IF St. Augustin,” says Nourrisson , “had left nothing but his Confessions and the City of God, one could readily understand the respectful sympathy that surrounds his memory. How, indeed, could one fail to admire in the City of God the flight of genius, and in the Confessions, what is better still, the effusions of a great soul?” It may be safely predicted, that while the mind of man yearns for knowledge, and his heart seeks rest, the Confessions will retain that foremost place in the world’s literature which it has secured by its sublime outpourings of devotion and profound philosophical spirit. There is in the book a wonderful combination of childlike piety and intellectual power. Desjardins’ idea, that, while in Augustin’s other works we see the philosopher or the controversialist, here we see the man, is only to be accepted as a comparative statement of Augustin’s attitude in the Confessions; for philosophy and piety are in many of his reflections as it were molten into one homogeneous whole. In his highest intellectual flights we find the breathings of faith and love, and, amid the profoundest expressions of penitential sorrow, gleams of his metaphysical genius appear.The Soliloquies introduce us to the converted man at the very moment of his conversion. The Confessions give us the Bishop of Hippo’s recollection of that man after years of absorption in the exacting duties of ecclesiastical function and doctrinal debate. Who, seeking to confront the real self of early years, would accept for such his own random recollections at a much later period, recalled of necessity piecemeal, amid the distractions of professional routine, in exchange for the diary into which was poured at the crucial moment the inmost self of those very days and hours? Harnack says: “The foundations of Augustine’s religious characteristics can be best studied in the writings that are read least, namely in the tractates and letters written immediately after his conversion, and forming an extremely necessary supplement to the Confessions.” “What was written earlier was, undoubtedly, in many respects less complete, less churchly, more Neoplatonic; but, on the other hand, it was more direct, more personal.”