Besides all the treatises of Augustine,—­exegetical, apologetical, dogmatical, polemical, ascetic, and autobiographical,—­three hundred and sixty-three of his sermons have come down to us, and numerous letters to the great men and women of his time.  Perhaps he wrote too much and too loosely, without sufficient regard to art,—­like Varro, the most voluminous writer of antiquity, and to whose writings Augustine was much indebted.  If Saint Augustine had written less, and with more care, his writings would now be more read and more valued.  Thucydides compressed the labors of his literary life into a single volume; but that volume is immortal, is a classic, is a text-book.  Yet no work of man is probably more lasting than the “Confessions” of Augustine, from the extraordinary affluence and subtilty of his thoughts, and his burning, fervid, passionate style.  When books were scarce and dear, his various works were the food of the Middle Ages:  and what better books ever nourished the European mind in a long period of ignorance and ignominy?  So that we cannot overrate his influence in giving a direction to Christian thought.  He lived in the writings of the sainted doctors of the Scholastic schools.  And he was a very favored man in living to a good old age, wearing the harness of a Christian laborer and the armor of a Christian warrior until he was seventy-six.  He was a bishop nearly forty years.  For forty years he was the oracle of the Church, the light of doctors.  His social and private life had also great charms:  he lived the doctrines that he preached; he completely triumphed over the temptations which once assailed him.  Everybody loved as well as revered him, so genial was his humanity, so broad his charity.  He was affable, courteous, accessible, full of sympathy and kindness.  He was tolerant of human infirmities in an age of angry controversy and ascetic rigors.  He lived simply, but was exceedingly hospitable.  He cared nothing for money, and gave away what he had.  He knew the luxury of charity, having no superfluities.  He was forgiving as well as tolerant; saying, It is necessary to pardon offences, not seven times, but seventy times seven.  No one could remember an idle word from his lips after his conversion.  His humility was as marked as his charity, ascribing all his triumphs to divine assistance.  He was not a monk, but gave rules to monastic orders.  He might have been a metropolitan patriarch or pope; but he was contented with being bishop of a little Numidian town.  His only visits beyond the sanctuary were to the poor and miserable.  As he won every heart by love, so he subdued every mind by eloquence.  He died leaving no testament, because he had no property to bequeath but his immortal writings,—­some ten hundred and thirty distinct productions.  He died in the year 430, when his city was besieged by the Vandals, and in the arms of his faithful Alypius, then a neighboring bishop, full of visions of the ineffable beauty of that blissful state to which his renovated spirit had been for forty years constantly soaring.