I need not detail the results of this famous controversy.  Augustine, appealing to the consciousness of mankind as well as to the testimony of Paul, prevailed over Pelagius, who appealed to the pride of reason.  In those dreadful times there were more men who felt the need of divine grace than there were philosophers who revelled in the speculations of the Greeks.  The danger from the Pelagians was not from their organization as a sect, but their opinions as individual men.  Probably there were all shades of opinion among them, from a modest and thoughtful semi-Pelagianism to the rankest infidelity.  There always have been, and probably ever will be, sceptical and rationalistic people, even in the bosom of the Church.

Now had it not been for Augustine,—­a profound thinker, a man of boundless influence and authority,—­it is not unlikely that Pelagianism would have taken so deep a root in the mind of Christendom, especially in the hearts of princes and nobles, that it would have become the creed of the Church.  Even as it was, it was never fully eradicated in the schools and in the courts and among worldly people of culture and fashion.

But the fame of Augustine does not rest on his controversies with heretics and schismatics alone.  He wrote treatises on almost all subjects of vital interest to the Church.  His essay on the Trinity was worthy of Athanasius, and has never been surpassed in lucidity and power.  His soliloquies on a blissful life, and the order of the universe, and the immortality of the soul are pregnant with the richest thought, equal to the best treatises of Cicero or Boethius.  His commentary on the Psalms is sparkling with tender effusions, in which every thought is a sentiment and every sentiment is a blazing flame of piety and love.  Perhaps his greatest work was the amusement of his leisure hours for thirteen years,—­a philosophical treatise called “The City of God,” in which he raises and replies to all the great questions of his day; a sort of Christian poem upon our origin and end, and a final answer to Pagan theogonies,—­a final sentence on all the gods of antiquity.  In that marvellous book he soars above his ordinary excellence, and develops the designs of God in the history of States and empires, furnishing for Bossuet the groundwork of his universal history.  Its great excellence, however, is its triumphant defence of Christianity over all other religions,—­the last of the great apologies which, while settling the faith of the Christian world, demolished forever the last stronghold of a defeated Paganism.  As “ancient Egypt pronounced judgments on her departed kings before proceeding to their burial, so Augustine interrogates the gods of antiquity, shows their impotence to sustain the people who worshipped them, triumphantly sings their departed greatness, and seals with his powerful hand the sepulchre into which they were consigned forever.”