A like result appears with greater power in Augustine. His _Confessions_ give the mode in which his spiritual progress presented itself to him some time after he had become a Catholic Christian.[55] His whole life sets forth the same theme, presenting the religious passion of the man drawing into itself his energies and interests. God and the Soul--these two would he know, and these alone. But these alone indeed! As if they did not embrace all life pointed and updrawn toward its salvation. God was the overmastering object of intellectual interest and of passionate love. All knowledge should direct itself toward knowing Him. By grace, within God’s light and love, was the Soul, knower and lover, expectant of eternal life. Nothing that was transient could be its chief good, or its good at all except so far as leading on to its chief good of salvation, life eternal, in and through the Trinity. One may read Augustine’s self-disclosures or the passages containing statements of the ultimate religious principles whereby he and all men should live, or one may proceed to examine his long life and the vast entire product of his labour. The result will be the same. His whole strength will be found devoted to the cause of Catholic Church and Faith; and all his intellectual interests will be seen converging to that end. He writes nothing save with Catholic religious purpose; and nothing in any of his writings had interest for the writer save as it bore upon that central aim. He may be engaged in a great work of ultimate Christian doctrine, as in his _De Trinitate_; he may be involved in controversy with Manichean, with Donatist or Pelagian; he may be offering pastoral instruction, as in his many letters; he may survey, as in the _Civitas Dei_, the whole range of human life and human knowledge; but never does his mind really bear away from its master-motive.