§ 178. AUGU8TIN-E. 993
brilliant and Incrative vocation of a teaclier of rhetoric, which lie had followed in Rome and Milan ; sold his goods for the benefit of the poor : and thenceforth devoted his rare gifts exclusively to the service of Christ, and to that service he continued faithful to liis latest breath. After the death of hie niotlier, whom he revered and loved with the most tender affection, he went a second time to Rome for seveial months, and wrote books in defence of true Christianity against false philosophy and the Manichsean heresy. Returning to Africa, he spent three years, with his friends Alypius and Evodin?, on an estate in his native Tagastc, in contemplative and literary retirement.
Then, in 391, he was chosen presbyter against his will, by the voice of the people, which, as in the similar cases of Cyprian and Ambrose, proved to be the voice of God, in thn Kumidian maritime city of Hippo Regius (now Bona); and in 395 he was elected bishop in the same city. For eight and thirty years, until his death, he labored in this place, and made it the intellectual centre of Western Christendom.'
His outward mode of life was extremely simple, and mildly ascetic. He lived with his clergy in one house in an apostolic community of goods, and made this house a seminary of theology, out of which ten bishops and many lower clergy went forth. Females, even his sister, were excluded from his house, and could see him only in the presence of others. But he founded religious societies of women ; and over one of these his sister, a saintly widow, presided.'' He once said in a sermon, that he had nowhere found better men, and he had nowhere found worse, than in monasteries. Combining, as he
' He is still known among the inhabitants of the place as " the great Christian" (Eumi Kebir). Gibbon (eh. xxxiii. ad ann. 430) thus describes the place which became so famous through Augustine: "The maritime colony of Hippo, about two hundred miles westward of Carthage, had formerly acquired the distinguishing epithet of Regius, from the residence of the Numidian kings; and some remains of tride and populousness still adhere to the modern city, which is known in Europe b/ the corrupted name of Bona." See below, p. 996, note 3,
^ He mentions a sister, "soror mea, sancta proposita" [monasterii], withoot naming her, Epist. 211, n. 4 (ed. Bened.), alias Ep. 109. He also had a brother bj th * name of Navigius.
994 THIED PEEIOD. A.D. 311-590.
did, the clerical life with the monastic, he became nn\vittiug-]y the founder of the Angnstinian order, which gave the reforniei Luther to the world. He wore the black di-ess of the Eastern coenobites, with a cowl and a leatliern girdle. He lived almost entirely on vegetables, and seasoned the common meal wilh reading or free conversation, in which it was a rule that the character of an absent person should never be touched. He had this couplet engraved on the table :
" Quisquis amat dictiB abseiitum rodere vitain, llanc meiisam vetitam noverit esse sibi."
He often preached five days in succession, sometimes twice a day, and set it as the object of his preaching, that all might live with him, and he with all, in Christ. Wherever he went m Africa, he was begged to preach the word of salvation.* He faithfully administered the external affairs connected with his Dffic", though he found his chief delight in contemplation. He was specially devoted to the poor, and, like Ambrose, upon exigency, caused the church vessels to be melted d(,)wn to i-edeem prisoners. But he refused legacies by which injusticci was doue to natural heirs, and commended the bishop Aurelius of Carthage for giving back unasked some property which a man had bequeathed to the church, when his wife unexpectedly bore him children.
Augustine's labors extended far beyond his little diocese. He was the intellectual head of the North African and the entire Western church of his time. He took active interest in all theological and ecclesiastical questions. He was the champion of the orthodox doctrine against Manichscan, Donatist, and Pelagian. In him was concentrated the whole polemic power of the Catholicism of the time against heresy and schism ; and in him it won the victory over them.
In his last years he took a critical review of his literary productions, and gave them a thorough sifting in his Retracta-
' Possidiu3 f?ays, in his Vita Auj^. : "Cfctcrum opiscopatu susccpto miilto instantius ac fcrvcntiiis, majore auctoritate, nou in una tantum regioiic, sed ubicunque rogatus venisset, vcrbum salutis alacritcr ac suavitcr, pullulante atque crescent* Domini ccclcsia, pncdicavit."