" Here, in Augustine, we meet a man who found the
path--one of the few who have found it, of the few who have won that Love
which is our only rest. It may be worth while to follow him to the
journey's end.
The treatise of Cicero, then, inflamed Augustine "to the loving and
seeking and finding and holding and inseparably embracing of wisdom
itself, wheresoever it was." Yet, when he looked for wisdom in the
Christian Scriptures, all the literary man, the rhetorician in him, was
repelled by the simplicity of the style. Without going further than Mr.
Pater's book, "Marius, the Epicurean," and his account of Apuleius, an
English reader may learn what kind of style a learned African of that
date found not too simple. But Cicero, rather than Apuleius, was
Augustine's ideal; that verbose and sonorous eloquence captivated him, as
it did the early scholars when learning revived. Augustine had dallied a
little with the sect of the Manichees, which appears to have grieved his
mother more than his wild life.
But she was comforted by a vision, when she found herself in a wood, and
met "a glorious young man," who informed her that "where she was there
should her son be also." Curious it is to think that this very semblance
of a glorious young man haunts the magical dreams of heathen Red Indians,
advising them where they shall find game, and was beheld in such
ecstasies by John Tanner, a white man who lived with the Indians, and
adopted their religion.
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