Sketches of Church History, from A.D. 33 to the Reformation

by James Craigie Robertson

A.D. 354-430.

PART I.

The church in the north of Africa has hardly been mentioned since the time of St. Cyprian.[28] But we must now look towards it again, since in the days of St. Chrysostom it produced a man who was perhaps the greatest of all the old Christian fathers—St. Augustine.

Augustine was born at Thagaste, a city of Numidia, in the year 354. His mother, Monica, was a pious Christian, but his father, Patricius, was a heathen, and a man of no very good character. Monica was resolved to bring up her son in the true faith: she entered him as a catechumen of the Church when a little child, and carefully taught him as much of religious things as a child could learn. But he was not then baptized, because (as has been mentioned already)[29] people were accustomed in those days to put off baptism, out of fear lest they should afterwards fall into sin, and so should lose the blessing of the sacrament. This, as we know, was a mistake, but it was a very common practice nevertheless.

When Augustine was a boy, he was one day suddenly taken ill, so that he seemed likely to die. Remembering what his mother had taught him, he begged that he might be baptized, and preparations were made for the purpose; but all at once he began to grow better, and the baptism was put off for the same reason as before.

As he grew up, he gave but little promise of what he was afterwards to become. Much of his time was spent in idleness; and through idleness he fell into bad company, and was drawn into sins of many kinds. When he was about seventeen, his father died. The good Monica had been much troubled by her husband's heathenism and misconduct, and had earnestly tried to convert him from his errors. She went about this wisely, not lecturing him or arguing with him in a way that might have set him more against the Gospel, but trying rather to show him the beauty of Christian faith by her own loving, gentle, and dutiful behaviour. And at length her pains were rewarded by seeing him before his death profess himself a believer, and receive Christian baptism.

Monica was left rather badly off at her husband's death. But a rich neighbour was kind enough to help her in the expense of finishing her son's education, and the young man himself now began to show something of the great talents which God had been pleased to bestow on him. Unhappily, however, he sank deeper and deeper in vice, and poor Monica was bitterly grieved by his ways. A book which he happened to read led him to feel something of the shamefulness and wretchedness of his courses; but, as it was a heathen book (although written by one of the wisest of the heathens, Cicero), it could not show him by what means he might be able to reach to a higher life. He looked into Scripture, in the hope of finding instruction there; but he was now in that state of mind to which, as St. Paul says (1 Cor. i. 23), the preaching of Christ sounds like "foolishness;" so that he fancied himself to be above learning anything from a book so plain and homely as the Bible then seemed to him, and he set out in search of some other teaching. And a very strange sort of teaching he met with.

About a hundred years before this time, a man named Manes appeared in Persia (A.D. 270), and preached a religion which he pretended to have received from Heaven, but which was really made up by himself, from a mixture of Christian and heathen notions. It was something like the doctrines which had been before taught by the Gnostics,[30] and was as wild nonsense as can well be imagined. He taught that there were two gods—a good god of light, and a bad god of darkness. And he divided his followers into two classes, the lower of which were called hearers, while the higher were called elect. These elect were supposed to be very strict in their lives. They were not to eat flesh at all;—they might not even gather the fruits of the earth, or pluck a herb with their own hands. They were supported and were served by the hearers; and they took a very odd way of showing their gratitude to these; for it is said that when one of the elect ate a piece of bread, he made this speech to it:—"It was not I who reaped or ground or baked thee; may they who did so be reaped and ground and baked in their turn!" And it was believed that the poor "hearers" would after death become corn, and have to go through the mill and the oven, until they should have suffered enough to clear away their offences and make them fit for the blessedness of the elect.

The Manichæans (as the followers of Manes were called) soon found their way into Africa, where they gained many converts; and, although laws were often made against their heresy by the emperors, it continued to spread secretly; for they used to hide their opinions, when there was any danger, so that persons who were really Manichæans pretended to be Catholic Christians, and there was some of them even among the monks and clergy of the Church.

In the humour in which Augustine now was, this strange sect took his fancy; for the Manichæans pretended to be wiser than any one else, and laughed at all submission to doctrines which had been settled by the Church. So Augustine at twenty became a Manichæan, and for nine years was one of the hearers,—for he never got to be one of the elect, or to know much about their secrets. But before he had been very long in the sect, he began to notice some things which shocked him in the behaviour of the elect, who professed the greatest strictness. In short, he could not but see that their strictness was all a pretence, and that they were really a very worthless set of men. And he found out, too, that, besides bad conduct, there was a great deal very bad and disgusting in the opinions of the Manichæans, which he had not known of at first. After learning all this, he did not know what to turn to, and he seems for a time to have believed nothing at all,—which is a wretched state of mind indeed, and so he found it.