J 016 THIRD TERIOD. A.D. ^11-590.
dacio (395), against deception (not to be confounded with tne eiuiilar work already mentioned Contra mendacinm, against the fraud-theory of the Priscillianists, written in 420) ; De agone Christiano (396) ; De opere monachorani, against monastic idleness (400) ; De bono conjiigali adv. Jovinianuni (400) ; De virginitate (401) ; De fide et operibiis (413) ; De adulterinis conjugiis, on 1 Cor. vii. 10 sqq. (419); De bono viduitatis (418) ; De patientia (418) ; De cura pro mortnis gerenda, to Paulinns of Nola (421); De utilitate jejunii; De diligendc Deo; Meditationes ; etc'
As we survey tliis enormous literary labor, augmented by many otlier treatises and letters now lost, and as we consider his episcopal labors, his many journeys, and liis adjudications of controversies among the faithful, which often robbed him of whole days, we must be really astounded at the fidelity, exuberance, energy, and perseverance of this father of tlic churcb. Surely, sucli a life was worth the living.
§ 180. The Influence of Augustine upon Posterity and hi% Relation to Catholicism and Protestantism.
Before we take leave of this imposing character, and of the period of church history in whicli he shines as the brightest star, we must add some observations respecting the influence of Augustine on tlie world since bis time, and his position with reference to the great antagonism of Catholicism and Protestantism. All tlie cliurch fathers are, indeed, the common inheritance of botb parties ; but no other of them has produced 80 permanent effects on both, and no other stands in so high regard with both, as Augustine. Upon the Greek church alone has he exercised little or no influence; fortius chui-ch
' Most of tlicm in torn. vi. ed. Bcncd. On the scripta dcpcrdila, dubia ct spuria of Augustine, see the index by Schunemann, 1. c. p. 50 sqq., and in the supplemental volume of Migne's edition, pp. 34-40. The so-called Meditations of Aiif^ustino ^German translation by August Kp.oiine, Stuttgart, 1854) arc a later compilation bj the abbot of Fescamp in France, at the close of the twelfth century, from the writmgs of Augustine, Gregory the Great, Anselm, and others.
§ 180. Augustine's kIelation to catholicisMj etc. 1011
stopped with the undeveloped synergistic anthropology of tlie l)revions age.'
1. Augustine, in the first place, contributed much to the development of the doctrinal basis which Catholicism and Protestantism hold in common against such radical lieresies of antiquity as Manicliagisilf, Arianism, and Pelagianism. In all these great intellectual conflicts he was in general the champion of tlie cause of Christian truth against dangerous errors. Through his influence the canon of Holy Scripture (including, indeed, the Old Testament Apocrypha) was fixed in its present form by the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397). He conquered the Manichasan dualism, hylozoism, and fatalism, and saved the biblical idea of God and of creation, and the biblical doctrine of the nature of sin and its origin in the free will of man. He developed the Nieene dogma of the Trinity, completed it by the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Ghost, and gave it the form in which it has ever since prevailed in the West, and in which it received classical expression from his school in the Athanasian Creed. In
' It betrays a ver}' contracted, slavish, and mechanical view of history, when Roman Catholic divines claim the fathers as their exclusive property ; forgetting that they taught a great many things which are as inconsistent with the papal as with the Protestant Creed, and knew nothing of certain dogmas (such as the infallibility of the pope, the seven sacraments, transubstantiation, purgatory, indulgences, auricular confession, the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, etc.), which are essential to Romanism. " I recollect well," says Dr. Newman, the former intellectual leader of Oxford Tractarianisin (in his Letter to Dr. Pusey on his Eirenicon, 1866, p. 5), " what an outcast I seemed to myself, when I took down from the shelves of my library the volumes of St. Athanasius or St. Basil, and set myself to study them ; and how, on the contrary, when at length I was brought into Catholic communion, I kissed them with delight, with a feeling that in them I had more than all that I had lost, and, as though I were directly addressing the glorious saints, who bequeathed them to the Church, I said to the inanimate pages, 'You are now mine, and I am yours, beyond any mistake.' " With the same right the Jews might lay exclusive claim to the writings of Moses and the prophets. The fathers were living men, representing the onward progress and conflicts of Christianity in their time, unfolding and defending great truths, but not unmixed with many errors and imper. fections which subsequent times have corrected. Those are the true children of th« fathers who, standing on the foundation of Christ and the apostles, and, kissing the New Testament rather than any human writings, follow them only as far as they followed Christ, and who carry forward their work in the onward march of true evangelical catholic Christianity.