But it must not be supposed that the total teaching of Augustine and the total influence of his thought is contained in this single change in Christian piety, as we have stated it. The various Pagan and Christian elements, as they lie in his system, have little coherence; and Augustine does not settle the rival claims between them. As the mediæval period advanced, what in his teaching had been a mere incoherence became in the hands of others positive discord. He gave the church impulses of the highest spiritual quality, but he left no well-organized capital. These impulses toward spiritual piety have never been lost, but the profusion of ideas and views in Augustine, unharmonized by himself, were also a permanent bequest to posterity that produced both vital movements and violent controversies. The legal and moral party of the church resisted his teaching at the beginning, and in the sixth century, under the influence of Gregory the Great, toned down Augustine’s teaching in the direction of a conception of the church as a juristic organization. Augustine was thus the beginner of a new line of development by his incorporation of neo-Platonism into Christian doctrine and by his use of the dialectic to present, defend, and develop the doctrine of the church. Although the years of his life fall in antiquity, although he is the collector of all the threads of the neo-Platonic and Christian religions, he belongs in the Middle Ages as the teacher of the Middle Ages. His doctrine acted as an authoritative spiritual guide for the new German peoples. They took up the problems of antiquity from the new point of view of individual spirituality, and created out of them the philosophy of the future. But philosophically Augustine was far in advance of his age, and in the intellectually torpid times that followed him little philosophical development could be expected. Not until after Charlemagne does philosophical development springing from Augustine appear. Later Luther and the Reformation reverted to him, and our modern philosophy is founded on the principle which he made central in his conception of piety.