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 dramati-
cally 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 circum-
stances, 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 wait-
ing in their anterooms. ⁴ There was, in fact, beneath the genius, a very hum-
drum 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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