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- Preface. ix
friendship and fellowship were absolutely essential, and one in whom was no trace of paltry personal feeling. The style of the “Confessions” bears many traces of his training in rhetoric. It is often epigrammatic, and in a stately and untranslatable way he plays on the sound of words, and balances them with extraordinary care. His familiarity with and common use of Scripture is remarkable. His mind was thoroughly steeped in it, and its phrases had become so much a part of his vocabulary that they are of constant recurrence in his writings. The piety of his purpose, which does not shrink from unveiling the darkest recesses of his soul, cannot save the book in parts from being terrible. The long struggle between his higher spiritual impulses and his lower carnal habits; the way in which his moral character and conduct act and react upon his mental clearness of vision, and his state of religious doubt; these things are set forth in a manner which cannot fail to awaken deep interest, and to manifest the intimate connection between moral habit and right faith. To the Agnostic of the nineteenth century the “Confessions of S. Augustine” are a warning; while the complete satisfaction and rest which his keen and cultured intellect, after at the prompting of his lower nature it had subtly sought many respites from a faith which demanded a purer life than he was prepared to live, found at length in the Creed of the “Catholic Mother,” may suffice to convince that the Religion of Christ has in it depths which can afford to the most logical and scientific minds a peace which will elsewhere be sought in vain.
The translation is revised, and the issue of this edition is made in the hope that the self-humiliation of S. Augustine, in so baring his inmost soul to the criticism of a gainsaying
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