government of bishops, of which the bishop of Rome was the acknowledged head.  But he did not anticipate—­and I believe he would not have indorsed—­their future encroachments and their ambitious schemes for enthralling the mind of the world, to say nothing of personal aggrandizement and the usurpation of temporal authority.  And yet the central power they established on the banks of the Tiber was, with all its corruptions, fitted to conserve the interests of Christendom in rude ages of barbarism and ignorance; and possibly Augustine, with his profound intuitions, and in view of the approaching desolations of the Christian world, wished to give to the clergy and to their head all the moral power and prestige possible, to awe and control the barbaric chieftains, for in his day the Empire was crumbling to pieces, and the old civilization was being trampled under foot.  If there was a man in the whole Empire capable of taking comprehensive views of the necessities of society, that man was the Bishop of Hippo; so that if we do not agree with his views of church government, let us bear in mind the age in which he lived, and its peculiar dangers and necessities.  And let us also remember that his idea of the unity of the Church has a spiritual as well as a temporal meaning, and in that sublime and lofty sense can never be controverted so long as One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism remain the common creed of Christians in all parts of the world.  It was to preserve this unity that he entered so zealously into all the great controversies of the age, and fought heretics as well as schismatics.

The great work which pre-eminently called out his genius, and for which he would seem to have been raised up, was to combat the Pelagian heresy, and establish the doctrine of the necessity of Divine Grace,—­even as it was the mission of Athanasius to defend the doctrine of the Trinity, and that of Luther to establish Justification by Faith.  In all ages there are certain heresies, or errors, which have spread so dangerously, and been embraced so generally by the leading and fashionable classes, that they seem to require some extraordinary genius to arise in order to combat them successfully, and rescue the Church from the snares of a false philosophy.  Thus Bernard was raised up to refute the rationalism and nominalism of Abelard, whose brilliant and subtile inquiries had a tendency to extinguish faith in the world, and bring all mysteries to the test of reason.  The enthusiastic and inquiring young men who flocked to his lectures from all parts of Europe carried back to their homes and convents and schools insidious errors, all the more dangerous because they were mixed with truths which were universally recognized.  It required such a man as Bernard to expose these sophistries and destroy their power, not so much by dialectical weapons as by appealing to those lofty truths, those profound convictions, those essential and immutable principles which consciousness