this man's life only begins after the old man has been put off and the new put on.

That certainly has been the Church's view. What has chiefly remained in the mind of the Church is not the Augustine who went astray and so dramatically turned back from his errors and his sins, nor the Augustine whom a declining world of Antiquity endowed with such exquisite sensibility. Rather was it the man, who, having found his treasure after seeking it for thirty years, had forty-three years left to turn it to account. The man whom the Church saw fit to canonize was the Bishop of Hippo Regius.

He was never an ordinary bishop, he was not even an ordinary bishop of genius. Most ordinary men, even most gifted ordinary men, who had happened to stand thus in the foreground of events and in the full glare of African Church history, would still have remained as impersonal in their orthodoxy as the Church itself. Had Augustine been such a man, he might well have been of moment to the historian; to the great multitude he would have made little appeal. But Augustine was not such a man; the pious men who studied these folios in every age have known better.

Nor was he baptized on the deathbed of his sensibility. He remained the incomparable one -- even in the grey habit which was indistinguishable from that of those who shared his habitation and who for forty years saw him go about in such attire. ³ In his writings he remained till the day of his death one of the world's greatest artists in thought -- and he was nearly seventy-six when he died. He was also one of the most intuitive of poetical minds, for whatever one may say of him and in whatever mood we encounter him, the mark of the artist is palpable and unfailing.

But the magic and attraction of the man did not lie in his writings alone. The story of his early years reveals something of the compelling power of his personality, and to the end, though living in strangely humble circumstances, he continued to draw men to himself.

The great man lived in a small world. He was hardly more than a sort of episcopal dean, and a great deal of his work was that of an ordinary priest; he was the kind of bishop whom the more casual officials cheerfully kept waiting in their anterooms. ⁴ There was, in fact, beneath the genius, a very humdrum Augustine who lived in what was really a large but very ordinary presbytery and who could be approached by anybody about pretty well any business that his caller fancied.

Viewing him through the perspective of history, we gain the impression that the saint's real home was Carthage and that this was the city from which he dominated Church history in his day. Undoubtedly there were years in which nearly half of his time was spent in the capital, but the truth is that Carthage was still essentially the exception and Hippo the rule. True, Augustine

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