# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S371
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library. 371

that we are neither the first nor the only ones who have undertaken to assail the divine theology of the sophists; and that not we, but rather they themselves are the authors of innovations in the church of God, who have forsaken the boundaries which the fathers set and have driven the hearts of the simple by force onto their crooked and devious hills, as the Scripture speaks.. But as regards the praise of Augustine, I will say nothing of it here except this one thing, which I can confidently assert from my own experience: that next to Holy Scripture there is no teacher in the church who may be compared with him in Christian learning. I leave to those others their praise, that they are eloquent, like Chrysostom; that they have looked well about them in the worldly sciences, like Jerome: but if one takes them all together, one will not find in all of them together half as much as in Augustine alone. Therefore, if you can and have time, choose for yourself, next to Holy Scripture, this Augustine for your teacher, and especially where he contends against the Pelagians, Donatists, and Manichaeans. For that is a man who has thorough learning in Christ. He has, to be sure, some books among the rest which he wrote at the beginning of his ministry; but those, I hold, you should read when you have spare and idle hours, of which sort I formerly spoiled not a few over Jerome, Chrysostom, and the like. If you will not believe me, who have experienced it, then for my part you may try it yourself. But afterward you too will regret it, as I did.“ (Opp. Hal. Tom. XIV, pp. 209, 210.) From which of his writings Augustine may above all others be come to know — of that there can be no doubt. It is his well-known „Confessions“. In it Augustine confesses not only his guilt, but at the same time the riches of the grace which God turned toward him, and how that grace at last brought him round. The whole book is one psalm, a psalm of penitence breathing the deepest contrition and a glowing psalm of praise. If we have ever read a human writing from which we have learned what unction is, it is this one. To read it and not be kindled by it to cast oneself before God into the dust as a poor sinful creature and at the same time to praise God as the eternal Love, seems impossible. Perhaps it might interest many and entice them to procure and read the work if we here communicate the biographical core to which Augustine's holy meditations in the first ten books of his „Confessions“ attach themselves. Such a core is given by Georg Rapp, pastor at Oberurbach in Württemberg, in the introductory foreword which he prefixes to the „Confessions“ as translated by him. There it reads as follows:

„Aurelius Augustinus was born on the 13th of November 354 at Thagaste, in the North African province of Constantine. His father, Patricius, a citizen of this city, good-natured but dissolute and hot-tempered, and moreover a