Augustine, in his “Confessions,”—­that remarkable book which has lasted fifteen hundred years, and is still prized for its intensity, its candor, and its profound acquaintance with the human heart, as well as evangelical truth; not an egotistical parade of morbid sentimentalities, like the “Confessions” of Rousseau, but a mirror of Christian experience,—­tells us that until he was sixteen he was obstinate, lazy, neglectful of his studies, indifferent to reproach, and abandoned to heathenish sports.  He even committed petty thefts, was quarrelsome, and indulged in demoralizing pleasures.  At nineteen he was sent to Carthage to be educated, where he went still further astray; was a follower of stage-players (then all but infamous), and gave himself up to unholy loves.  But his intellect was inquiring, his nature genial, and his habits as studious as could be reconciled with a life of pleasure,—­a sort of Alcibiades, without his wealth and rank, willing to listen to any Socrates who would stimulate his mind.  With all his excesses and vanities, he was not frivolous, and seemed at an early age to be a sincere inquirer after truth.  The first work which had a marked effect on him was the “Hortensius” of Cicero,—­a lost book, which contained an eloquent exhortation to philosophy, or the love of wisdom.  From that he turned to the Holy Scriptures, but they seemed to him then very poor, compared with the stateliness of Tully, nor could his sharp wit penetrate their meaning.  Those who seemed to have the greatest influence over him were the Manicheans,—­a transcendental, oracular, indefinite, illogical, pretentious set of philosophers, who claimed superior wisdom, and were not unlike (at least in spirit) those modern savans in the Christian commonwealth, who make a mockery of what is most sacred in Christianity while themselves propounding the most absurd theories.

The Manicheans claimed to be a Christian sect, but were Oriental in their origin and Pagan in their ideas.  They derived their doctrines from Manes, or Mani, who flourished in Persia in the second half of the third century, and who engrafted some Christian doctrines on his system, which was essentially the dualism of Zoroaster and the pantheism of Buddha.  He assumed two original substances,—­God and Hyle, light and darkness, good and evil,—­which were opposed to each other.  Matter, which is neither good nor evil, was regarded as bad in itself, and identified with darkness, the prince of which overthrew the primitive man.  Among the descendants of the fallen man light and darkness have struggled for supremacy, but matter, or darkness, conquered; and Christ, who was confounded with the sun, came to break the dominion.  But the light of his essential being could not unite with darkness; therefore he was not born of a woman, nor did he die to rise again.  Christ had thus no personal existence.  As the body, being matter, was thought to be essentially evil, it was the aim of the Manicheans to set the soul free from matter;