§ 178. AUJUSTTNE. 991
pressed in liis sentence: "Thou liast made ris for Tliee, and our heart is restless till it rests in Thee.'' ' This yearning, and his reverence for the sweet and holy name of Jesus, though crowded into the background, attended him in his studies at the schools of Madaura and Carthage, on his journeys to Romo and Milan, and on his tedious wanderings through the labyrinth of carnal pleasures, Manichaean mock-wisdom, Academic skepticism, and Platonic idealism ; till at last the prayers of his mother, the sermons of Ambrose, the biography of St. Anthony, and, above all, the Epistles of Paul, as so many instruments in the hand of the Holy Ghost, wrought in the man of three and thirty yeai'S that wonderful change which made him an incalculable blessing to the whole Christian world, and brought even the sins and errors of his youth into the service of the truth.'
A son of so many prayers and tears could not be lost, and the faithfnl mother who travailed with him in spirit with greater pain than her body had in bringing him into the world,^ was permitted, for the encouragement of future mothers, to receive shortly before her death an answer to her prayers and expectations, and was able to leave this world with joy without revisiting her earthly home. For Monica died on a homeward journey, in Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, in her fifty-sixth year, in the arms of her son, after enjoying with him a glorious conversation that soared above the confines of space and time, and was a foretaste of the eternal Sabbath-rest of the saints.
' Conf. i. 1 : "Fecisti nos ad Te, et inquietum est cor nostrum, donee requiescat in Te." In all his aberrations, which we would hardly know, if it were not from his own free confession, he never sunk to anything mean, but remained, like Paul in his Jewish fanaticism, a noble intellect and an honorable character, with burning love for the true and the good.
" For particulars respecting the course of Augustine's life, see my work above cited, and other monographs. Coiiip. also the fine remarks of Dr. Baur in his posthumous Lectures on Doctrine-History (1866), vol. i. Part ii p. 26 ff. He compares the development of Augustine with the course of Christianity from the beginning to his time, and draws a parallel between Augustine and Origen.
' Conf. ix. c. 8 : " Quae me parturivit et came, ut in banc temporalera, et corde, at in aeternam lucem nascerer." L. v. 9 : " Non enim satis eloquor, quid crga me habebat arimi, et quanto \najore sollicitudine me parturiebat spiritu, quam came pepererat."
9D2 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
She regretted not to die in a foreign land, because slie was not tar from God, who would raise her up at the last day. " I^iirj Miy body anywliere," was her last request, "and trouble not yourselves for it; only this one thing I ask, that you remember me at the altar of my God, wherever you may be." ' Augustine, in his Confessions, has erected to Monica the noblest monument that can never perisli.
If ever there was a thorough and fruitful conversion, next to that of Paul on the way to Damascus, it was that of Augustine, when, in a garden of the Villa Cassiciacum, not far from Milan, in September of the year 386, amidst the most violent struggles of mind and heart — the birth-throes of the new life — he heard that divine voice of a child : " Take, read ! " and he " put on the Lord Jesus Christ " (Rom. xiii. 14). It is a touching lamentation of his : "I have loved Thee late, Thou Beauty, so old and so new ; I have loved Thee late ! And lo ! Thou wast within, but I was without, and was seeking Thee there. And into Thy fair creation I plunged myself in my ugliness; for Thou wast with me, and I was not with Thee ! Those things kept me away from Thee, which had not been, except they had been in Thee! Thou didst call, and didst cry aloud, and break through my deafness. Thou didst glimmer. Thou didst shine, and didst drive away my blindness. Thou didst breathe, and I drew breath, and breathed in Thee. I tasted Thee, and I hunger and thii-st. Thou didst touch me, and I burn for Thv peace. If I, with all that is within me, may once live in Thee, then shall pain and trouble forsake me; entirely lilled with Thee, all shall be life to me."
He received baptism from Ambrose in Milan on Easter Sunday, 387, in company with his friend and fellow-convert Alypius, and his natural son Adeodatus {given hy God), It impressed the divine seal upon the inward transformation. He broke radically with the world ; abandoned the
' Conf. 1. ix. c. 11 : "Tantum illud vos rogo, ut ad Domini altare memincriris mei, ubi fueritis." This must be explained from the already prevailing custom of offering prayers for the dead, which, however, had rather the form of thanksgiving for the mercy of God shown to them, than the later form of intercession for them, Comp. above, g 84, p. 432 ff.