Who was Saint Augustine in church history?

But God, who sees the end from the beginning, had already prepared Himself a man to go forth against this new enemy. This man was Augustine, bishop of Hippo, one of the brightest lights that ever dawned upon the church.

He sprang from a noble family, and was born at Thegaste, a little village in Numidia, A.D. 354. His father was a pagan, but his mother was a woman of much piety, whose faithful and loving counsel Augustine was never weary of recalling in after life. Ambrose knew her well, and once said to her, "Be of good courage, a child of so many prayers and tears can never be lost." Augustine received a good education, and quickly came to the front as the first pupil in the school of rhetoric; but even in youth he was noted for his depraved ways. By his own account he would deceive "his tutor, masters, and parents with innumerable lies," and was so enslaved by greediness that he would "commit thefts from his parents' cellar and table." His very conscience was stifled. "I was grown deaf," he says in his Confessions, "by the clankings of the chain of my mortality, the punishment of the pride of my soul; and I strayed further from Thee, and Thou lettest me alone, and I was tossed about, and wasted and dissipated; and I boiled over in my fornications, and Thou heldest Thy peace, O Thou my tardy joy!" The father of Augustine died while he was yet young; but not before Monica's prayers for her husband had been answered, and he had found peace for his soul in Monica's Saviour. Thus encouraged, the pious woman went on praying for her son; feeling confident that her faith would be rewarded, though the answer might seem to linger. From his nineteenth to his twenty-eighth year, Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric; and, removing to Carthage during that period, he immediately took his place as the foremost rhetorician of that city. Yet his evil ways continued; and he acknowledges that the "hunt after the emptiness of popular praise, down even to theatrical applauses, and poetic prizes, and strifes for grassy garlands, and follies of shows," was the ruling passion of his life there. Nor was this all. To his thirst for popularity was added "a seduced and seducing lust," which kept him in bonds of wretchedness many years. A copy of Cicero's "Hortensius"came into his hands about this time, and gave him some serious thoughts about himself; but human philosophy proved inadequate for his deeper needs, and the book did him no permanent good. After this it was his misfortune to fall in with some books of Manichean philosophy, which drew him still further from the truth; and it was not till A.D. 384, when he visited Milan, that he was able to disengage himself from the wildering meshes of that network of lies. Here, under the advice of Ambrose, he began to study the scriptures for himself, and with the happiest results. He was thoroughly aroused; and saw for the first time his moral deformity in the mirror of divine truth. He was amazed at his wickedness, and became from that time an earnest, though hopeless seeker after God. Hearing on one occasion of the conversion of some Roman nobles, he exclaimed, "These people take the kingdom of heaven by force, while we with our learning are wallowing in sin." But hope dawned at last, and after a wholesome though painful discipline of some months, he was converted through the instrumentality of Ambrose. His mother — her last earthly wish gratified died the following year; exclaiming, in the language of the aged Simeon, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation."

After his conversion, Augustine remained three years in retirement, during which time he studied the scriptures with profit. On his re-appearance in public he was ordained presbyter, and became a celebrated preacher at Hippo Regius, where he was elected bishop some years later. Throughout the remainder of his life he continued a faithful minister of the truth, and specially distinguished himself by the ability and vigour with which he exposed the doctrines of Mani and Pelagius. It is asserted by many that the zeal of Augustine against Pelagius, led him into the opposite extreme of Fatalism, and perhaps the charge is just. Yet the saying of Jeremy Taylor, that "when Pelagius had puddled the stream, Augustine was so angry, that he stamped and disturbed it more," is more witty than truthful. The free grace of God was ever his favourite theme, for, like Paul, he had learnt from what he had been delivered, and could glory in the apostle's words, "By grace we are saved through faith, and that not of ourselves; it is the gift of God."

Having mentioned Augustine in his connection with the Donatists, the reader will like to learn a little more of this great champion for the truth, as he was called. His mother, Monica, was a Christian, and prayed earnestly and constantly for his conversion. When young, indeed until near his conversion, he led an irregular life, according to his own "Confessions." For about ten years he was joined to the Manicheans (whom he afterwards attacked); but their immorality disgusted him, and their shallowness could not satisfy his longing for something better. He went to Milan where, out of curiosity, he heard Ambrose, and there he was converted in his thirty-fourth year (A.D. 386). On the death of his mother, which deeply affected him, he sold his property and became an ascetic; but in A.D. 391, he was called to be a presbyter at Hippo, and in 395 he became bishop. Here he continued about thirty-five years with but few remarkable incidents except his defence of the faith. Shortly before his death, the Vandals overran the North of Africa and assailed Hippo; but Augustine closed his earthly career (A.D. 430), before the city was taken.

The two principal works of Augustine are his "Confessions," which give his own history of his conversion, and his "City of God," an elaborate work which represents the church of God as surviving the decline and fall of the Roman empire. He defended the doctrine of the Trinity, and has been thought to have ended the great controversy against the Arians, although some still held the doctrine and do to this day. He was also the champion of grace against Pelagianism, and what has been called semi-Pelagianism, which we hope to look at presently. And thus he has often been held up to be the defender of the truth, standing, as it were, midway between the apostles and the Reformers.

Augustine and Divine Grace

Augustine the famous bishop of Hippo, the great evangelic light of the West, and the most influential of all the Latin christian writers, began about this time to assail with his pen the doctrines of Pelagius and Celestius; and to him chiefly is due, as God's instrument, the credit of checking the growth of this sect at that time. By a remarkable conversion, and by deep exercise of soul, he had been trained under the Lord's discipline for this great work. Thus did the all-wise God secretly raise up a testimony in opposition to Pelagius, and by means of his heresy, bring out more scriptural views of the gospel of grace than had been taught since the days of the apostles, and also fuller views of christian truth, holiness and humility. The Western churches, led on by Augustine continued perseveringly to assail the false doctrines with councils, books, and letters. The Gauls, the Britons, and even the Palestinians, by their councils, and the Emperors by their laws and penalties, so far crushed the controversy in its commencement; but the fundamental principles of Pelagianism in many forms and degrees remain to the present time. Rather, however, than pursue the history of this heresy, we will briefly refer to what the scriptures teach on the two main points of the subject.

And so it was with the church. Even the philosophers began to take up Christian truth, and in the writings of the fathers we find pretty much what we have here. What fornication is in moral things, such was their illicit commerce with the world in the things of God. There were, I doubt not, witnesses who were made very little account of, save in heaven; but one of the men who had the largest and most lasting influence of all, Augustine, was a true saint of God, and, though it may not mean much, the greatest light of the western church. He had held the name of Christ and had not denied his faith. All agree that these epistles applied primarily to the churches to which John wrote; but many do not see that they also apply to different stages of the church, and describe its various states successively.

92 The truth is, Augustine was first attracted by Ambrose's preaching, by his kindness and eloquence, and began to doubt his own Manicheanism; but he was converted by the scriptures, and established in the faith by the scriptures. "Therefore," he says, "as we were infirm in finding the truth by mere reason, and the authority of the holy letters was needful for us, I began now to believe that thou wouldst in nowise have given so excellent an authority to the scriptures in all lands, unless thou hadst written that by it I should believe in thee, and by it I should seek thee." This accordingly he did, passing through much conflict; and at last abandoning himself to tears under a fig-tree, he heard a voice saying, "Take and read, take and read"; and he arose, took up the Epistles to look at the first thing he opened at, and found a passage which was his deliverance. Such is his own account in his Confessions when he is relating the facts, not reasoning with Manicheans. He was not very nice in reasoning with these. He wrote a book against them early in his career; and when he could not make any proper sense out of the scriptures literally, or none could be made (so he says), he turned it into an allegory to get out of the scrape, hoping he might do better afterwards; and so, indeed, he tried to do in a treatise on Genesis according to the letter.

But long before Augustine took up his pen in defence of the truth, the armies of Constans had purged the country of these dangerous outlaws; and when the bishop began to write, it was against the old schism of the Donatists and not the excesses of the Circumcellions. His zeal was not thrown away. So vigorously did he expose 'this dangerous and seditious spirit,' — alike in his writings, his public discourses, and his private conversation, that he all but ruined the Donatist cause in Africa, and destroyed the sympathy which their sufferings had awakened in other parts of Christendom. The faithful bishop died at Hippo, in the year 430, just as the Vandals were besieging the place.

N*. That is the very use of referring, as I have done, to the Fathers. They are quoted, and Bill M. had referred to them as great authorities to you, and so do Dr. Milner and all Roman Catholic teachers. Nay, their Council of Trent will have no interpretation of scripture but what is by their unanimous consent. Hence it was well to know what they are really worth. Augustine was a godly man, and hence his spirit rejected the vagaries of Origen, copied by Jerome and by Ambrose, who must have had great weight with him as his spiritual father, but he rejects it all. But not knowing the fulness of redemption, as not one of the Fathers did, nor that the poor thief could go straight into paradise to be with Christ, because Christ's blood (who was in grace on the cross by him) had cleansed him from all sin, nor able, as scripture speaks, to "give thanks to the Father, who hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light," they were at a loss what to do with the faults and failings of real Christians. Before Augustine the purifying was held to be after the day of judgment: this he sometimes teaches — sometimes that it was tribulation here — sometimes between death and judgment; and then he put off its full discussion (but never took it up again), and wished some more learned man to treat of it — would not controvert its being after death, or here and not there, or here and there both.

The confounding the outward administration by ordinances with the power of the Spirit of God is the source of popery and apostasy. It is pitiable to see how Augustine (a truly godly man personally, who felt what life and the true Church were, when the outward thing had become grossly corrupt) writhes under the effort to conciliate the two; and quails and is boggled in his answer to the Donatists - which is none. It had been determined that the baptism by heretics was good; it was held that the Holy Ghost was given by it (another egregious blunder at any rate, as the Acts plainly shews): consequently the Donatists had it, consequently were of the true Church. In vain Augustine seeks, flounderingly, to get out of the net he had spread for himself or got into. It required another remedy. In fact the bishops and Constantine had used other means than arguments.

Augustine comes next. In his Psalm against the Donatists, a poor production — poor in thought and morality — which he says he wrote for the poorest that they might commit it to memory, and be able to meet them — he presents Peter as the rock and a sure centre of unity to these poor people. He did the same (he tells us in his Retractations) in a book also against the Donatists, not now extant. Augustine is not happy in his spirit or reasonings with these Donatists. They had resisted one who had given up his Bible in the last persecutions, being a bishop. A vast number of bishops and their flocks sided with them, and the schism lasted a very long time, more than a century. The Catholics, as they call them, appealed not to the pope but to the Emperor, and the Donatists were cruelly persecuted and put to death. Their passions were roused, and many of them took arms and fought and used violence against the other party — a wretched scene in the so-called Holy Catholic church. But so it was. Augustine cannot justify the party he espoused, but says there must be evil in the church, and the Donatists were worse. But he was every way embarrassed with these people. For, contrary to Cyprian and the East in earlier times, their baptism was held good. Now Augustine believed the Holy Ghost was conferred by baptism. They said to him, "Well, then, we confer the Holy Ghost, so we must have it." Yet he said they were not in the unity of the Catholic church, and so had not got the Holy Ghost; and here he toils and labours, to get out of the net he had got himself into, so as to make any one pity him. But I must pass on, only it is well to keep in mind what this socalled Holy Catholic church was.

54 Augustine will give us another phase. Yet his views of personal religion and election involve him in the greatest contradiction and difficulty. They are, however, important; for if Cyprian has formed hierarchical views short of Romanism, Augustine has in a great measure been the source of reformed doctrines, save in the point of justification by faith, on which certainly the Reformation was somewhat clearer. But his difficulties, if they were not to be wept over for the sake of the Church, would really amuse from the way he is perplexed. Like all the rest, though searching scripture for himself as a godly man, he is occupied in his reasonings with the circumstances of the moment. In his case it was the Donatists. A quarrel having arisen in Africa as to the episcopacy of Donatus's predecessor, a very large party indeed was formed with a very considerable part of the episcopacy. It was alleged, that Cecilianus was ordained by one who had been unfaithful in Diocletian's persecution, having given up the sacred books - a traditor. They chose Majorinus, to whom succeeded Donatus. The others complained of a fanatical love of martyrdom. The Donatists appealed to Constantine; and, after two appeals from the first sentence, they were condemned and violently persecuted, which they returned by violence and, as is alleged, by assassination; so bright is the history of the primitive Church! But another circumstance must be mentioned here. Cyprian and most of the Eastern bishops had re-baptized those baptized by heretics. Rome, and those under its influence, had opposed this. Cyprian and the East, however, held good; but, in the course of time, the Roman opinion prevailed in the West, and it was orthodox to receive heretical baptism. In the East it was generally rejected for a long while after this.

I refer to this, because it was a great source of Augustine's perplexity; he received the Western view. But then he had to acknowledge, that by Donatist baptism those who were not in the catholic Church received forgiveness of sins and the Holy Ghost. This, of course, was a terrible difficulty. I will now give his statements, in which the conflict of his views will easily appear. They gave formal rise to the thought of an invisible Church. He is very fond of insisting on one text, and citing it repeatedly everywhere; thus Ephesians 5, as to the unity of the body and Head, spouse and Husband.