Christianity was not long in finding a champion to defend her cause--an African monk, Augustine, to mediaeval minds the greatest of all the ‘Fathers of the Church’. Augustine was the son of a pagan father and a Christian mother and grew up a wild and undisciplined boy. After some years at the University of Carthage, spent in casual study and habitual dissipation, he determined to go to Rome, and from there passed to Milan, where he went out of curiosity to listen to the preaching of St. Ambrose. It was obvious that he would either hate or be strongly influenced by this fiery old man; and in truth Augustine, who secretly repented of the way he had wasted his life, was in a ripe mood to receive the message that he had refused to hear from the lips of Monica his mother. Soon he was converted and baptized, and later he was made Bishop of Hippo, a place not far from Carthage. It is difficult to give a picture of Augustine in a few words. Like St. Ambrose and others of the early ‘Fathers’ he was quite intolerant of heresy and believed that ordinary human love and the simplest pleasures of the world were snares set by the devil to catch the unwary; but against these unbalanced views, largely the product of the age in which he lived, must be set his burning enthusiasm for God, and the services that he rendered to Christianity. A modern writer says of him, ‘As the supreme man of his time he summed up the past as it still lived, remoulded it, added to it from himself, and gave it a new unity and form wherein it was to live on.... The great heart, the great mind, the mind led by the heart’s inspiration, the heart guided by the mind--this is Augustine.’ Superior in intellect to other men of his day, his whole being filled with the love of God and fired by the desire to make the world share his worship, he preached, worked, and wrote only to this end. In his _Confessions_ he describes his youth and repentance; but his most famous work is his _Civitas Dei_. Here was the answer to those who declared that Rome had fallen because she neglected her pagan deities. Rome, he maintained, was not and never could be eternal; for the one eternal kingdom was the _Civitas Dei_, or ‘City of God’, towards whose reign of triumph the human race had been tending since earliest times. Before her glory the kingdoms of this world, and all the culture and civilization of which men boasted, must fade away. Thus God had destined; and St. Augustine exerted all his eloquence and powers of reasoning to prove from history the magnitude and sureness of the divine purpose. [Sidenote: Vandal Invasion]