Fourchambault—­Heavens!  He’s not even handsome.

Madame Fourchambault—­What does that matter?  Haven’t I been the happiest of wives?

Fourchambault—­What?  One word is as good as a hundred.  I won’t have him.  Blanche need not take Chauvet, but she shan’t marry Rastiboulois either.  That’s all I have to say.

Madame Fourchambault—­But, Monsieur—­

Fourchambault—­That’s all I have to say.

[He goes out.]

ST. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

(354-430)

BY SAMUEL HART

St. Augustine of Hippo (Aurelius Augustinus) was born at Tagaste in Numidia, November 13th, 354.  The story of his life has been told by himself in that wonderful book addressed to God which he called the ‘Confessions’.  He gained but little from his father Patricius; he owed almost everything to his loving and saintly mother Monica.  Though she was a Christian, she did not venture to bring her son to baptism; and he went away from home with only the echo of the name of Jesus Christ in his soul, as it had been spoken by his mother’s lips.  He fell deeply into the sins of youth, but found no satisfaction in them, nor was he satisfied by the studies of literature to which for a while he devoted himself.  The reading of Cicero’s ‘Hortensius’ partly called him back to himself; but before he was twenty years old he was carried away into Manichaeism, a strange system of belief which united traces of Christian teaching with Persian doctrines of two antagonistic principles, practically two gods, a good god of the spiritual world and an evil god of the material world.  From this he passed after a while into less gross forms of philosophical speculation, and presently began to lecture on rhetoric at Tagaste and at Carthage.  When nearly thirty years of age he went to Rome, only to be disappointed in his hopes for glory as a rhetorician; and after two years his mother joined him at Milan.

[Illustration:  ST. AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER.  Photogravure from a Painting by Ary Scheffer.]

[Illustration]

The great Ambrose had been called from the magistrate’s chair to be bishop of this important city; and his character and ability made a great impression on Augustine.  But Augustine was kept from acknowledging and submitting to the truth, not by the intellectual difficulties which he propounded as an excuse, but by his unwillingness to submit to the moral demands which Christianity made upon him.  At last there came one great struggle, described in a passage from the ‘Confessions’ which is given below; and Monica’s hopes and prayers were answered in the conversion of her son to the faith and obedience of Jesus Christ.  On Easter Day, 387, in the thirty-third year of his life, he was baptized, an unsubstantiated tradition assigning to this occasion the composition and first use of