When we speak of the Moravian Hymnology, we use the word with some latitude, signifying by it, not merely the hymns which have been written by professed Moravians, but that large class which the Moravian faith and feeling, manifested in so many quarters long before their brotherhood was organized, inspired. At the same time the Moravians have a prolific hymnist of their own, no less a man than the founder of their order, Count Zinzendorf himself. Born in 1700, he was godson of the famous old mystic, Spener, and early a pupil of the hardly less celebrated "hero of the faith," Franke. Though some of his numerous hymns are, with all their fluency and fervor, neat in expression and pure in taste, many of them are disfigured by a childish fondling of sacred images, by that extreme of sensuous mysticism, which finds in the Song of Solomon the hints and materials of its inspiration. Here is a favorable specimen of his style:

"Heart to heart in love united,

Rest ye in the heart divine;

Let your zeal, by Jesus lighted,
To his glory burn and shine!
He the head and we the members,
We the light, the fountain he,
He the master, we the brethren,
He is ours, and his are we.

"Come, ye children, mercy sharing,
And your covenant renew!
To our conquering Captain swearing,
From the heart, allegiance true!
When you feel your love-chain failing,
In temptation's mighty strain,
Seek the Lord in prayer prevailing,
Till he temper it again.

"Ah, thou gracious Friend, united
Keep henceforth thy chosen flock,
That, by thy last words incited,
They in heart-felt love may walk!
Thou, who art the uncreated

Word of truth and life, unite
All that are illuminated

By the clearness of thy light!

"Make our bond still wider, stronger,
With each other and with thee,
Till, on earth's whole round, no longer
We one severed member see.

When our love, a pure flame, blazes,

That from thee its brightness drew,
Then the world shall own, with praises,

We are thy disciples true."

In no Liturgy does so much of the expression take the hymn form as in the Moravian. The very name Moravian seems almost to convey, of itself, the twin ideas of mysticism and music. Very beautiful and wholesome, when rightly regulated, is that union of elements. But there was a period, of about ten years, in the middle of the eighteenth century, which showed the danger of letting anything but sober reason hold the reins, even (if we should not say especially) in religion. It has been called by the brethren themselves the period of "child's play," and seems to have led Zinzendorf to retract several of his hymns. In a Moravian Service-Book of 1823, under the head of Hymns for the Passion, we find a long

prayer in alternate verses, addressed entirely to the side of the crucified Jesus, perhaps a translation of one of those by St. Bernard already referred to. It begins:

(Minister.) Look up, and see the rocky cleft,
And in the cleft the fountain-reft

Whence you, ye saints, God's chosen race,
Were digged and hewed of his free grace!

Amen!"

But, with all its dangers, the idea in which the Moravian communion originated is too true to a want of the human heart to be ever abandoned; for it rests upon that word of the Master, "He that doeth the will of my Father in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother;" and the predominance of the musical element in their worship may well stand as a presentiment of the higher harmonies of the perfect Church.

22

ART. VI.- ST. AUGUSTINE AT HIPPO.

1. The Confessions of AUGUSTINE, edited, with an Introduction, by WILLIAM G. T. SHEDD. Andover: Warren F. Draper. 1860. 2. BÖHRINGER'S Kirchengeschichte in Biographien. Band I. Abth. 3. 3. Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament, by ST. AuGUSTINE, Bishop of Hippo. Oxford: John Henry Parker.

1844.

THE handsome edition of the Confessions of Augustine just published, under the supervision of Prof. Shedd, cannot fail to be most acceptable to a large religious public. The work is a reprint of the old English translation, already republished in Boston in 1843, and which has seemed to us, on a somewhat careful comparison with the original text, remarkably true to the author's meaning: but the present edition is far superior, in elegance and convenience, both to its predecessor in this country and to the Oxford translation under Pusey's supervision. The preliminary essay by the editor, if longer than need be, contains much that is valuable, and is well adapted to the class of readers among whom the book will chiefly go. Its characterization of the most remarkable features of the Confessions, however superfluous for those already familiar with them, is just and clear, and may lead fresh students into this wonderful work, which exhibits the consciousness of a great soul, so clarified by intense religious experience that the reader sees, as in a forest pool, at once the sediment which has been deposited below, and the blue heaven reflected from above.

AURELIUS AUGUSTINUS was born in the little Numidian town. of Tagaste, November 13, A. D. 354. His father, Patricius, was a pagan; his mother, Monica, one of the saintliest Christian women that ever taught a child to pray. From his birth, he tells us, he was "sealed with the mark of His cross, and salted with His salt." In all his wanderings through error and sin, this mother's love was ever drawing his heart toward the heavenly peace in which she abode perpetually. She yearned over him through those long years when he filled himself with the

husks of folly and with doctrines barren as the east wind; and at last had the joy of seeing him a believer, baptized into the Church of Christ. The loving son has preserved her portrait, drawn with filial tenderness, in the Confessions, where she appears at intervals, like an angel, above the troubled waters of Augustine's life, now receiving from the Bishop whom she consults about his errors of belief the comforting reply, "that it cannot be that the son of those tears should perish," and telling it to that son as a voice from Heaven; again, waiting all night in prayer at a church near the sea, while he sails for Rome, having first promised her that he would not go; following him to Italy; and at last dying in his arms, but not until the great desire of her life was fulfilled, and her Benoni, the son of her sorrow, become the crown of her joy.

Augustine's parents spared no pains with the. cultivation of his active mind. He was early instructed in all that was taught in the schools of that time, learning with ease whatever pleased him, but incorrigibly dull in distasteful tasks, and especially averse to grammatical studies. Hebrew he never knew; with Greek his acquaintance was very superficial. This impatience of dry details, which hungered for the hidden meaning in all things, and which formed so marked a feature in his mental constitution, cost him many stripes, "as was approved by our ancestors, labor and sorrow being multiplied to the sons of Adam." To this period of boyhood Augustine looks back in after life with profound awe for that "individuality which is a kind of miniature of that mysterious Unity of Thine, whence I am derived."

Soon, however, the shadows begin to fall more darkly about his course of life. The fervid temper of his blood, quickly burnt into adolescence by that Numidian sky, drove him into miry excesses, in which he wallowed for sixteen years. "The restraining of the soul from appetite," says an Eastern proverb, "is the greatest holy war." Alas for the youth Augustine! in this war he was conquered and led captive in ignominious bonds.

At the age of seventeen he was sent to the college at Carthage, where he passed four years in rhetorical studies, his father dying meantime. The city of Hannibal had long been