AN ELOQUENT BOOK OF RELIGIOUS MEDITATION--THE ABLEST OF
EARLY CHRISTIAN FATHERS TELLS OF HIS YOUTH, HIS FRIENDS
AND HIS CONVERSION.
In reading the great books of the world one must be guided largely by
his own taste. If a book is recommended to you and you cannot enjoy it
after conscientious effort, then it is plain that the book does not
appeal to you or that you are not ready for it. The classic that you may
not be able to read this year may become the greatest book in the world
to you in another year, when you have passed through some hard
experience that has matured your mind or awakened some dormant faculties
that call out for employment.
Great success or great failure, a crushing grief or a disappointment
that seems to take all the light out of your world--these are some of
the things that mature and change the mind. So, if you cannot feel
interest in some of the books that are recommended in these articles put
the volumes aside and wait for a better day. It will be sure to come,
unless you drop into the habit of limiting your reading to the
newspapers and the magazines. If you fall into this common practice then
there is little hope for you, as real literature will lose all its
attractions. Better to read nothing than to devote your time entirely to
what is ephemeral and simply for the day it is printed.
_The Confessions of St. Augustine_ is a book which will appeal to one
reader, while another can make little of it. For fifteen hundred years
it has been a favorite book among priests and theologians and those who
are given to pious meditation. Up to the middle of the last century it
probably had a more vital influence in weaning people from the world and
in turning their thoughts to religious things than any other single book
except the Bible. And this influence is not hard to seek, for into this
book the stalwart old African Bishop of the fourth century put his whole
heart, with its passionate love of God and its equally passionate
desire for greater perfection. As an old commentator said, "it is most
filled with the fire of the love of God and most calculated to kindle it
in the heart."
This is the vital point and the one which it seems to me explains why
the _Confessions_ is very hard reading for most people of today. The
praise of God, the constant quotation of passages from the Bible and the
fear that his feelings may relapse into his former neglect of
religion--these were common in the writers who followed Augustine for
more than a thousand years. In fact, they remained the staple of all
religious works up to the close of the Georgian age in England. Then
came a radical change, induced perhaps by the rapid spread of scientific
thought. The old religious books were neglected and the new works showed
a directness of statement, an absence of Biblical verbiage and a closer
bearing on everyday life and thought. This trend has been increased in
devotional books, as well as in sermons, until it would be impossible to
induce a church congregation of today to accept a sermon of the type
that was preached up to the middle of the last century.
[Illustration:
PORTRAIT OF ST. AUGUSTINE
BY THE FAMOUS FLORENTINE PAINTER
SANDRO BOTTICELLI--THE ORIGINAL IS IN
THE OGNISSANTI, FLORENCE]
For this reason it seems to me that any one who wishes to cultivate St.
Augustine should begin by reading a chapter of the _Confessions_. If you
enjoy this, then it will be well to take up the complete _Confessions_,
one of the best editions of which will be found in Everyman's Library,
translated by Dr. E. B. Pusey, the leader of the great Tractarian
movement in England. Pusey frowns on the use of any book of extracts
from St. Augustine, but this English churchman, with his severe views,
cannot be taken as a guide in these days. Doubtless he thought _Pamela_
and _Coebs in Search of a Wife_ entertaining books of fiction; but
the reader of today pronounces them too dull and too sentimental to
read.
Many there are in these days who preserve something of the old
Covenanter spirit in regard to the Bible and other devotional books. One
of these is Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell, superintendent of the Labrador
Medical Mission, an Oxford man, who cast aside a brilliant career in
England to throw in his life with the poor fishermen along the stormy
coast which he has made his home. Dr. Grenfell has come to have the same
influence over these uneducated men that General Gordon of Khartoum
gained over alien races like the Chinese and the Soudanese, or that
Stanley secured over savage African tribes. It is the intense
earnestness, the simple-minded sincerity of the man who lives as Christ
would live on earth which impresses these people of Labrador and gains
their love and confidence. Grenfell in a little essay, _What the Bible
Means to Me_, develops his feeling for the Scriptures, which is much the
same feeling that inspired Augustine, as well as John Bunyan. Grenfell
even goes to the length of saying that he prefers the Bible as a
suggester of thought to any other book, and he regrets that it is not
bound as secular books are bound, so that he might read it without
attracting undue attention on railroad trains or in public places while
waiting to be served with meals.
Gordon carried with him to the place where he met his death pieces of
what he firmly believed was wood of the real cross of Calvary, and on
the last day of his life, when he looked out over the Nile for the help
that never came, he read his Bible with simple confidence in the God of
Battles. Stanley believed that the Lord was with him in all his
desperate adventures in savage Africa, and this belief warded off fever
and discouragement and gave him the tremendous energy to overcome
obstacles that would have proved fatal to any one not keyed up to his
high tension by implicit faith in the Lord.
If you wish to know what personal faith in God means and what it can
accomplish in this world of devotion to mammon, read Stanley's
_Autobiography_, edited by his wife, that Dorothy Tennant who is one of
the most brilliant of living English women. It is one of the most
stimulating books in the world, and no young man can read it without
having his ambition powerfully excited and his better nature stirred by
the spectacle of the rise of this poor abused boy slave in a Welsh
foundlings' home to a place of high honor and great usefulness--a seat
beside kings, and a name that will live forever as the greatest of
African explorers.
It is this marvelous faith in God, which is as real as the breath in his
nostrils, that makes St. Augustine's _Confessions_ a vital and enduring
book. It is this faith that charges it with the potency of living words,
although the man who wrote this book has been dead over fifteen hundred
years. Augustine was born in Numidia and brought up amid pagan
surroundings, although his mother, Monica, was an ardent Christian and
prayed that he might become a convert to her faith. He was trained as a
rhetorician and spent some time at Carthage. When his thoughts were
directed to religion the main impediment in the way of his acceptance of
Christianity was the fact that he lived with a concubine and had had a
child by her. Finally came the death of his bosom friend, which called
out one of the great laments of all time, and then his gradual
conversion to the Christian church, largely due to careful study of St.
Paul.
Following hard upon his conversion came the death of his mother, who had
been his constant companion for many years. Rarely eloquent is his
tribute to this unselfish mother, whose virtues were those of the good
women of all ages and whose love for her son was the flower of her life.
In all literature there is nothing finer than the old churchman's tender
memorial to his dear mother and his pathetic record of the heavy grief,
that finally was eased by a flood of tears. Here are some of the simple
words of this lament over the dead:
[Illustration:
A PAGE FROM
ST. AUGUSTINE'S "LA CITE DE DIEU"
WHICH WAS PRINTED IN ABBEVILLE
FRANCE, IN 1486]
"I closed her eyes; and there flowed withal a mighty sorrow into my
heart, which was overflowing into tears; mine eyes at the same time, by
the violent command of my mind, drank up their fountain wholly dry; and
woe was me in such strife! * * * What then was it which did grievously
pain me within, but a fresh wound wrought through the sudden wrench of
that most sweet and dear custom of living together? I joyed indeed in
her testimony, when, in her last sickness, mingling her endearments with
my acts of duty, she called me 'dutiful,' and mentioned with great
affection of love that she never heard any harsh or reproachful sound
uttered by my mouth against her. But yet, O my Lord, who madest us, what
comparison is there betwixt that honor that I paid her and her slavery
for me?"
Augustine was the ablest of the early Christian fathers and he did
yeoman's service in laying broad and deep the foundations of the
Christian church and in defending it against the heretics. But of all
his many works the _Confessions_ will remain the most popular, because
it voices the cry of a human heart and shows the human side of a great
churchman.