unquestionable truth, that if any believer has been wrongfully excommunicated, the sentence will do harm rather to him who pronounces it than to him who suffers this wrong. For it is by the Holy Spirit dwelling in holy persons that any one is loosed or bound, and He inflicts unmerited punishment upon no one; for by Him the love which worketh not evil is shed abroad in our hearts" (Fragment attached to Ep. 250).

On another occasion we find him standing up energetically for social righteousness in a case between landlord and tenant. The circumstances have to be gathered from the allusions in the letter (Ep. 247), but it appears pretty clear that a rascally land-steward had collected the rents from the peasant occupiers and absconded with them. He had no authority to collect these rents, and the landowner, acting apparently within his legal rights, was proposing to exact the rents a second time from men who were very near the poverty line. The landowner was professedly a Christian, and Augustine writes him a very trenchant letter. He argues the equity of the case, pointing out that these ignorant peasants could not be expected to know just at what point the authority of the agent stopped. The landowner, he says, ought either to have given them definite instructions in writing

that they were not to pay the land-steward in
any circumstances, or alternatively he ought to
have told them only to pay him on the produc-
tion of special written authority. [Augustine
had a good deal of Church property under his
own charge, and seems to have been a careful
business man.] He reminds the landowner-
apparently from personal knowledge-that he
had in several cases been rather inconsistent
in the amount of authority he permitted to
these land-stewards. He taxes him with deliber-
ately dodging a personal interview with himself
-one fancies Augustine was not a pleasant
person to meet when he had grounds for righteous
indignation-and he offers him by letter what he
calls a draught of that bitter medicine, truth.
"Would that any abuse which you direct against
myself might do you as little harm as it will do
me, and would that the injustice which you are
inflicting on the poor and wretched might do you
no more harm than it does them. For they
suffer for this present time, but be well assured
that you are laying up to yourself wrath against
the day of wrath and of the revelation of the
judgment of God. I beseech His mercy that He
will correct you here rather than reserve you for
that day when there will be no place for correction;
and I
pray that He who has given you the fear
of Him, for which cause I do not despair of you,

will open your understanding, that you may see what you are doing, and abhor it and amend it. For you think little or nothing of things which are so great evils that when your greed is sufficiently tamed to allow you to consider them, you will water the earth with your tears that God may have mercy upon you. If I am wrong in thinking it unjust that men should have twice exacted from them what they are scarce able to pay once, then do what you choose. But if you recognise that it is unjust, then do what is right; do what God commands and what I urge upon you. I ask it not more for their sake than for your own." One may venture to hope that the rents were remitted.

By way of contrast with this severe letter we may conclude with one which shows the touch of humour so often noticed in Augustine. Astrological fatalism, the theory that men's actions are governed by the stars, was a very living belief in his day, and in writing to one correspondent he meets it with the following effective argumentum ad hominem: "When one of these astrologers," he says (Ep. 246), "after selling to wealthy clients his absurd prognostications, calls back his thoughts from the ivory tablets [on which he inscribes them] to the management of his own house, he reproves his wife, not with words only, but with blows, if he

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finds her, I do not say jesting too freely, but even looking out of the window. Nevertheless, if she were to expostulate saying: 'Why beat me, beat Venus rather, if you can, since it is under that planet's influence that I am compelled to do what you complain of '-he would certainly apply his energies, not to invent some of the absurd jargon by which he cajoles the public, but to inflict some of the just correction by which he maintains his authority at home!" 1

i Augustine froquently uses his gift of humour to ridicule superstition, and although it is not from the letters, I may quote, by way of pendent to the above, the following rather good story: Many people," he says, "hold that to have anything belonging to one caten by mice portended some disaster. Tho story goca that some one once came to Cato with a long face announcing that the mice had eaten his boots. Cato replied: 'It would have been a very much stranger thing if the boots had caten the mice!"" (De Doct. Christ. ii. 31).

IV

OUTLINES OF HIS PSYCHOLOGY

Ir one were asked for a good illustration of the contrast between poetry and prose-between essential poetry and prose, that is-one might offer it in a pleasantly paradoxical form by comparing a famous verse of Pope, as illustrating the prosaic treatment, with a famous passage of St. Augustine's prose, as illustrating the poetic treatment. Pope, in the often-quoted line, informs us didactically that

The proper study of mankind is man.

Augustine, in a perhaps less well-known passage, expresses his astonishment that men go forth to marvel at lofty mountains and mighty torrents, and the expanse of ocean, and the movements of the stars-and pass themselves by."

That was a mistake which Augustine at least was in no danger of making; in that sense he could not pass himself by. He had, as we have already seen, a keen enough eye for external

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