28
August. 1662 Book of Common Prayer: St. Augustine the Greater—Bishop of Hippo.
St. Augustine, Bishop
(354-430), the great Bishop of Hippo, and father of Latin Theology, who has
perhaps more than any other writer affected Christian thought, especially on
the doctrines of Justification and Predestination, and whose influence was
dominant with all the great leaders of the Reformation. He was a native of
Tagaste in North Africa, in his youth a student of literature and teacher of
rhetoric, inclined to passion and self-indulgence, an inquirer in the Manichean
and other schools, and even by the prayers of his saintly mother Monica not
persuaded to be a Christian. At Milan he was converted and baptized by St.
Ambrose at the age of 33, ordained priest and consecrated Bishop at Hippo in
395, where he ministered till, just before the conquest of North Africa by the
Vandals, he was taken from the evil to come, in 430. The personal and spiritual
force of his Confessions and
Retractions; the profound
theology of his writings against Manichæism and Pelagianism, Arianism, and
Donatism; his wonderful Commentaries on Scripture, Sermons, and Letters; his
contrast of the "City of God" with the kingdom of the world, expiring
in the fall of Rome -- all have laid hold of the mind and heart of Christendom
with a power fairly unexampled in the history of the Church, if not of the
world. -- August 28th.
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