures, believe me, saith the same St. Augustine, is high and divine; there is verily truth, and a doctrine most fit for the refreshing and renewing of men's minds, and truly so tempered, that every one may draw from thence that which is sufficient for him, if he come to draw with a devout and pious mind, as true religion requireth. ”

“ Among the few great names which have most signally emblazoned the pages of history, and whose fame and influence have not been limited to their own age, country, or people, that of Augustine, saint and bishop, stands out pre-eminently as worthy of all the encomiums bestowed upon him by serious students of men and their times. He has been and is regarded as the greatest and most celebrated of theologians, the father and master of preachers of the Divine Word, the peer of the rarest and most enlightened minds, whose soaring is above all time. ”

“ S. Augustine observes that her name signifies chaste in Greek, and a lamb in Latin. She has been always looked upon in the Church as a special patroness of purity. We learn from S. Ambrose and S. Augustine, that she was only thirteen years old at the time of her death. She suffered in the persecution of Diocletian. Her riches and beauty excited one of the young nobles of Rome, the son of the prefect of the city, to attempt to gain her hand in marriage. ”

“ I would only instance it, as a specimen how, in other days, and with other notions of Christ's Sacraments, the memory of them, and their benefits, was ever present to the soul. Once more: people still dread, lest, by telling our flocks, that they have all been born again, all once died to sin, and been born again unto righteousness, we should relax their diligence: yet St. Augustine, they will allow, knew well the heart of his fellowmen, and its corruptions and deceit, and was a faithful preacher of the cross of Christ, as well as of "righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come." ”

“ His mother, Monica, was a Christian, but all her prayers and loving care could not keep her son from evil ways. He is often called the prodigal saint, because he wandered very far astray for many years into that far country of the youngest son in the parable; living in the midst of the sins and evil pleasures of the world, until he learned to say, 'I will arise and go to my father.'
And so Augustine's story comforts and helps us when we feel how easy it is to do wrong, and how we fail every day to do the good things we meant to do. ”

“ On other occasions the violence of his love carries him, as it were, out of himself, so that, as is the case with lovers, he cannot find words to express his love, and desires the impossible, and breaks out into the well- known sigh of love: I rejoice, Lord, that Thou art God; but if perchance Augustine could be God, then should I prefer to be Augustine, that Thou mightest be God. wonderful power of divine grace, what extraordinary changes thou canst make in the hearts of men! ”

“ Justina, mother of the emperor Valentinian, favoured the Arians, and desired to remove Ambrose from his see. The Ambrose. “devout people,” of whom Augustine’s mother, Monica, was one, combined to protect him, and kept guard in the church. “Then,” says Augustine, “it was first appointed that, after the manner of the Eastern churches, hymns and psalms should be sung, lest the people should grow weary and faint through sorrow; which custom has ever since been retained, and has been followed by almost all congregations in other parts of the world.” ”