pire, is swallowed up in one tremendous fire; and there is no part of the earth where Romans are
not in exile. Churches once held sacred are now but heaps of dust and ashes; and yet we have our
minds set on the desire of gain. We live as though we were going to die tomorrow; yet we build as
though we were going to live always in this world. Our walls shine with gold, our ceilings also
and the capitals of our pillars; yet Christ dies before our doors naked and hungry in the person of
His poor."
This passage occurs incidentally in a letter to a friend who has decided to devote his daughter to
perpetual virginity, and most of it is concerned with the rules to be observed in the education of
girls so dedicated. It is strange that, with all Jerome's deep feeling about the fall of the ancient
world, he thinks the preservation of virginity more important than victory over the Huns and
Vandals and Goths. Never once do his thoughts turn to any possible measure of practical
statesmanship; never once does he point out the evils of the fiscal system, or of reliance on an
army composed of barbarians. The same is true of Ambrose and of Augustine; Ambrose, it is true,
was a statesman, but only on behalf of the Church. It is no wonder that the Empire fell into ruin
when all the best and most vigorous minds of the age were so completely remote from secular
concerns. On the other hand, if ruin was inevitable, the Christian outlook was admirably fitted to
give men fortitude, and to enable them to preserve their religious hopes when earthly hopes
seemed vain. The expression of this point of view, in The City of God, was the supreme merit of
Saint Augustine.
Of Saint Augustine I shall speak, in this chapter, only as a man; as a theologian and philosopher, I
shall consider him in the next chapter.
He was born in 354, nine years after Jerome, and fourteen years after Ambrose; he was a native of
Africa, where he passed much the greater part of his life. His mother was a Christian, but his
father was not. After a period as a Manichæan, he became a Catholic, and was baptized by
Ambrose in Milan. He became bishop of Hippo, not far from Carthage, about the year 396. There
he remained until his death in 430.
Of his early life we know much more than in the case of most ecclesiastics, because he has told of
it in his Confessions. This book has had famous imitators, particularly Rousseau and Tolstoy, but I