three years more in study and meditation, giving away all he possessed to religion and charity, living with his friends in a complete community of goods.  It was there that some of his best works were composed.  In the year 391, on a visit to Hippo, a Numidian seaport, he was forced into more active duties.  Entering the church, the people clamored for his ordination; and such was his power as a pulpit orator, and so universally was he revered, that in two years after he became coadjutor bishop, and his great career began.

As a bishop he won universal admiration.  Councils could do nothing without his presence.  Emperors condescended to sue for his advice.  He wrote letters to all parts of Christendom.  He was alike saint, oracle, prelate, and preacher.  He labored day and night, living simply, but without monkish austerity.  At table, reading and literary conferences were preferred to secular conversation.  His person was accessible.  He interested himself in everybody’s troubles, and visited the forlorn and miserable.  He was indefatigable in reclaiming those who had strayed from the fold.  He won every heart by charity, and captivated every mind with his eloquence; so that Hippo, a little African town, was no longer “least among the cities of Judah,” since her prelate was consulted from the extremities of the earth, and his influence went forth throughout the crumbling Empire, to heal division and establish the faith of the wavering,—­a Father of the Church universal.

Yet it is not as bishop, but as doctor, that he is immortal.  It was his mission to head off the dissensions and heresies of his age, and to establish the faith of Paul even among the Germanic barbarians.  He is the great theologian of the Church, and his system of divinity not only was the creed of the Middle Ages, but is still an authority in the schools, both Catholic and Protestant.

Let us, then, turn to his services as theologian and philosopher.  He wrote over a thousand treatises, and on almost every subject that has interested the human mind; but his labors were chiefly confined to the prevailing and more subtle and dangerous errors of his day.  Nor was it by dry dialectics that he refuted these heresies, although the most logical and acute of men, but by his profound insight into the cardinal principles of Christianity, which he discoursed upon with the most extraordinary affluence of thought and language, disdaining all sophistries and speculations.  He went to the very core,—­a realist of the most exalted type, permeated with the spirit of Plato, yet bowing down to Paul.

We first find him combating the opinions which had originally enthralled him, and which he understood better than any theologian who ever lived.