As an example of the hermeneutical manner in which St. Augustine unfolded the concealed facts of the Scriptures, I may cite the following from the thirteenth book of the “Confessions;” his object is to show that the doctrine of the Trinity is contained in the Mosaic narrative of the creation: 

“Lo, now the Trinity appears unto me in a glass darkly, which is thou my God, because thou, O Father, in him who is the beginning of our wisdom, which is thy wisdom, born of thyself, equal unto thee and coeternal, that is, in thy Son, createdst heaven and earth.  Much now have we said of the heaven of heavens, and of the earth invisible and without form, and of the darksome deep, in reference to the wandering instability of its spiritual deformity, unless it had been converted unto him, from whom it had its then degree of life, and by his enlightening became a beauteous life, and the heaven of that heaven, which was afterward set between water and water.  And under the name of God, I now held the Father, who made these things; and under the name of the beginning, the Son, in whom he made these things; and believing, as I did, my God as the Trinity, I searched further in his holy words, and lo! thy Spirit moved upon the waters.  Behold the Trinity, my God!—­Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost Creator of all creation.”

That I might convey to my reader a just impression of the character of St. Augustine’s philosophical writings, I have, in the two quotations here given, substituted for my own translation that of the Rev. Dr. Pusey, as contained in Vol.  I. of the “Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church,” published at Oxford, 1840.

Considering the eminent authority which has been attributed to the writings of St. Augustine by the religious world for nearly fifteen centuries, it is proper to speak of them with respect.  And indeed it is not necessary to do otherwise.  The paragraphs here quoted criticise themselves.  No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office—­ a guide to purity of life—­and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man.  The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the great Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance.

A divine revelation of science admits of no improvement, no change, no advance.  It discourages as needless, and indeed as presumptuous, all new discovery, considering it as an unlawful prying into things which it was the intention of God to conceal.

What, then, is that sacred, that revealed science, declared by the Fathers to be the sum of all knowledge?