No mind has exerted greater influence on the church than that of Augustine. Con sistency of theological opinion is not to be looked for from him, nor from any of the church fathers. A larger sphere of freedom was permitted to religious speculation in those unfettered days, before creeds were encircled with that traditional sanctity they now possess. Nevertheless, we have little difficulty in determining the central tenets of his belief. He held the corruption of human nature through the fall of man, and the consequent slavery of the human will. Both on metaphysical and religious grounds, he asserted the doctrine of predestination, from which he necessarily deduced the corollary doctrines of election and reprobation; and finally, he strenuously supported, against the Pelagians, not only these opinions, but also the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. At the same time, it is but fair to add that. even on such points, his language is far from uniform; that mach of the severity of his doctrines arose from the bitter and painful remembrance of his own early sins, and from the profound impres sion which the corrupt state of society in his time, and the vast desolations of barbarism, had made on his earnest and susceptible soul; and that. in his desire to give glory to God, he sometimes forgot to be just to man. In illustration of this may be mentioned the fact (see Neander, .Mosheim, and Waddington's church histories) that the maxim which justified the chastisement of religious errors by civil penalties, even to burning, was established and confirmed by the authority of A., and thus transmitted to following
ages. In his epistle to Dulcitius, a civil magistrate, who shrank from putting in force the edict of Ilonorius against heretics, he uses these words: " It is much better that some should peril, li by their own fires, than that the whole body should burn in the evIa. lasting thanes of Gehenna, through the desert of their impious dissension." In the opinion of Neander, it was to the somewhat narrow culture and the peculiar personal experience and temperament of Augustine, that the doctrines of absolute predestination and irresistible grace, first systematized by him, owed much of that harshness and one sideduess which so long obstructed their general reception by the church, and which CUIIIitille to render theta repulsive to multitudes.
His life has been written by Tillemont, and his entire works have been repeatedly edited. The Benedictine edition. published at Paris in 11 vols. (1679-1704 is the best. Numerous editions of the Confessiones and De Ciritate Dei have appeared; the most recent of the latter by Marcus Dods, D.D. In the " Library of Fathers of the Doty Catholic Church," are translations into English of A.'s Gooftwions, .E.17.osition on St. John's Gospel and on the Psalms, 8,1'71101a on the New Testament, and Short Treoties. His Sermon on the Mount is translated by Trench, and his Letters by Rev..I. G. Cunningham.