“Thus ceased to flow,” said a contemporary, “that river of eloquence which had watered the thirsty fields of the Church; thus passed away the glory of preachers, the master of doctors, and the light of scholars; thus fell the courageous combatant who with the sword of truth had given heresy a mortal blow; thus set this glorious sun of Christian doctrine, leaving a world in darkness and in tears.”

His vacant see had no successor.  “The African province, the cherished jewel of the Roman Empire, sparkled for a while in the Vandal diadem.  The Greek supplanted the Vandal, and the Saracen supplanted the Greek, and the home of Augustine was blotted out from the map of Christendom.”  The light of the gospel was totally extinguished in Northern Africa.  The acts of Rome and the doctrines of Cyprian were equally forgotten by the Mahommedan conquerors.  Only in Bona, as Hippo is now called, has the memory of the great bishop been cherished,—­the one solitary flower which escaped the successive desolations of Vandals and Saracens.  And when Algiers was conquered by the French in 1830, the sacred relics of the saint were transferred from Pavia (where they had been deposited by the order of Charlemagne), in a coffin of lead, enclosed in a coffin of silver, and the whole secured in a sarcophagus of marble, and finally committed to the earth near the scenes which had witnessed his transcendent labors.  I do not know whether any monument of marble and granite was erected to his memory; but he needs no chiselled stone, no storied urn, no marble bust, to perpetuate his fame.  For nearly fifteen hundred years he has reigned as the great oracle of the Church, Catholic and Protestant, in matters of doctrine,—­the precursor of Bernard, of Leibnitz, of Calvin, of Bossuet, all of whom reproduced his ideas, and acknowledged him as the fountain of their own greatness.  “Whether,” said one of the late martyred archbishops of Paris, “he reveals to us the foundations of an impure polytheism, so varied in its developments, yet so uniform in its elemental principles; or whether he sports with the most difficult problems of philosophy, and throws out thoughts which in after times are sufficient to give an immortality to Descartes,—­we always find in this great doctor all that human genius, enlightened by the Spirit of God, can explain, and also to what a sublime height reason herself may soar when allied with faith.”

AUTHORITIES.

The voluminous Works of Saint Augustine, especially his “Confessions.”  Mabillon, Tillemont, and Baronius have written very fully of this great Father.  See also Vaughan’s Life of Thomas Aquinas.  Neander, Geisler, Mosheim, and Milman indorse, in the main, the eulogium of Catholic writers.  There are numerous popular biographies, of which those of Baillie and Schaff are among the best; but the most satisfactory book I have read is the History of M. Poujoulat, in three volumes, issued at Paris in 1846.  Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, has an extended biography.  Even Gibbon pays a high tribute to his genius and character.