Saint Augustin | Page 4

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 we have inherited from the ancients reaches us through
Augustin. He is the great teacher. In his hands the doctrinal
demonstration of the Catholic religion takes firm shape. To indicate the
three great stages of the onward march of the truth, one may say: Jesus
Christ, St. Paul, St. Augustin. Nearest to our weakness is the last. He is
truly our spiritual father. He has taught us the language of prayer. The
words of Augustin's prayers are still upon the lips of the devout.
This universal genius, who during forty years was the speaking-trumpet
of Christendom, was also the man of one special century and country.
Augustin of Thagaste is the great African.
Well may we be proud of him and adopt him as one of our glories--we
who have kept up, for now almost a century, a struggle like to that
which he maintained for the unity of the Roman Empire, we who
consider Africa as an extension of France. More than any other writer,
he has expressed the temperament and the genius of his country. This
motley Africa, with its eternal mixture of races at odds with one
another, its jealous sectarianism, the variety of its scenery and climate,
the violence of its sensations and passions, its seriousness of character
and its quick-changing humour, its mind at once practical and frivolous,
its materialism and its mysticism, its austerity and its luxury, its
resignation to servitude and its instincts of independence, its hunger to
rule--all that comes out with singularly vivid touches in the work of
Augustin. Not only was he his country's voice, but, as far as he could,
he realized its old dream of dominion. The supremacy in spiritual
matters that Carthage disputed so long and bitterly with Rome, it ended
by obtaining, thanks to Augustin. As long as he lived, the African
Church was the mistress of the Churches of the West.
As for me--if I may venture to refer to myself in such a matter--I have
had the joy to recognize in him, besides the Saint and Teacher whom I
revere, the ideal type of the Latin of Africa. The image of which I
descried the outline long ago through the mirages of the South in
following the waggons of my rugged heroes, I have seen at last become

definite, grow clear, wax noble and increase to the very heaven, in
following the traces of Augustin.
And even supposing that the life of this child of Thagaste, the son of
Monnica, were not intermingled so deeply with ours, though he were
for us only a foreigner born in a far-off land, nevertheless he would still
remain one of the most fascinating and luminous souls who have shone
amid our darkness and warmed our sadness--one of the most human
and most divine creatures who have trod our highways.

THE FIRST PART
DAYS OF CHILDHOOD
Sed delectabat ludere. "Only, I liked to play."
Confessions, I, 9.

I
AN AFRICAN FREE-TOWN SUBJECT TO ROME
Little streets, quite white, which climb up to clay-formed hills deeply
furrowed by the heavy winter rains; between the double row of houses,
brilliant in the morning sun, glimpses of sky of a very tender blue; here
and there, in the strip of deep shade which lies along the thresholds,
white figures crouched upon rush-mats--indolent outlines, draped with
bright colours, or muffled in rough and sombre wool-stuffs; a horseman
who passes, bent almost in two in his saddle, the big hat of the South
flung back over his shoulders, and encouraging with his heel the
graceful trot of his horse--such is Thagaste as we see it to-day, and such
undoubtedly it appeared to the traveller in the days of Augustin.
Like the French town built upon its ruins, the African free-city lay in a
sort of plain taken between three round hills. One of them, the highest
one, which is now protected by a bordj, must have been defended in
old days