This sketch would be very deficient without some reference to the state of religion in Africa in the fourth century. More than in most countries, Christianity there was tinctured by the soil in which it grew. Donatism may be considered as the expression of national and religious jealousy. The "fractionary" ecclesiastical spirit of the African Christians has been traced in the enormous numbers of the African bishops. For instance, in one conference at Carthage, (A.D. 411) we read of 279 Donatist, 286 Catholic bishops. The colonists acquired something of the fierceness of the tribes by whom they were surrounded. The Donatists, those Puritans of Africa had their Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchy men in the Circumcellion. Some one has ingeniously said that yet another analogy between the Puritans and the Donatists is suggested by those extraordinary names which, as we turn over the pages of a Church History, remind us for a moment of passages at which we have smiled in Woodstock. But the love of these names belonged to African, not to Donatist, Christianity. Among the Catholic bishops, whose names are subscribed to the letter to Pope Innocent against Pelagius and Cœlestius are two Adeodatuses, and three Quod vultdeuses. How prevalent Manicheism was, no reader of the Confessions can forget. It was no unusual circumstance to find three bishops in one town, Manichean, Donatist, and Catholic. Heathenism lingered on still. Augustine speaks, with an eloquent shudder, of the hideous and effeminate wretches, who, with unguent-dripping locks and whitened faces, up to yesterday, as he says, went in the processions of the Magna Mater through the streets of Carthage.* The country, and especially Carthage, was haunted by dissolute fortune-tellers and spiritualists,f the maggots who crawl from the rottenness of scepticism. Aruspices still remained and sacrificed. Ingenious people were puzzled by impostors, mathematici. § Now an image was rashly broken by the Christians, and the population rose in fury. Now a nomad tribe had a bargain to make with its civilized neighbours, and scruples of conscience arose, because the barbarians would only swear by their own gods. As is the case in India now, two phenomena were exhibited, on the one hand a fanatical revival of the old religion, on the other a philosophical rationalism, which sought to preserve a minimum of it, inculculating the moral ideas of the new faith. There, as ever in analogous circumstances, two currents of thought are formed drop by drop, until at last the equilibrium is broken, the mass of the new ideas exceeds that of the old, and the old is absorbed and lost in the new. The letters of two pagans to Augustine, Longinianus the priest, and Maximus of Madaura, illustrate this truth. At Carthage, and elsewhere, the Christian Church had not yet filtered off all the dregs of paganism. Augustine admits that he knew Christians who were worshippers of pictures and sepulchres. There were riotous feasts, nominally changed into Memories of Martyrs, but in carnality and excess in no respect different from the old festivals in the temples of the idols. At Hippo itself, there were Church feasts, whose admitted extravagances were sanctioned, or palliated, by a reference to similar abuses, committed at Rome, under the eyes of its bishop. Such is a hasty and faintly drawn sketch of the varied life of populous towns now overthrown and forgotten in the desert, or remembered only to be execrated as the nests of pirates. † * Of one of these Roman-African towns, a correspondent of the Times wrote a few years agoUnder the shadow of the forest-hill at Batna, upon which the lion, the panther, and the wild boar range, a Roman city, which once held 50,000 inhab itants, and where ninety bishops assembled in council, lies a ruin." For this citation I am indebted to a passage in Archdeacon Lee's lectures, where he draws with solemn eloquence the moral of Donatism."Lectures on Ecclesiastical History," p. 96, sqq. † Of Hippo, now Bona, an eloquent description of Bona is an old and miserable mosque, which has been given by the Abbé Sibour. "The chapel the Moors themselves have abandoned. ... Beneath the shadow of aged olive trees, which extend their boughs over the tomb of Hippo, I was able to call up the phantom of the buried city. Nothing was changed-the same rounded coasts, the same waves which bathed them, the same bluish mountains on the side of Carthage, and near us the chain of the Edough, rising up with its sombre gorges and wild aspect. The Seybouse rolled its slow waters. . We walked along a road hemmed in by two living hedges of cactus and aloes. The Arabs have given Bona the name Uneba. Sometimes from the thick hills of thorny shrubs, we saw the scanthus raise its great elegantly-cut leaves. We were, in fact, on the ruins of Hippo. The town covered with its buildings the two slopes which we had ascended, and which by a gradual fall, descend to the banks of the Seybouse near III. Erasmus complains bitterly that the pow-time to tremble with excitement and sym ers of Augustine were wasted upon Africa. pathy for the fortune of others. But the Such a genius would have produced still parallel must be drawn with due allowance nobler fruits, had it been born or lived in for the difference between the manly subItaly or Gaul. The rudeness, the voluptu- mission to the Catholic Christianity of the ousness, the small and restless curiosity of fourth century, and the suicide of reason Africa, was hostile to literary excellence involved in the acceptance of Ultramontaand philosophical ripeness.* This may be nism in the nineteenth century. partly true. It seems, indeed, that the scanty hours left to the Bishop after the toils of controversy, the care of his flock, and the superintendence of his clergy, were broken in upon by a noisy throng of babbling visitors, fond of hearing their own tongues, and utterly incapable of solid discussion. But the discordant elements into which he was thrown have gained for us one useful lesson. It is instructive to see how thoroughly Augustine had mastered the thoughts and the wants of his own age; what an extensive toleration he possessed, in spite of the occasional severity and dogWhile yet divided between passion and matism which grate upon a modern ear. vanity, his soul is reached by the Hortensius He answers the strange letter of Volutianus of Cicero. The first ring was touched, and with an exemplary patience which astonish- the chain never ceased to vibrate. es Erasmus; of the Manicheans he speaks great problem of the origin of evil first ocgenerally in the tone of one who knew the cupied his thoughts, and led to his long subdifficulty of finding truths. Perhaps some-jugation to Manicheism. To this, without thing like a parallel may be found in New-the same long uncertainty lulled in dogmatism, only awakening from time to man the city of Augustine. . On that one of the It only remains to notice briefly the milestones on the road-side of Augustine's intellectual career. We may term it, with equal truth, his spiritual career, for with him the intellectual and the spiritual are so interfused that we cannot discriminate one from the other. With many men, conversion is the abdication, with him it is the consummation, of reason. The being ever fully converted himself, he made several converts, as has happened more than once with converts to Rome in our own day. During nine years of Manicheism he was never thoroughly satisfied with it. Perthe sea. Some stones were all that remained of haps his mother was led to her dream by two hills of Hippo which is nearest to the Abou- the prophetic penetration of maternal love. gemma, on the side of the sea, you meet as you as He seems to have held, first, a kind of Dualcend the remains of a vast edifice. All round old lism, then, the theory of an extended olive trees, thick cactuses garnished with points. grow wild from the energy of a soil of which all God; or, as he himself says, an extended proves the luxuriant fertility. The character of nothing. He made various efforts to escape these ruins the extent of the building to which they belong, the solidity of the walls and vaults, from these unsatisfactory speculations. Epithe situation, make one believe at first that these are cureanism might have tempted him for a the remains of a church-perhaps the crypt of that Basilica Pacis where the voice of Augustine was moment, but the instinct of immortality, so often raised, and where his tomb was placed. strong in such natures as his, preserved him. But other indications, especially the remains of Subtler theories won him for a while. In aqueducts, appear to give the building another destination. The ruins have probably nothing sacred, despair of attaining to truth, he tended for and belong to the old cisterns of Hippo-vast res a little to Academic scepticism, the probervoirs, fed at a great expense from the sources of abilism of the New Academy. the Edough. At other The Arabs and Kabyles of the mountains perform some curious ceremonies on times he inclined to Pantheism, the pera portion of the wall, in an angle of the edifice, petual temptation of the speculative spirit; he uses a very curious similitude to explain the form in which it presented itself to him for a while. § upon a great stone. Upon asking their reason, they reply that a great Roumi lived here, that his history was written upon the stone, but that the stone was broken." M. Sibour argues that this great Roumi is Augustine; that the stone was transferred from its place in the ruins of the Basilica Pacis, where it covered the body of Augustine, together with the remains of the great bishop, lest the tomb should be profaned by the Arian Vandals on the taking of Hippo.- Translation de la Relique de S. Augustine, par M. l'Abbé Sibour-in Poujoulat's Histoire de S. Augustine, ii. 445 450. "Rudis erat Africa, voluptatum avida, studiorum inimica, curiosarum rerum appetens." August. Opp. tom. ii. 1. "Eorum irruentem presentiam qui plerumque non sunt apti tali negotio, magisque linguæ certaminibus quam scientiæ luminibus delectantur."- Volusianus Augustino. Confess., iii. 11. "Ex adverso sibi duas moles. . . . utramque infinitam."-Ibid. v. 10; vii. 14. "Neque enim mihi videbatur esse quidquam quod tale non esset.... . spatiosum nihil."ĺbid. viii. 1. "Te autem, Domine, ex omni parte ambientem et penetrantem eam, sed usquequaque infinitum. Tamquam si mare esset ubique, et ubique per im mensa infinitum solum mare, et haberet intra se spongiam quamlibet magnam, sed finitam tamen; plena esset utique spougia illa ex omni sua parte ex Such are the bare outlines of this restless career, from Manicheism to scepticism, from scepticism to Pantheism. The true cause of the long uncertainty was, as he tells us, want of spirituality. He had had some acquaint ance with Scripture from an early period of his life; he had never lived quite outside a current of Christian thought. The ineffable sweetness of the name of Jesus had breathed upon his soul. It is right, and, if properly understood, may be most profitable for the Christian to remember, that he who among all Christian teachers has been pronounced to have had the greatest influence next to Saint Paul, derived his first great religious lessons, not directly from Scripture, but from Platonism. He can be thankful to God in later life that he had mastered some high truths of this philosophy before he really studied the Bible. But he is careful to proclaim that with all its efficacy as an awakener, Platonism is absolutely insufficient as a guide. We cannot discover in it that which alone can act upon the will, the humility of Jesus: "I did not humbly cling to my humbled Lord Jesus: nor know how masterful that infirmity was, the strength of that weakness." The most superficial reading of the Confessions will show with what entire and loving devotion he rested upon the Holy Scriptures, his chaste delight, honeyed with heaven's manna, and luminous with its light. As specimens of Augustine's philosophy, I shall only refer to his discussion upon Time and Memory. He is led to a theory of time in the eleventh book by his examination of the first verses of Genesis. He meets those who asked, as an objection to creation, what God was doing before He made heaven and earth, and how it came into His mind to make what he had not before made - this renders it necessary for him to examine the notion of Time. The substance of his doctrine is this, What is Time? It is in the consciousness, and by the aid of memory that we find the first notion of duration. The mind itself is the type and measure of it. It is not from exterior sources that we acquire the notion of time, but by the inner sense; and it is the mind, the ego, which is the original model of that which endures. The present is an ideal point. The past and future have no existence but in the conception of the mind. We do not measure time by motion, but motion by time. "In thee, my soul, I measure time, in thee I say I measure it. The impression which things as they pass make in thee, and which abides when they have passed away, that impression which is present I measure, not things which have passed away that it might remain. It I measure when I measure time. Therefore, either this impression is time, or I do not measure time.” psychology has solved Augustine's great In the treatise on Memory, modern difficulty our memory of having forgotten something-t by the distinction between memory and reminiscence. Memory is effort. When we will to remember a thing spontaneous, reminiscence is memory with which does not come spontaneously to us, we remember something relative to it, which gives us a relative conception of it. We may have no conception what the thing is, else. That relation affords an only what relation it bears to something infinitæ investigationis," and suggests another relation or relations, until we remember the whole thing. "abscissio should induce any younger reader to study I shall be amply rewarded if these pages the Confessions for himself. We honour this great teacher, not by heaping upon him extravagant titles of traditional honour, not from Pavia to Bona, ‡ but by being made as they did who carried his assumed relics partakers of his spirit. Better than any positive result of his psychological speculations is that fresh admiration for the glories "And they go and depth of man's nature. the billows of the sea, and the starry heavto admire the heights of the mountains, and ens, and leave themselves."§ Better even * Confess., vi. 27. Saisset's "Cite de Dieu," Introduction, lxxxix., 899. "Here is Augustine's thought which has not been well understood. The sure proof that the mind is the measure of time, or measures time, is that it measures silence. And as and as no privation can be measured, the mind alsilence is not anything real, but simply a privation, ways measures silence by its own duration and intervals, which form part of time."-Notes of D. Martin's Traduction des Confessions, Tom. ii. 219. † Confess., x. 16. Hamilton's Reid, p. 359. "On this footing, what Augustine qualifies by the name of oblivion would be, in name and fact, a true reminiscence, or even a confused sign of a thing which memory has lost. It is like a cloth drawn before a picture which we have formerly seen in a picture, recalls to those who have looked on it the idea of a picture, without recalling what it represents."- D. Martin, ut supra, 57, 58. room. It is certain that the cloth, which hides the For a vivid description of the translation of these [alleged] relics by the French in 1842, see Poujoulat's " Histoire de Saint Augustine," i. 413 -456. Confess., x. 8. 166. the Apology. His description of Gibbon states almost expressly that the historian became a Roman Catholic some time after leaving Oxford, and went into Parliment at the very time the first volume of the Fall and Decline appear. We believe these mistakes are caused by over-generalization and want of elearness of perception, rather than by neglect. But Dr. Hurst is simply ludicrous when he speaks of Mr. Maurice as not employing himself in publishing his theological sentiments in the form of religious novels, like Kingsley and others, but having the commendable frankness to state his opinions without circumlocution, and to furnish us with his creed in a single volume of essays. Perhaps some of the readers of the three American editions of Dr. Hurst's work will be able to explain why it should be so very commendable for a man to write in a style in which he excels, instead of in a style for which he has no inclination. Spectalor. than all the great pages in which he has left WILLIAM ALEXANDER. History of Rationalism. By John F. Hurst, D.D. (Trübner.) It is some recommendation of this work that it has gone through three editions in America. We doubt if it would ever attain such a circulation in England. Though | useful as a storehouse of materials on religious thought since the Reformation, it is wholly confused and undigested, and has no pretention to the name of a history. The style is equally faulty, and the grammar not always perfect. Dr. Hurst writes of Germany as a country which has been prospered. His account of Voltaire's death reads as if Frederick the Great maintained a correspondence with Voltaire even after that event. His sketch of the controversy between Dr. Newman and Mr. Kingsley clearly implies that Mr. Kingsley wrote a reply to cere... "" "Tanta est Christianum profunditas literarum, ut in eis quotidie proficere si eas solas ab ineunte pueritia usque ad decrepitam senectutem, maximo otio, summo studio, meliore ingenio conarer addistantaque non solum in verbis quibus ista dicta sunt, verum etiam in rebus que intelligenda sunt latet altitudo sapientiæ, ut flagrantissimæ cupiditati discendi hoc contingat, quod eadem Scriptura quodam loco habet, cum consummaverit homo tunc incipit."― August. Volusiano. Epist. ii., tom. ii. 8. In quibus adhuc parvulis salubritur ædificatur fides.... quorum si quispiam quasi vilitatem dictorum adspernatus, extra nutritorias cunas imbecillitate se extenderit, heu cadet miser. Domine Deus, miserere, ne implumen pullem conculcent qui transeunt viam; et mitte angelum tuum, qui eum reponat in nido, ut vivat donec volet."-Confess. xli. 27, eg. 31. "Cum enim audio Christianum aliquem fratrem, illum aut illum, ista nescientem, et aliud pro alio sentientem, patienter intueor opinantem hominem; obest autem si hoc ad ipsam doctrinæ pietatis formam pertinere arbitretur. Confess., v. 9. COAL AND PYRAMIDS. "If we take the area of Lincoln's Inn Fields, measured up close to the houses, at eleven acres, about the dimensions of the base of the Great Pyramid, and could stack the coal as nature has done in the seams, the British coal raised last year would form, on that base, a solid block of the height of 5,229 feet, or as high as Snowdon surmounted by another mountain of half its height. Again, taking the distance from London to Edinburgh, four hundred miles, the same quantity, similarly packed, would build a wall the whole way of twelve feet thick and ninety-nine feet high, whilst if put together in the broken state in which coal is commonly used, it would give a wall of more than double that thickness. This yearly production, obtained by the labour of 240,000 men, is palpably a gigantic effort for so small an area as that of our united coal-fields and naturally excites apprehension for the future." To add another comparison to those of Mr. Smyth, we may take the cubic volume of the coal raised in 1865 as just about 100,000,000 cubic yards. The solid contents of the Great Pyramid of Cheops is found to be 3,394,307 cubic yards. We therefore raise yearly an amount of coal thirty times as great in bulk as the Great Pyramid. This quantity, too, is raised from the bottom of our mines by 240,000 men working one year. The Great Pyramid, as we are assured by Herodotus, required the united labours of 100,000 men during 20 years, which is equal to the labour of 2,000,000 men during one year. A simple calculation will show that in our coal-mining each man on an average raises 250 times as much material in a year as each of the ancient Egyptians engaged on the Pyramid. We need hardly point out, however, how very unfair this comparison is to the ancient Egyptians in some points. - Spectator. PART VI. CHAPTER XVII. A CATASTROPHE. horrible conventional system, and break a lance upon it, and make good his entrance. He forgot his work even, and laid down his pen and stared at Mr. John, who was younger than himself. How was he better than himself? that was the question. Then an incipient sneer awoke in the soul of the young backwoodsman. If there was such a differ nce between the son of a country solicitor and his clerk, what must there be between the son and the clients, all the connty people who came to have their difficulties solved? But then Mr. Brownlow was something more than a solicitor. If these two men the one old and full of experience, the other young and ignorant, with only a screen of glass and a curtain between them could have seen into each other's thoughts, how strange would have been the revelation. But happily that is one refuge secured for humanity. They were each safe, beyond even their own powers of selfinterpretation, in the recesses of their hearts. AFTER that day of curious abandonment and imprudence, Mr. Brownlow returned to his natural use and wont. He could not account to himself next day even for his want of control, for his injudiciousness. What end could it serve to lay open his plans to Sara? He had supposed she would take it seriously, as he had done, and, lo! she had taken it very lightly, as something at the first glance rather amusing than otherwise. Nothing could have so entirely disconcerted her father. His position, his good name, his very life, seemed to hang upon it, and Sara had taken it as a singularly piquant novelty, and nothing more. Then it was that it had occurred to him about that softening of the brain, and the thought had braced him up, had reawakened all his energies, and sealed his lips, and made him himself again. Mr. Brownlow, by a superhuman effort, not He went to the office next day, and all the fol- only took no notice of young Powys, but, so far lowing days, and took no more notice of young as that was possible, dismissed all thought of Powys than if he had never tried to win his him from his mind. It was a difficult thing to confidence, and never introduced him to his do, but yet he all but did it, plunging into the daughter. No doubt it was a disappointment Wardell case, and other cases, and feeling with to the young man. No doubt a good deal of a certain relief that, after all, he had not any the intoxication of the moment had remained particular symptoms of softening of the brain. in Powys's brain. He had remembered and The only thing he could not do was to banish dwelt upon the effect of that passing sunbeam from his own mind the consciousness of the on Miss Brownlow's hair and her dress, much young man's presence. Busy as he was, occumore than he need have done. And though pied to the full extent of his powers, considering he did not look at it much, the young Canadi- intently and with devotion fine points of law an had hung up the Claude in his memory and difficult social problems, he never for one the Claude with a certain setting round it more minute actually forgot that young Powys was important than its actual frame. This he had sitting on the other side of the screen. He done naturally, as a kind of inevitable conse- could forget anything else without much diffiquence. And it was not to be denied that he culty. Neither Sara nor Brownlows were in watched for Mr. Brownlow's coming next his mind as he laboured at his work. He morning, and waited for some little sign of spe- thought no more of Jack's presence in the cial friendship, something that should show, on office, though he knew very well he was there, his employer's part as well, a consciousness of than of the furniture; but he could have made special favour extended. But no such sign a picture of the habitual attitude in which his came. He might have been a cabbage for all clerk sat, of the way he bent over his work, the notice Mr. Brownlow took of him as he and the quick upward glance of his eyes. He passed to his own office. Not a glance, not a could not forget him. He could put out of his word, betrayed anything different from the or- mind all his own uncomfortable speculations, dinary not unkind but quite indifferent de- and even the sense that he had conducted matmeanour of the lawyer to his clerks. Then, as ters unwisely, which is a painful thought to was to be expected, a certain surprise and pain- such a man. All this he could do, but he could ful enlightenment-such as everybody has to not get rid of Powys's presence. He was there encounter, more or less, who are noticed by a standing menace, a standing reminder. their social superiors - came upon the young did not even always recall to himself, in the man. It was all a caprice, then, only momen-midst of his labours, why it was that this young tary and entirely without consequences, which man's presence disturbed him, but he never had introduced him to Mr. Brownlow's table could for a moment get free of the consciousness and his daughter. He belonged to a different that he was there. world, and it was vain to think that the other world would ever open to him. He was too unimportant even to be kept at a distance. He was her father's clerk. In Canada that would not have mattered so much, but in this old hard long-established England - Poor young fellow! he knew so little. The thought brought with it a gush of indignation. He set his teeth, and it seemed to him that he was able to face that He At the same time he regarded him with no unfriendly feelings. It was not hatred any more than it was love that moved him. He carried the thought with him, as we carry about with us, as soon as they are gone, that endless continual thought of the dead which makes our friends in the unseen world so much closer to us than anybody still living to be loved and cherished. Mr. Brownlow carried |