miracles and those of his own time, not a doubt as to the reality of the latter. Again, towards the end of his long list, immediately after the narrative of the restoration to life of the child of Eleusinus, which we have quoted, Augustine says:--"What can I do? The promise of the completion of this work is pressing, so that I cannot here recount all (the miracles) that I know; and without doubt many of our brethren when they read this work will be grieved that I have omitted so very much, which they know as well as I do. This I even now beg that they will pardon, and consider how long would be the task of doing that which, for the completion of the work, it is thought necessary not to do. For if I desired to record merely the miracles of healing, without speaking of others, which have been performed by this martyr, that is to say, the most glorious Stephen, in the district of Calama, and in ours of Hippo, many volumes must be composed, yet will it not be possible to make a complete collection of them, but only of such as have been published for public reading. For that was our object, since we saw repeated in our time signs of divine power similar to those of old, deeming that they ought not to be lost to the knowledge of the multitude. Now this relic has not yet been two years at Hippo-Regius, and accounts of many of the miracles performed by it have not been written, as is most certainly known to us, yet the number of those which have been published, up to the time this is written, amounts ta about seventy. At Calama, however, where these relics have been longer, and more of the miracles were recorded, they incomparably exceed this number."(1) 184 Augustine goes on to say that, to his knowledge, many very remarkable miracles were performed by the relics of the same martyr also at Uzali, a district near to Utica, and of one of these, which had recently taken place when he himself was there, he gives an account. Then, before closing his list with the narrative of a miracle which took place at Hippo, in his own church, in his own presence, and in the sight of the whole congregation, he resumes his reply to the opening question:--"Many miracles, therefore," he says, "are also performed now, the same God who worked those of which we read, performing these by whom he wills and as he wills; but these miracles neither become similarly known, nor, that they may not slip out of mind, are they stamped, as it were like gravel, into memory, by frequent reading. For even in places where care is taken, as is now the case amongst us, that accounts of those who receive benefit should be publicly read, those who are present hear them only once, and many are not present at all, so that those who were present do not, after a few days, remember {185} what they heard, and scarcely a single person is met with who repeats what he has heard to one whom he may have known to have been absent"(1)